Sure enough, when I got my iPad last week this quickly emerged as a pain point.

Apple decided in its noble quest for simplicity that the file system should be kept invisible.  Simple, right?  Just don’t worry your pretty little head about it.

It’s a great idea until you actually need to transfer files.  Then it amounts to a really bad idea.

What happens is that each file transfer and remote document viewing app (Air Sharing, GoodReader, DropBox, iBooks, Stanza, etc.) has no choice but to reinvent its own UI for transferring and managing files.  The resulting user experience is massively inconsistent.

And, all of these buckets of files are siloed.  No app can see see another’s contents.  The user is left having to remember what PDF is accessible from which app.

The iOS (was iPhone OS) needs to expose the file system to people who need it.  There should be a clear, obvious way of transferring files among the devices.

Here is the demo I’d like to see some day:  The iPad or iPod “desktops” show up as an extension of the PC’s desktop.   The user drags a file or folder from the PC to the iPad’s “desktop”.  Yes, the mouse cursor extends off your screen and onto the iPad* (*there’s already an app for this).  Boom… file transferred and accessible to all apps.

For bonus points: let the user indicate that changes to the files or folders should be kept in sync across all media.

The ingredients are all in place.  And yet I still haven’t seen a strong play to command our smartphones by voice.  It should be easy pickin’s at this point, nay?

But increasingly I found myself depending on these tools.  Why?  Because of the new paradigm of collaboration that they enable.  No longer must you sit in a cave and perfect a document before tossing over the wall.  In the new era, you don’t have to wait for a document to be finished to get feedback on it; multiple people can collaborate on it simultaneously, and everyone always has the latest version at all times.  It’s a better way to work.

But we are still stuck with that clunky browser-based user experience, that is now 12 years old and not much better than it was two years ago.  It’s usable, yes, but let’s be clear: Google Spreadsheets cannot hold a candle to Excel in the tightness of the user experience.

So when Microsoft announced over a year ago that it was going to match Google Apps I thought, that’s kind of nice.  The documents will be accessible from any web browser, and Google could use some competition.

But why are they racing to give up their evolved user experience?  It really is a pain to use web apps within a web browser; there are countless little user experience compromises that we must still live with.  Why must we have either cloud-hosted documents or a modern user experience?

After all, it’s not the web browser that makes web apps special.  It’s the fact that the apps and data are available everywhere and are shared in real time.

Vision to steal: Why doesn’t Microsoft let you browse, open and edit cloud-stored documents directly from within Office apps?  Users would have the best of both worlds: ubiquitous access (even from a web browser when needed), continuous publishing, and the most comfortable and responsive UI.

If you and I are co-editing a document, we’d see each others edits in Word or Excel or PowerPoint in real time (as in Google Wave).  This is not just a parlor trick; it’s a fantastic way to work collaboratively over distance while on speakerphone.  (We can expect to see much more of this.)

As a bonus idea to steal, cloud-hosted documents can be kept in sync with local copies (which is what Google Gears does).  Opening a desktop .DOC or .XLS that you have shared on the cloud would keep all edits synched to both places whenever possible.  The user could do offline editing and have the changes propagated when their Internet access is restored.

If the competition is zigging, you should be zagging, because by the time you catch up to where the competition is today, they will be somewhere else.  Don’t make it easy for customers to continue to pick the leader.  Add some enticing benefits that catch the customer’s attention and make them make a choice.  Then, over time, fill in the parts where you are behind.

That “cloud” is actually made up of racks and racks of servers. Those servers are not actually in the clouds, where it is quite cold, but down on the earth, where it’s warm and getting warmer.  Those racks of servers generate heaps of thermal energy, which requires yet more energy to keep cool.  Otherwise they melt onto one another like Hersheys in the glovebox.

The software architecture that makes these clouds of servers work is modular, and fault-tolerant and distributed.  They allow plug-and-play expansion when more capacity is needed.  They are built to withstand any node failing (with thousands of servers, several will break down every day).

And those nodes can be anywhere, since everything is connected.  But given a choice, it’s preferable to put them close to where they are needed, because things are faster that way.

The purpose of a space heater is to generate heat.  Heaters are pretty dumb.  That’s all they do.  They have an electric heating element, maybe some oil to circulate through and some fins to radiate the heat, a thermostat and that’s it.

