Archive for the “technology” Category

I watched with interest as Barnes & Noble released the Nook, an electronic book reading thing that’s pretty similar to Amazon’s Kindle.  I immediately thought of Microsoft’s Zune music player, released well after Apple’s iPod had pretty much conquered the world.  There are some interesting similarities and also some differences.

Dominant Design

There are several models of iPod, ranging from the no-screen Shuffle to the all-screen Touch.  As with mobile phones, each of these styles is pretty well-established and I think it’s safe to say that the last time either category got real innovation was when Apple delivered the iPhone and then the iPod Touch.

The dominant design of an ebook reader seems to have crystalized with the Kindle and to a lesser extent, Sony’s reader products.  Black and white e-ink screen, super-long battery life, small or absent keyboard, book-like leather covers optional, and so forth.  In this respect, the Nook, like the Zune, adds maybe some incremental improvement, but little of substance or lasting advantage.

Complementary Assets

Most people agree that the first iPods were not that great as devices, but that it was the iTunes store and the integration of the two that won the day for Apple.  This comparison is more interesting for the book readers.  By the time Microsoft released the Zune, the iTunes store was huge and dominant, and Apple computers were gaining share against Windows boxes on the back of iPod and iPhone sales.

In the book world, Amazon and Barnes and Noble have pretty much the same assets.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a new book exclusive to either store, at least not with paper books.  Ebooks might turn out different, but at least for starters, it seems the two companies have the opportunity to offer the same media selection to their ebook reader customers.  Amazon’s store carries far more than books and music, and that might turn out to be important as they put more Amazon-dedication shopping machines into consumers’ hands.

Network Effect

If you can build a network effect into a product, you have a good chance at getting your users to do some serious marketing for you.  Social networks thrive on invitations, and they’re more useful as more of your friends join them.  Reading and listening to music are somewhat solitary pursuits (I would argue that the iPod and before that the walkman made music solitary when it had been quite social and that greedy music execs have prevented any device I know of having a second headphone jack) so it’s an interesting question how or if ebook readers can go viral.

Both Microsoft and Barnes and Noble tried making their challenger devices more social.  Microsoft’s “squirting” allowed you to send songs via wifi from your Zune to a friend’s Zune for three plays.  The songs you squirt are still available to you to listen to while they’re squirted and it seems you can squirt as many songs to as many friends as you like.  That seemed to have been too little too late.  Apple was allowing DRM-free downloads of some music, and three plays (with a three day time limit) seemed stingy.  Plus, with the wifi sending method (as cool as that might be) you have to be physically near your friend to squirt. And let’s not get into the wisdom of calling this “squirting.”

I speculate that Barnes and Noble did some focus research on heavy readers (like book clubbers, for example) and came up with a sharing feature that’s more like what we do with paper books.  As I’ve blogged before, I think lending and sharing paper books is a viral part of both reading and friendship.  With a Nook, you (the Nooker?) can loan an ebook to a fellow Nook owner (The Nookee?) for two weeks, during which time it is unavailable to you to read.  Seems pretty fair and similar to the reality of paper.  But then I read that Nook loans can be disabled on a book-by-book basis by the publisher, and even when enabled, allow only one loan of a given title – ever.  Not only does that fail to take full advantage of the capability of digital books, it adds a restriction that doesn’t even exist in the paper world.  Disappointing First Sale Doctrine Fail.

It seems unlikely that the Nook could win the day on the basis of the sharing feature, even if it did everything I want it to, but the hobbling of that feature looks like just another indicator that the Nook will go the way of the Zune – not gone, but forgotten.

As you may have noticed, October was a pretty poor month posting-wise here at limeduck world headquarters.  I was therefore quite excited to see a new inbound link in my dashboard.  I followed it and found another example of an all-too-common blogging phenomenon: grabbing peoples’ photos to illustrate your posts without permission or attribution.

