Maark Blog

Here's a thought-provoking piece on Chris Dixon's blog about the decline of the mobile web. In it, he discusses some of the ramifications of recent trends around organization putting their entire mobile strategy in apps while leaving their mobile websites to ghettoize. According to the post:

The likely end state is the [mobile] web becomes a niche product used for things like 1) trying a service before you download the app, 2) consuming long tail content (e.g. link to a niche blog from Twitter or Facebook feed).

This will hurt long-term innovation...

How this shakes out could really determine our relationship with, and the nature of, the web in the near-future.

So when we talk about wearable technology and Google, we immediately think Google Glass, but yesterday Google stepped into the burgeoning smartwatch arena. What it unveiled is probably the best-looking concept we’ve seen yet, especially when it comes to UI. Granted, the UI isn’t real yet and the bar for smartwatches isn’t very high, but it’s a great opportunity to compare and contrast the two prominent, near-future options we have for wearable tech: Glasses vs. Watches.

Now, the success of one doesn’t preclude the success of the other, but certainly most of the work around innovative experiences will be shunted to whichever devices catch on with the public at large.

Level of bias: I’m a watch guy. Always have been. Even today where I use my smartphone for telling time, I still wear a watch.  I once wore a broken watch for an entire year. I’m completely invalidating this comparison, aren’t I?

Social Acceptance

Obviously, Google Glass has had some problems in this area. The fact that we have the term “glasshole” is testament enough to that. But the technology lends itself to disparagement…it’s showy and creates a filter between you and the people you’re interacting with.

Watches, on the other hand, are less obtrusive, stuck on a wrist, often hidden under a sleeve. Even the most expensive watch on the planet isn’t that showy for those reasons. Plus we’ve had centuries of getting used to the idea of a wearable timepieces (i.e., piece of tech). Heck, in many ways, the smartphone works on the same basic interaction principle as the pocket watch…you pull it out and look at it.

Personal Identity 

Everything we do, everything we consume, everything we own, everything we wear contributes to our personal identity…how we perceive ourselves and how we want to be perceived by others. And we want to be in control of that.

For instance, many would wear a nice, expensive blazer, but few of us would raid Elton John’s closet circa 1975.

And that’s kind of the different between glasses and watches. Both say something about the person wearing it, but only one of the devices, like Elton John’s 1970s wardrobe, insists on us getting that message. And it’s that insistence that trips up glasses in the realm of social acceptance.

Plus, it messes with our face, the single biggest contributor to our personal identities. Even many people who love tattoos and get them all over their bodies reserve that space as a no-tattoo zone. 

Interaction

Both glasses and smartwatches have voice and touch interactions, but one is a bit more alien than the other. Speaking into the air for Glass is different than speaking into a device on your wrist. Touching your face, different from touching a device on your wrist. In fact, speaking into or tapping a device on your wrist isn’t that far removed from speaking into or tapping a device in your hand.

Customizability

This aspect is connected to personal identity. Technically, there are a thousand different styles of frames a thousand different styles of watches, but the range of diversity is obviously much wider for watches. 

In a way, personal devices have always been about fashion (and even when the devices themselves weren’t customizable, an enormous market for customizable cases opened up around them), but once we get to wearable technology, it’s even more so about how a device looks.

Watches allow customizability in the face (or, home screen in this case, I guess) and the band, whereas glasses lack that. And even if we were going to try to bedazzle our glasses like we bedazzle our phone cases, we get back into that trap of insisting on our personal identity that turns people off. Again, with watches, that’s less of a  problem.

Future-Cool

Here, Glass should have the decided advantage, right? It’s way more futuristic than a mere smartwatch. The problem, though, is that it’s not the future we’ve been promised. In pop culture, all the cool personal technology advances we were promised were around our watches…James Bond, Dick Tracy…um…Inspector Gadget. So we’re not really looking for the future, we’re looking for the future we’ve been promised and which we’re comfortable with out of mere familiarity.

In pop culture, the heads-up display was always given to robots and invading aliens. Hm. Maybe that’s the real reason many are resistant to Glass. Bad connotations.  Thanks a lot, movies.