What if a space heater instead had a bunch of cheap, older generation, heat-generating CPUs and a wireless connection?  You could crank up the number of processors and their clock speed for a nice cozy hearth, or turn them down a few GHz if you just needed to keep your nose from freezing overnight.

The cloud computing companies could even give you a few cents for each MIPS-hour your heater burns.

At a larger scale, an entire office floor could have computers built into its HVAC system.  Even our desktop computers could be enlisted for the job.  They are ridiculously overpowered for what we need them for most of the time anyway.  The building’s climate control system could instruct all those idle CPUs to do something productive with their downtime, while warming the office in the winter.  Those computers could even monitor the local temperature and provide more heat where it is most needed.

All of this would:

• do something productive in the process of heating your home or office
• reduce the cost of cooling servers
• distribute computing closer to where it is needed
• maybe control temperature in a breezy office to a finer degree
• maybe subsidize heating costs by donating cycles to the cloud

My wife, tactfully: “I think you have an idea that is ahead of its time.”

Yes, it could be a while before this idea is stolen.  [This would be a fun and compelling research project for some engineering & system design students.  Anyone?]

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, an innovation consultancy that helps guide product leaders and their teams to generate ideas even more important than the Network Heater.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

With a high contrast scene like a face against a bright daytime sky, you have to choose between detail in the shadows — your friend’s face — and highlights in the bright areas — like the cool billowy clouds.  [..] Is there anything to stop the camera from capturing multiple exposures and doing this stitching for you within the camera?  Then you could have Ansel Adams shots at the touch of a button

A team at Stanford has demonstrated this feature (see the video halfway down the page).

Plus those idea robbers also stole another idea straight from my head: the ability to program the camera for all kinds of tricks.

However, their model is open-source software, and so it will be limited in use to real programmers.  This is nice, but I want Nikon and Canon to let any computer-literate person write – or visually snap together – scripts to be executed by the camera. (That’s the new idea to steal.)

This is an enabling technology that would let the end-user do all kinds of tricks:

• Adjust settings & preferences according to your rules (If it’s in Manual mode, fix the ISO.  If it’s in Aperture priority mode, use Auto-ISO.  If the flash is on, drop ISO to 100.)
• Set up a lightpainting program: blink the light for 3 seconds to indicate the start of the program, then open the shutter for 60 seconds while you paint, then beep for 5 seconds so you can pose, then take a flash image to capture you.
• Baby or lightning capture: With the camera on a tripod pre-bufferring video, and when a spike in lighting happens or the baby finally laughs, let the user press the remote to begin capture a few seconds earlier
• Wildlife capture: Pre-buffer video, and when motion is detected, start recording it from a second earlier.  Then capture stills every 10 seconds for the next minute, then wait for motion
• so much more

The scripts would be sharable and rated online among the community.  Serious photographers are a techie, enthusiastic bunch and this creative capability would go over nicely.

Photographers, what tricks would you teach your gear if it were easy and fun?

A big ongoing question is whether it will be possible for newspapers to stay afloat by charging for its content.  I happen to think it is possible, especially for those few papers with original, high quality, highly differentiated content.

But my point in this article is not to argue that it would work, but instead to stick my neck out and take a stab at the question of, if requiring payment were attempted, how such a system should be crafted.  My fear, and expectation, is that when paid online newspapers are introduced again, it will once again be done clumsily and greedily, and will foster user rebellion and further decline of journalism.

So here is a blueprint for another way.

Precedents

The system I propose rests upon elements of several precedents which provide proofs of concept:

• SMS messages - Each message is too cheap for the customer to think about (although in the aggregate, the price is enormous).  There is no purchase confirmation; it just happens.  Consumption is separated from payment, which happens at the end of the month.   (Someone tell me again that micropayments won’t work?)
• Ringtones – even at $1 or $2 it was cheap enough to be a no-brainer for status-conscious kids.  The purchase was also separated from billing.
• Electronic toll collection systems such as FasTrak or EZ-Pass.   I had read that bridge tolls increase far faster than otherwise when electronic payment is implemented (I can’t find the reference.  Anyone?).  It’s is a lot easier to cross the bridge without having to feel the pain of handing over a fiver each time.
• Apple’s iTunes Music Store - Anyone can download any song online for free from file sharing networks.  Yet lots of people pay to get it from iTunes Music Store.  Why?  It always boils down to their needs.  The iTunes store addresses the need for convenience (speed and streamlined purchase workflow), the need for audio quality (random downloads vary in quality), and the need for a clear conscious.  There is a market for legal.
• Apple’s iPhone app store - iPhone apps are so cheap that it’s almost a no-brainer to just buy them.  And you can buy them right from the phone, greatly reducing the purchase friction.  Estimated sales?  $2.5 billion per year.
• Skype - You only have to pitch in $10 occasionally.  The amount trickles down slowly as you call your distant relatives.  (Tell me again how micropayments don’t work?)
• Wall Street Journal online – offers a proof of concept that differentiated content can attract paying customers.
• Nintendo Wii game store, iStockPhoto and others deal with credits rather than dollar value.  Not necessarily the customer-friendliest trick, but it allows prices to be increased while obfuscating the normal pricing calculus.
• Credit cards – You only pay at the end of the month.  Credit cards divorce the desire to acquire from the pain of paying, and that makes people much more willing to spend.
• Amazon 1-click – Radically reduces the purchase friction.  You click that button and your mind switches modes from, “Should I buy it?  Let me think about it.” to “I bought it, now let me think about how to justify my actions.”

Elements of all these systems can be incorporated into our architecture for moving people to a paid model for newspaper articles.

Incidentally, I think it’s silly for people to make blanket statements that micropayments can never work or that people will never pay for online content.  Micropayments are nothing more than small payments.  Anyone buying a gumball out of a machine is making a micropayment.  That said, to make it work the content has to be valuable enough to be worth buying, differentiated enough to prevent migration to lower-cost competitors, cheap enough to not think about, and the payment mechanisms has to be streamlined enough that it does not impose its own burden of inconvenience.

Overall strategy

The solution requires some systems thinking to account for the psychology of visitors.  There is some social engineering going on here but I hope you don’t construe it as evil.  Society needs strong journalism and we’ve had a free ride for many years.  Those doing a good job of journalism deserve to be compensated well and we have to find a way to get from here (unsustainably free) to there (sustainably profitable).

The strategy involves these elements, which have been notably absent in prior attempts:

• Position ourselves to be on the consumer’s side.
• Overcome the barrier of having the customer pull out that credit card for the first time
• Boil the frog.  (Yes I know frogs don’t really allow themselves to be boiled slowly.)  Start the user off with plenty more free content, then make it so cheap they don’t care.  Give time for people to get used to the idea that there is no more free lunch, but make lunch extremely cheap.  Then ratchet up the price gradually profitability slowly as
• Make the transfer of money and credits as frictionless as possible.
• Separate the act of consuming from the act of exchanging money.  Avoid having people make purchase decisions.
• Plan to lose money for a while, as you transition the audience to a paid basis.  Getting greedy and trying to make a huge profit immediately will just leave you wondering why the frogs just keep jumping out of the water.

The system would work something like this:

1. Preparation

• Make it clear to visitors in advance that access to certain content will soon require credits.  Not because you’re greedy or mean, because  you can no longer survive without it, which is true.  The point is to combat the first instinct of critics that anyone who tries to charge for something is evil.
• Start as soon as possible, to space out the future price increases as far as possible.