Since the post was about being laid off from working at a bakery (and as of this writing, the author is still unemployed), I felt sort of bad dropping a stink bomb in the comments. I can’t stay mad at the unemployed knitting blogger, but I can complain that this practice is widespread in personal and even corporate blogs, and it really must stop.  I often cite Fair Use, but this is not it.  Fair Use is, among other things, publishing a portion of  a copyrighted work to illuminate a discussion or review of that work.  The attribution is clear because you’re discussing that work.

Blogging about how frustrated you are by  your cell phone carrier (a common enough blog topic) does not mean you can just search the net for “frustration” or “cell phone plan” and clip one of the image results for your post.  You’ve got to make an attempt to find out the copyright status of the image and do the right thing.

I’m sure you can find times when I’ve done it wrong (do let me know, I’d like to fix them), but here’s what I try to do these days:

• Try to use my own work as much as possible
• Sample others’ works when discussing them, but keep it clear what’s quoted and keep images and media small/short or embedded
• Use product images when discussing those products
• Always link the image to the source (source web page, not source image) and attribute with at least <alt> text, preferably caption or nearby copy

Copyright and Fair Use are not quite fully adapted to the internets yet, but I’m trying to hold up my end.  I hope other bloggers will think a little more about their image-acquisition habits.

I was excited to hear that Google maps had finally added Boston’s public transit system.  Now you can get directions around Boston for driving, walking, and public transit.  Of course, the MBTA website has been providing a trip planning service for some time.  So I figured I would compare the two services recommendations.  Too lazy to do anything particularly scientific, I asked both to tell me how to get from limeduck world headquarters (a secure undisclosed location in Central Square) to Modern Pastry in the North End at 8:30pm tomorrow.  The variance is shocking.

The defending champ, the MBTA Trip planner coughed up two suggestions:

• Red line to Orange line to Haymarket in 23 minutes
• Red line to Green line to Haymarket in 28 minutes

This pretty conclusively reinforced my preference for the Orange line to the Green, even if it means an extra stop on the Red.

The contender, Google Maps, brought four different routes, although two of them are essentially identical.

• Red line to Green line to Haymarket in 19 minutes
• Red line to Downtown Crossing, then walk the rest of the way in 22 minutes (duplicated with different Red line departures)
• Red line to Green E line (at Symphony) to Haymarket in 37 minutes

Both sets of times include the walking time on each end.  I don’t know which of these plans is more accurate.  I have to believe that the MBTA should know the schedule better, but I also believe that Google might be reporting more realistic data.  Both systems agree that the Red line departing Central at 8:33 will arrive at Park Street at 8:39, but it all goes haywire after that, with a whopping nine minute difference in estimating the same trip, with Google saying it’s quicker to hoof it than to take either of MBTA’s Green or Orange legs.

I checked, the Orange line does show up in some Google routes at different times, but it looks like it doesn’t arrive very often, which might skew things.  Google’s last suggestion is so off the wall that it makes me doubt the whole system – take the #1 bus down Mass ave past the B C & D Green line station at Hynes and the Orange line station at Mass Ave to get on the E branch of the Green line at Symphony??  Feh.

Poor Google, has Boston’s beany maze bested your mapping mojo?

Boston is not known as a late-night town.  I met up with fashion blogger and journalista A for some bag shopping (more on my utter failure therat later) and sushi.  She wanted to get an iPhone, too.  Knowing that the Apple store was open later than the others – till 10 – we saved that errand for last.  We walked in at 9:30 and asked to buy a phone.

I’m sorry, we stop selling phones at 9:30.

You have iPhones, right?

Of course!  But we activate them in the store and AT&T shuts down their servers at 9:30.

Clearly there was little point in arguing, but this seems silly, suspicious or both.  Maybe they just wanted to go home early and were shooing us out of the store?  Seems unlikely.  Maybe it takes more than half an hour to sell an iPhone? I hope not.  I thought Apple was all about stuff being really really easy.