Utility

Okay, here is where I think Google Glass finally wins and will ultimately win. Smartwatches are extremely tiny screens in out of the way spot on our body. Glass has the potential to offer screens of unlimited size, augmented reality, holographic projection, and all the conventional benefits of a heads up display. And that’s just scratching the surface. The eventual benefits of being able to have a large, hands-free screen anywhere under any conditions that can interact with the physical world as we see it has an unlimited number of applications.

Smartwatches are more constrained and seem more of a transitional technology at their best…which is basically the point of all the other points in this post: Right now, we ‘re probably more  comfortable with the idea of smartwatches than Google Glass.

Years and years of cloud talk has most of us thinking that physical media (other than servers) is dead. Not so, says Sony and Panasonic.  Behold, the Archival Disk, which will eventually be able to store a terabyte of information, as opposed to the paltry 50 gigs that Blu-ray offers. It even has its own logo already.

But, judging just by its name alone, it doesn’t seem to be the usual strategy of making us buy our media library all over again (like the consumer-aimed “Blu-ray”). No, this is a business storage media.

An article on BBC News addresses this seeming paradox:

In an era of digital and cloud storage, some have questioned the point of such discs but actually such systems are crucial, thinks Gartner analyst Paul O'Donovan.

"If you want to hand on your photos to your grandchildren we are going to need somewhere to store it all," he said.

"Cloud servers have to store massive amounts of data and have to be able to hold on to it for a long time."

Panasonic and Sony were also keen to talk up the benefits of physical discs.

"Optical discs have excellent properties to protect themselves against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored," the firms said in a statement.

 The article even goes on to mention that Facebook is testing a system of 10,000 Blu-ray discs in a special storage cabinet as a backup for all its users’ media.  

It’s almost like all the financial wizards telling you to buy gold when they’re really stockpiling silver.

We’re not much for conspiracy theories here on the Maark blog…or celebrity news, but I couldn’t pass this one up.

Saturday night, the weird, mesmerizing, and 55-year-old Prince put on a four-hour show to a relatively intimate audience in Hollywood. All the reports seem to emphasize his cell phone ban, for some reason, mentioning the signs everywhere forbidding the devices and even quoting him as “singing” from the stage: “You can’t get down with technology in your hand.”

What a great, hilarious phrase. I need it on a T-shirt. I need to write a book with it as the title. I need to meme it.

Of course, the irony is he shouted the phrase into a microphone in one hand while holding an electric guitar in the other.

Regardless, I smell a plot.

Who would benefit from making smart phones uncool? Besides payphone booth manufacturers.  All the wearable technology companies. That’s right. You can’t get down with technology in your hand, but you could possibly do so with it on your wrist or across your face or embedded in your clothes or skin. 

If they can start getting the purveyors of cool to discount the smartphone (which, honestly, a lot of us love-loathe anyway), maybe they can create that space they need to fill with a bevy of new products. The only hole in the theory is whether Prince brings in the young audience they need to receive the message, but he could just be a small feint in a larger strategy. 

Alternatively, it could just be that Prince is 55 years old. He’s got a “my day” that he was “back in.”

All righty. Obviously, the blog's been on a hiatus. That's basically because the run up to Mobile World Congress is always an extremely busy time for us here at Maark. Certain things must be sacrificed. This blog. Our sanity.

But, with MWC now over, it's time to blog again. More interestingly, it's time to sit back and look at the state of the union as spun by MWC. A great place to go for that is the blog of Chetan Sharma, industry sage. He released about 20 observations on the mobile industry as it now stands in this post-MWC 2014 world that are way worth checking out. I mean, in many ways, it's the same stories we hear every year, but that's the way it goes with such a massive industry. I've severely truncated some of his observations below as examples: 

Connecting the Unconnected: Connecting the unconnected was by far the biggest theme of the show. From Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote to the launch of $25 devices from Mozilla, there was concerted discussion around how to increase the 3.5B consumers to 5-6B.

SDN/NFV: SDN and NFV took more prominence this year compared to the past and operators are urgently moving to cloud-based infrastructure.

Ecosystem Value Shifts: The value is shifting to the upper layers of the stack. This is what is defining the current turbulence, which is exciting to many and depressing for some.