2. Pricing and sign up

• Use credits as currency for accessing content, not cash.
• Do not expire credits (like some services we know)
• Give unlimited access to nonprofits and educational institutions, for good will.
• Give away a large number of free credits to anyone who wishes to continue reading the site.  Give enough free credits for 6 months of typical usage and convey clearly that this is the case.  The point is to soften the discomfort at transitioning to metered access.  Users may initially think, “This stinks!  I don’t want to pay!  But whatever, just give me the article I want to read; I can opt out later when my free credits expire.”  But as they use the site over time they will incubate in the thought that the content is actually worth something and think, “Well it’s not that much and fair is fair.”
• When the user signs up, require a valid credit card, PayPal account or direct withdrawal.  Don’t charge anything at this time; instead, deposit a few cents in the account.  The point is to disconnect the act of giving the credit card information from any purchase decision.  Getting over this hump is a major strategic turn.
• Give the user the choice of how much the auto-bill amount should be when the user runs out of credits.  $5, $10 or $20.  The point is to give the customer some level of control so they don’t feel like helpless victims.
• Make the initial price for reading an article so low, few will care:  2 credit per article, with one credit worth roughly one penny.
• Keep the price structure extraordinarily simple.  Make all the content deduct a single credit.  Don’t charge different amounts for different length articles or different “premium” articles.  Don’t make some content free and some paid.   Your goal is to avoid having people ever snap into purchase decision mode.
• Make the cost of credits an odd ratio, such as 1000 credits for $9.50.  This will be increased over time.
• Continue to serve ads and, of course, collect revenue for them.
• Allow for an ad-free version of the experience, for, say, 3 credits per article, whatever recoups the lost revenue.  Indicate in the box in the corner that this price level is activated.
• If you detect that ad blockers are being used, then, after a generous grace period, let the user know that they will be automatically switched to the ad-free experience in a few days.  Give instructions on how to disable their ad blocker if they would prefer otherwise.
• Offer unmetered access to the site for $50 a year.
• Be fair, and when the user hits the annual subscription amount, automatically upgrade them to unmetered access and let them know.  You could bilk them as, say, cellphone carriers and banks do, but remember, you want customers to see you as the good guys to lower their resistance to paying you.

3. Reading / purchasing experience

• Show the meter of credits remaining in a box at the top-right corner at all times.
• Indicate within that box the price of each article: 1 credit per article.
• When the user clicks a link for an article, just deduct the credit.  Don’t request confirmation.  Put a small note in the box in the corner saying that a credit was deducted for this article.
• The price is for unlimited use of that article.  Don’t charge them multiple times for re-reading an article they already bought.  Remember:  you’re on their side.
• Let the user click an undo button if they didn’t want the content.  Don’t haggle; give the customer ample benefit of the doubt.  Maybe they clicked by accident, maybe they didn’t get what they expected, or maybe they don’t like the writing.  Have a money back guarantee and just credit the content back.  Say something only if you notice the right being abused.
• When the user has 25 credits left, put up a note saying that their account will be auto-billed for $5 or $10 or $20 worth of credits once their account falls to 10 credits.

4. Dealing with piracy

• Take a soft stance on the inevitable content piracy that will ensue.  Focus on the mainstream users who are willing and able to pay and who don’t have the inclination to bother with the workarounds.  The main site will always be faster, more cohesive and more convenient than the rip-off sites and thus differentiated.
• Be gentle with content pirates; they will all blog your cease-and-desist letters.  Go after the worst offenders.  Say, sorry, we wish we could give away the content for free.  But we are forced to prosecute copyright violators otherwise we lose the copyrights.
• Over time gradually increase the exchange rate of credits per dollar and/or the number of credits to read an article.  If you devalue existing credits (e.g. by doubling the cost of reading an article from 1 to 2 credits) then be fair and make existing credit balances whole (e.g. by doubling the number of old credits).

5. Bonus points

• The hard part:  Establish a consortium of content providers.  Newspaper creators, TV vendors, eBook vendors, bloggers, etc. that all will run on the same system and display the price in the same way.  Signing up for any one service signs someone up for all of them.  The point is to reduce the sign-up pain.  The less the user has to whip out the credit card, the better.  This may be the only chance that the smaller players have.
• Different types of content may cost a different number of credits.  Use as a basis the amount of time the content keeps the user occupied.  If an average article takes 5 minutes to read and costs 1 credit, make a 25 minute TV show 5 credits.

No matter what, the newspaper business will contract.  There are just too many papers out there relying on syndicated (read: commodity) content, that have too little to offer.  But for the top papers ready to try again to charge for content, they should follow an approach like this that accounts for buyer psychology.

Readers, what did I miss?  Please pass this article on to people who might benefit from it.

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

There were two main options. If you give mobile surfers the whole site (Option 1), it will be slow, and it will be poorly formatted to the small screen.  If you reformat the websites to make them fast to load and easy to read (Option 2), you lose the authenticity of surfing the real world.

The iPhone took a clear stance in favor of the former alternative.  They download and display the whole website quite accurately.  They were able to pull this off (years after the Palm initiative) because of important technical advancements: higher res screens that allowed small text to be legible, a scalable graphics and text rendering layer that allows pages to be zoomed to any level of magnification, and 3G & WiFi networking that made loading the full, original web page directly, without a transcoding proxy, tolerable.