So if the Apple people were not messing with us, it must be AT&T.  (In an aside, let me say that right after preferring a keyboard, it’s this kind of Apple paternalism and AT&T ineptitude that’s kept me from getting an iPhone myself.)  So AT&T shuts down some critical part of the iPhone operation at 9:30pm?  That’s 6:30 on the West coast – do they have an even earlier iCurfew or their own servers?  Is the iPhone activation process so complex that it can’t be automated?  Isn’t a cellphone network sort of a 24-7 kind of thing?

A semi-random survey of Apple Stores listed on the Apple website came up with a variety of closing times, mostly 9, 9:30 or 10.  (Many stores are in malls that enforce their own closing times.)  So a 9:30 iPhone cutoff makes sense for many, but it’s also so close to the actual closing time of so many stores, it seems a small thing to give an extra 30 minutes to ensure a consistent experience.  But here’s what fully grinds my gears: the 24/7 Apple store in NYC has this note on its hours: “iPhone purchases can be activated with AT&T daily from 7:00 a.m. until 11:30 p.m.”  I guess they have a special server.

Dad wanted a phone “with a camera and internet and keys that aren’t too small to see”, so for Fathers’ Day I picked one up, a 3G flip phone from a major manufacturer with T-Mobile’s mobile web thing.  What dad wanted most was to be able to check his stuff on eBay.  So I set out to configure the phone for maximum mobile eBay usage by the on-the-go 70-year-old.

I thought I knew a thing or two about the interwebs, but in an effort to make things easy, T-Mobile has wrapped the web in a very confusing little phone package.  For starters, there’s no button or menu item for “surf the web” or even “mobile internet” – you have to know that the operative term is “T-Zones” which I always thought was the oily bit on your nose and forehead.  How is anybody supposed to figure that out?  Plus, when configuring “shortcuts” which are accessible with one click, you can’t add a URL or even a link to these “T-Zones”

Since “typing” on a phone with T9 “predictive” text entry is a chore for the most skilled and a terrible challenge for the newbie oldster, I figured the least I could do would be to set up Dad’s phone with eBay as a bookmark and enter his username and password for him.  After some poking around, I found that eBay has a special T-Mobile mobile portal, tmo.ebay.com, pre-configured in the phone.  I added it to the homepage bookmarks and thought I was pretty cool.

Then I clicked the “sign in” button and got a weird error.  The phone can’t display that page, it claimed.  Checked everything, tried again.  Same.  Rebooted, moved to a different location, same.  I even tried the same operation on my own T-Mobile phone. Fail. What good is special t-mobile eBay if you can’t log in?  Well, I suppose it could be good for one’s paypal balance.  Then, on a total lark, I tried the regular mobile eBay URL, m.ebay.com, and what do you know, everything worked fine.  let’s compare the two pages:

vs.

I can’t really be bothered to view the source, but it’s pretty clear that the T-Mobile version adds the “t-zones home” link and somehow subtracts the actual “sign in” functionality.  (Both seem to work fine on a full-blown PC browser) Rather a poor deal, if you ask me.  Now that I finally have the phone logged into eBay, it’s looking pretty good.  It remembers the login, and defaults to a nice compact “my eBay” view showing items you’re selling, buying, watching, etc.

The final step that almost defeated me was adding this non-standard eBay page to the phone’s little web homepage link list.  I was instructed to “enter a URL, such as msn.com” but apparently “ebay.com” or “m.ebay.com” didn’t count, so I ended up tortuously entering the “http://” in T9, and when I finally did, the page showed up in the menu under the full URL, not just “eBay”

So where does this all leave us?  Well, I’m pretty sure Dad will be able to check the status of his bids and sales on the go, but between the T9 text entry and the imperfect experience of the mobile versions of most websites, I doubt he’ll be doing much more.  Perhaps he’ll list this phone on eBay by next Fathers’ day.