IoT: IoT is going through its hype cycle right now. IoE takes the notion even to a next level. Everyone wants to make things connected but how will this all pan out? 

Connected Cars: This year connected cars feel more real with imminent launches and data become a key selling point for the OEMs.

Network investments: All the progress that has been on the mobile economy has been on the back of trillions of dollars of investment over the last couple of decades. With declining margins, how long do operators continue to invest and at what pace? What’s the margin profile they are willing to live with? What’s the role of government in building out the infrastructure when high-speed mobile networks are concerned?

OTT Regulations: Faced with OTT impact on their core business, operators are asking regulators to take a broader look at how communications is regulated. Most of the regulators seem incapable or unwilling.

Today, we interact with computers using only three of our five senses: Sight, sound, and touch...more or less. We use the latter, but not fully yet. We're still working on reproducing textures digitally. Our more intimate senses, taste and smell, well, they're just not something that we've been able to digitize.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore are trying to tackle one of those, taste, with something they're calling the "digital lolly." Now, that sounds like some gewgaw you'd get for playing a Facebook game, but it's actually a technology for recreating, storing, and transmitting oral data. 

According to an article in The New York Times:

While it might sound complicated, the technology is relatively simple. When the lollipop, which is made of a silver electrode, touches the tip of the tongue it reproduces four well-known tastes: salty, sweet, sour or bitter. Together these flavors can create different simulations close to the real thing.

Obviously, there's a bit of biological disgust inherent in such a technology, but we've been able to get over greasy finger spots on our tablets, so we'll probably find a way to get over this if it ever becomes practical.

So Intel is in the news today. Remember them? Back before every tech commercial on TV was about mobile devices, its circular logo and sound signature were everpresent at the end of PC commercials.

I mean, Intel is still the king of PCs, but that kingdom ain't what it used to be and the company hasn't quite been able to annex mobile. So in an attempt to increase its relevance, Intel is investing in the development of what it's calling "perceptual computing." According to a C/NET article:

Intel has devoted significant resources and efforts to something it calls "perceptual computing." Perceptual computing may sound like a jargony, marketing term, but it does just what it says -- it uses the senses to help technology interpret what's going on around it. Those features, such as gestures, facial recognition, and voice recognition, should all make devices more "natural, intuitive, and immersive," says Anil Nanduri, one of the Intel executives in charge of the company's efforts in perceptual computing.

And, yeah, like the article implies, it sounds a bit gimmicky...but it is definitely the direction we're going. I talk to my phone pretty regularly these days, and thanks to devices like Microsoft's Kinect and the Leap Motion 3D controller, I've done my share of gesticulating at computers, too.

But more than it being a trend, it's the ultimate interaction. When we communicate with each other, we don't use a single avenue of input or need specialized peripherals. We just communicate.

So once a computer can start sensing emotions in a person's voice and face, seeing the fine details of body language like finger twitches and posture, and then react accordingly then we have a whole new definition of "personal computer."

Back in the day, "Intel Inside" meant you were getting something fast and powerful. If Intel is really investing Elon Musk-levels of money, brain power, and determination into making perceptual computing natural and useful, "Intel Inside" could start meaning something much more nuanced.

We post one of these "death of TV" types of articles every once in a while on the Maark blog...partly because it's fun to track the death and regeneration of an industry, partly it's because this is an industry we have experience with...mostly, though, it's because we all watch a lot of TV.

According to new statistics aggregated by Business Insider, people are continuing to jump ship from cable TV...cord cutters, everybody's been calling them, which has the literal idea of severing the cable cord and the uncomfortable idea of severing the umbilical cord.

Here's a sampling from the article:

Aside from a brief respite during the Olympics, there has been only negative ratings growth on broadcast and cable TV since September 2011...In all, about 5 million people ended their cable and broadband subs between the beginning of 2010 and the end of this year.

Obviously things are changing, and mobile technology, the Internet, and a more demanding consumer base are behind it. Well, that and the cable and media companies themselves who continue to raise costs and hobble convenience.

We might have ruined a lot for the next generations, but at least we'll leave TV in a better place than we found it. Ha.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

Our new world of Apple FaceTime, Facebook Video Calling, Google Hangouts, and WebRTC is pretty awesome, but sometimes I miss just being able to give somebody a high-five.