And this works.  Sorta.  Apple’s early iPhone ads featured someone pinch-zooming into an article blurb on the New York Times home page.  Well, this just so happens to be a narrow newspaper-like column of text that actually lends itself to reading on the small display of a mobile phone.

Most prose on the web is not so narrow.  In real life, reading a web page as originally formatted involves a lot of laborious pinching and scrolling, both horizontal and vertical.  It’s so laborious that I have found it simply too much work to read articles this way on my iPhone.

Instead, I channel all of my iPhone articles through an app that caches and reformats it for the small screen. (I happen to use Instapaper, which I have found edges out its close competitor, Read It Later.)  It’s a great solution, and as a bonus, it even increases my productivity: rather than getting lost in the surf when I am at my computer supposedly working, I click the Read Later button and channel it off to my iPhone for reading during downtime.

But importantly, Instapaper reformats the web content so it’s very easy to read on the iPhone.  The text is as large as you need it to be, it syncs quickly since it cuts out the graphics, and no evil horizontal scrolling is involved.  Instapaper also has a brilliant tilt-to-scroll feature that makes scrolling feel like it’s not a task at all, just a subtle change in the angle at which you are holding the device.  This experience is a night-and-day difference from attempting to read the original web page that was designed for a computer display crammed onto a screen that fits in the hand.

The only remaining trouble is that moving everything through Instapaper is extra steps, and I am still forced to skip some content because of it.

Which brings us to today’s idea to steal:  To Apple, and anyone else who creates web browsers for mobile experiences:  it’s great that you can render a web page accurately.  Thanks, and congratulations.  But for actual readability, please provide the option to quickly load and reformat a page for the small screen.  Support both Option 1 and Option 2.

(Oh, and while you’re at it, you should pick up on what Instapaper has discovered and build in support for offline caching and reading, so it’s available to all applications.)

The strongest influence on reputation isn’t what a company says about its product, it’s what people actual experience with it.  Whether customers love or hate your offering, they are sure to tell two friends, and so on. The channels for doing so are myriad, and the message is a far more credible and influential.

And so the most powerful way for us to establish a valuable brand is by consistently creating great products.

Duh, right?

Yet take General Motors, which keeps trying to convince us through its words, not its actions, that we’ve changed, baby, we swear.

One need only rent a GM car to be reminded that this is not the case.  Each rental event is powerful negative advertisement for GM, reconfirming the “hoary old conventional wisdom” about GM’s lackluster quality.

This is not entirely GM’s fault.  We who rent cars are notoriously price-sensitive.  If rental agencies were to spring for more expensive and enjoyable cars they’d have to raise rental rates, and they’d instantly lose business to lower-cost competitors.  Rental agencies need to acquire cars as cheaply as they can to keep prices down.

But this still doesn’t solve GM’s brand problem.  What might GM do about it?  Here are some possible strategic visions for them to steal:

• Option 1. Spin off a new, separate brand and separate models for the rental market, and distance them from the GM brand.  Only permit premium vehicles to be rented under the GM badge — cars that will leave renters with a positive impression of the brand.  Forbid any sub-par car from carrying the GM nameplate.
• Option 2. Think of car rentals not as a profit center but as advertising opportunities.  Only permit GM cars to be rented that will reflect well on the brand.  Give the rental agencies a break on price to make this possible, or perhaps lease the cars to the rental agencies or buy them back after they start to show poorly.
• Option 3. Throw in the towel on the old GM brand.  It’s horribly tainted and will take a decade and a half a billion dollars to repair.  Spin up a fresh new brand for vehicles to be sold to consumers that has no “G” and no “M” anywhere.

And of course, support the brand by making nothing but world-class quality cars from now on.

Any other options?

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost

The author’s vision to steal includes:

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. [..] A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

Have grad students come down from the ivory tower and pile onto the challenges of the day. Sounds like a plan!

Now we have cameras that can go back in time to take a shot that was missed and cameras that can recognize and focus in on faces, cameras that know precisely where you are, cameras that can transmit images over the air, cameras with large, sensitive sensors that they can almost see in the dark, cameras that illuminate with heat and can see in the dark, and cameras that can record video in HD.

It seems like digital photography has reached a peak.  The quality is impeccable.  Are we done with the radical breakthroughs?

Of course not, silly!  What kind of a blog do you think this is?

There is a feature I have been looking forward to that, to my knowledge, does not yet exist in a camera.  See, with a high contrast scene like a face against a bright daytime sky, you have to choose between detail in the shadows — your friend’s face — and highlights in the bright areas — like the cool billowy clouds.

HDR image (click to enlarge)

If you have the time and inclination you could take a couple of different exposures and sew them together.  This has become known as high dynamic range imaging.

But is there anything to stop the camera from capturing multiple exposures and doing this stitching for you within the camera?  Then you could have Ansel Adams shots at the touch of a button, without all the messy darkroom chemicals.

This is just one new avenue for innovation in image capture.  There are many more.  Stereoscopic point-and-clicks?  Cameras that can infer a 3D scene and automatically stitch together a 3D model?  Infrared cameras that can see in the dark?  Tiny lapel pin cameras that capture our life every few seconds?

Readers, what future digital camera innovations you foresee?

Here are a few possible improvements:

1. Load me up. Make streaming music playback a multimedia experience for when the music piques my interest.  It is fantastic that I can glance at Pandora on my iPhone to see a vivid album cover of the currently playing song.  But I want more more more… lyrics, photos of the performer, liner notes, trivia, upcoming concerts.

2. Sync up. If a Pandora client is playing, and another is activated with the same account, give the option to sync playback across them.  Buffer them up so they are in perfect synchrony.   This would allow multiple sound systems in the house to be synchronized.  At that point, changes to one would change them all.

3. Buddy up. List what friends are currently using Pandora, the titles of their stations and the current song.  Give the option to tune in to someone else’s station live.  Leverage existing social networks so we don’t have to re-establish the graph.

4. Step up the bitrate. I recently fired up a phonograph that had been idle for fifteen years and was blown away at the sound fidelity.   I had literally forgotten how much better music could sound.  Over the years, MP3s and streaming audio had inured me to mediocre quality of digitally compressed music.  Streaming music purveyors: give me an option to pay… a little bit ($30/year).. to get pristine reception.

Apple already got AT&T to do the work to support visual voicemail. This is a good thing for users, since it’s much faster to be able to use one’s eyes to navigate interfaces than only one’s ears.

But why must voicemail be accessible only from your cellphone? Users already have a web login for their cellphone accounts. Why not allow users to access voicemail through a web interface? Then you could skim the messages, type text message responses from the browser or even initiate a callback from the far more efficient UI of your computer. (The callback would call your cellphone then the other party’s.)

While we’re at it, why not have an IMAP connector to your voicemail? You could then process voice messages as you process your email. The only difference is when you open the email message there would be a voice attachment to play. Since it’s using the glorious magic of IMAP, messages you read or delete are kept in sync with the server and your mobile phone, so your phone doesn’t nag you with a message you already processed. (Office VoIP PBX phone systems have permitted these scenarios for years, and they are great.)

By the same token: It’s been two years since I wrote about how cellphone configuration would be better done with a web interface. Is anyone doing this yet?

Why must this be so?  Why can’t we have multiple active phones tied to the same number?  Cellphones are so cheap.

Why not allow multiple phones to be tied to one mobile number?  Then, an incoming call would call all of them.  It would allow all sorts of wonderful scenarios.  You could have:

• You could keep your powerful PDA/communicator/GPS smartphone like the iPhone as your main device
• You could have another tiny mini-cellphone/MP3 player to take running — something like an “iPhone Shuffle”.  (Today I must leave my phone behind because it is too bulky to run with.  But I’d rather have one with me for contingencies.)
• You could have a backup cellphone to grab when you are rushing out the door, when you misplace or lose one
• You could have a real, standalone hands-free cellphone integrated into your car.   No messing with clumsy cables or bluetooth to dock it to your one and only phone.
• You could have a cellphone built into your laptop computer. Your computer would “ring” when someone called.   You could answer it there on speaker phone.  You could process voicemail visually from your desktop.  The cellphone service would provide your laptop with data, voice and video call connectivity when you are away from a friendly WiFi signal.
• You could replace your home service and home wireless phone with 2 or 3 cellphones cradled around the house.  You could walk into the yard or even down the block without losing service.