And so do the guys at MIT.

The Tangible Media Group over there have developed a system using a Kinect motion sensor, a grid of "physical pixels," and some secret herbs and spices to allow people to manipulate physical objects over a video call. It's called InForm, and they describe it as a "dynamic shape display." From  a CNET article:

The InForm...turns 3D data into crude, physical representations in real time...It can scan bodily movements and recreate them on a table of physical "pixels," allowing you to manipulate objects on the other end. The pixels on the InForm table are actually a grid of 900 motorized, polystyrene pins that can extend about 4 inches from the surface.

Astounding advances in technology are often only discussed in the context of the gadgets that they produce, and so our discussion about those astounding advances in technology often devolve into gadget reviews ("Is it cool?" "Should I buy it?") as opposed to thoughtful criticism around the technology itself.

That's the point of this blog post from Dave Winer, a long-time respected voice in the technology sphere. His gripe is primarily with the New York Times, who, he says offers great commentary on the arts, but falls down on technology. But he also broadens his point to the entire industry. From his post:

Of course it's not just the Times. They're treating software largely the same way the tech industry does. Toys for teens to help them explore being a teen. But not much substance for people who have their degrees, mates, children, who are living their lives, as opposed to looking forward to living their lives. Nothing wrong with looking at tech from the young person's perspective, I would read those reviews too. But today, adults are largely left out of it.

There are some obvious generalizations and a bit of blinkerism in the post, but it's a good, discussion-starting piece, worth reading.

Maybe on your gadget.

Yesterday, we talked bout AI being better at diagnosing cancer than a human doctor. Today, let's talk about how it's a better driver, too. I think it's about time that our collective inferiority complex officially starts.

The statement by Chris Urmson, one of the engineers of the project, at a robotics conference in California, isn't surprising in light of what we've been seeing from Google's self-driving cars over the past few years.

But now they say they apparently have the data to back it up. And these days, data is boss, king, and God.

From the MIT Technology Review:

[Urmson] presented results from two studies of data from the hundreds of thousands of miles Google’s vehicles have logged on public roads in California and Nevada. One of those analyses showed that when a human was behind the wheel, Google’s cars accelerated and braked significantly more sharply than they did when piloting themselves. Another showed that the cars’ software was much better at maintaining a safe distance from the vehicle ahead than the human drivers were.

“We’re spending less time in near-collision states,” said Urmson. “Our car is driving more smoothly and more safely than our trained professional drivers.”

Google's advances in this area are especially interesting against the backdrop of out usual transportation woes and headlines. Just yesterday, for instance, there was this report from the Los Angeles Times and a million other news sources, about state governments wanting to charge taxes per mile driven to make up for people buying less gas due to the economy and the prevalence of hybrids.

It's like they don't know the entire paradigm is about to change.

We write a lot on this blog about mobile technology...but, personally, this is the real mobile technology that gets me excited. I don't ever want to have to drive again. Just ride.

So, what's supercomputer Watson been up to since its impressive run on Jeopardy! back in 2011? Well, it made its mom proud and became a doctor.

Researchers have been feeding it all the latest oncology trial and journal information to create a diagnostic aid for human doctors who can't keep up with all the new and changing data. 

According to Wired:

Only around 20 percent of the knowledge that human doctors use when diagnosing patients and deciding on treatments relies on trial-based evidence. It would take at least 160 hours of reading a week just to keep up with new medical knowledge as it's published, let alone consider its relevance or apply it practically. 

However, Watson's starting to look like less of aid and more of an oracle. Turns out, Watson's better at some diagnoses, with a 90% accuracy rating for lunch cancer, compared to 50% accuracy for human doctors. 

You know what the next headline'll be, right?:

"Watson Better at Curing Cancer than Doctors."

Or I guess, it'd be:

Man Recreates iOS 7 in Word

I've been using Microsoft Word my entire life, and I can barely put one paragraph after another. This guy shows how the entire interface...heck, the entire device, can be recreated using the program.

Movies Gettin' Around

All movie-goers (and industry representatives) are wondering it. What happens after 3D? Does it go away like it has in decades past? Does it linger around as a price upgrade that nobody really wants? Does another technology come along and up the stakes?

Well, if a South Korean theater has any say, it wants to accomplish that last bit, upping the stakes...stratospherically.

They call the new experience ScreenX, and it basically projects the movie in 270 degrees...on the screen in front of you and on the two walls beside you. Action takes place on all three screens (although not the entire time), and the movies have to be scripted and filmed specially for this format.

According to pieces on Slate and the Verge, filming for this format is extremely difficult and watching the movies can be discombobulating, but here's where you throw in the "new technology" caveat.

However, as we've seen, if Hollywood sees a chance to charge a premium regardless of the quality of the experience, they'll jump at it.

Mostly, this reminds me of the home entertainment systems in Fahrenheit 451, where each wall of a room was a massive television set, making for a surrounding, immersive, addictive experience.

I'm not ready to call it inevitable, but it seems more and more likely that at some near point in the future, we're all going to be wearing eyewear. Google Glass is the obvious example, but the Oculus Rift has been getting more and more buzz, and now we have castAR.

castAR is a recently funded Kickstarter campaign for a pair of glasses that projects interactive holograms for the wearer. Obviously, just like the Oculus Rift, the first application everybody's talking about is games, and it mentions hologram chess from Star Wars, but the applications beyond that are unlimited. According to the Kickstarter page:

The frames of the glasses contain two micro-projectors—one for each eye. Each projector casts a perspective view of a stereoscopic 3D image onto the surface. Your eyes focus on this projected image at a very natural and comfortable viewing distance. A tiny camera in-between the projectors scans for infrared identification markers placed on the surface. The camera uses these markers to precisely track your head position and orientation in the physical world, enabling the software to accurately adjust how the holographic scene should appear to you.

And apparently, the glasses are lightweight. Just 100 grams, which they say is slightly heavier than a pair of sunglasses. Unfortunately, the glasses need peripherals to work: A wand-like joystick and a special mat for the reflective surface.

Still, the fact that these kinds of systems are getting a lot of press, as well as getting funded on Kickstarter (CastAR beat a 400K goal in just a few days), shows that people are excited by this.

It sounds like something from an espionage story...China has a little black box and high-ranking people in the U.S. are worried. But far from it being a tale of national security, it's a tale of entertainment security. Wait, is that even a thing?

The whole flap involves a Chinese company that streams movies over Roku-like set-top boxes. According to Forbes:

Future TV is one of seven firms licensed to stream content into Chinese homes via the Internet to set-top boxes and smart TVs...It claims to offer 1.5 million hours of content, of which half is high-definition. But among U.S. studios it is notorious for uploading hundreds of copyrighted movies and evading tens of millions of dollars in licensing fees.

Content is obviously a global issue. We live in a world today where we have massive catalogues of books and movies and music and art, the industries behind each of which is going through flux as the Internet and technology changes the game.

Part of that flux is the devaluation of all that content. I can get thousands, maybe tens of thousand of movies for mere dollars a month. Every day, a new story comes out about some respected writer asking to submit work for free, and music and books, well, those are well-trod topics in this area.

And that devaluation isn't just a tech issue, it's a market issue. There is just vast amounts of content out there. And no amount of copyright protection is going to change that, either in the problem of policing that or in the problem of users' attitudes toward it.

How Does Technology Make You Feel?

How does technology make you feel? Before you answer that, check out what Disney just unveiled...the technology to feel 3D objects on a 2D screen with your hands.

Apparently, by using mere vibrations (backed by years of research, hardware experiments, and highly complicated algorithms, of course), they can trick your brain into comprehending an actual object through your fingers--its texture, its shape, etc.

Here's how one of the Disney brains explained it in a press release:

Our brain perceives the 3D bump on a surface mostly from information that it receives via skin stretching. Therefore, if we can artificially stretch skin on a finger as it slides on the touch screen, the brain will be fooled into thinking an actual physical bump is on a touch screen even though the touch surface is completely smooth.

I mean, we've talkd about the Holy Grail that is haptic technologies like this on the Maark blog before, but I've never seen it presented with such reality.