Readers: We in the USA are mobile phone laggards. Does this capability exist anywhere in the world yet?

NEW request [1/5/09]  If you could have multiple phone lines directed to the same cellphone, then you could have your home phone ring both spouses, and you could have your office number also go to you main cellphone.  Of course you’d want to be able to configure any number to drop right into voicemail.  You don’t want work calls to interfere with your weekend or vacation life.  (This capability is close to what GrandCentral does, but I’m imagining the experience to be more unified, with less players and complexity.)

[Updated 1/5/09 to clarify and add the multiple-numbers per cellphone.]

$10,000 Honeywell Kitchen Computer from 1969. No units were sold. You can visit it at the Computer History Museum.

One era’s flop is often another era’s success. The typical excuse given for failure is something vague like, “the market wasn’t ready for it” or “the product was ahead of its time.” I dislike these phrases, as they shrug off our responsibility to predict what customers will accept, and they shift the blame to the vagaries of customer behavior and psychology.

Yes, sometimes it’s true that mainstream customers need plenty of role models around them before they’ll even entertain the possibility of trying a new technology. It took some convincing to get people to try out the first microwaves, mobile phones, email and the Web.

But just as often, the early attempts at a product fail simply because they do not meed important customer needs at a realistic price.

It shouldn’t have been a stretch for Honeywell to realize that a kitchen computer that cost $10,000 in 1969 dollars, that required the housewife to take a two week course to learn to program the device, using toggle-switch input and binary light output, might not be a blockbuster. Despite its integrated cutting board.

3Com Audrey of 2000

A more recent attempt at a kitchen computer was a quick flame-out by 3Com called the Audrey in 2000. But that was before widespread broadband and WiFi, before large, cheap LCD panels and many other enabling technologies. For the price, it too was not about to earn its place under the cupboard.

We now we have enabling technologies lined up to make a device plausible: cheap computers, thin LCDs, fast, wireless Internet connectivity. Is the time right to make place for a computer in the kitchen?   There is anecdotal evidence of the demand: no fewer than three of my friends remodeling kitchens are designing a place for a kitchen computer. Lead users often portend larger trends (see von Hippel, The Sources of Innovation).

The need is apparently there, the technological ingredients are in place.  There is no external barrier, so now we await a major manufacturer to introduce a well-designed device and establish the category. (Waits like this are hard to predict. They could take months or years.)

Users can, of course, get by nicely today with a laptop in a cubby.  Many do.  But for high-end remodels that kind of retrofit won’t do.  So here are some specs that we can compare against the next wave of kitchen computers. These specs describe a relatively full-feature devices for big, fancy kitchen. They would be pared down for lower-end products.

Key scenarios for a kitchen computer

1. General lightweight web surfing
2. Family information appliance
3. Follow a recipe while cooking
4. Possible homework & surfing station
5. Audio controller, for background music and talk while doing kitchen activities
6. Decorative element, as a digital photo frame

Features of a kitchen computer

1. Attractiveness, since it’s part of the décor. Designed for a kitchen, not an office.
2. Different finish options to match with different décors. People remodeling choose from hundreds of tiles and paint colors and one style does not fit all.
3. Touch screen for most common tasks.
4. Wireless keyboard and mouse, normally stored, can be pulled out for more serious use.
5. Resilient to spills, oils, greasy fingers. Durable for kid usage.
6. Unobtrusive, since there is enough clutter in the kitchen.
   • Only a thin display is outwardly visible. The main unit is concealed within cabinetry, along with cabling.
   • Display takes up no precious counter space. It is mounted on an arm and, when not in use, folds under a cabinet or rotates flush against the wall. In use while cooking it hinges out. When used for homework or sit-down surfing, it lowers to a work surface.
   • The main unit (if there is one, apart from the display) is small like the Mac Mini to minimize consumption of precious cabinet volume.
   • Speakers are built into the display to further reduce footprint.
   • Quiet, fanless operation. Does not contribute to the background noise.
7. Central control – Display can completely control the device including powering it on. There is never a need to dig into the cabinets to fuss with the device.
8. Media playback, particularly music.
   • Hidden main unit includes amp for speakers and speaker output.
   • Remote control to control playback while across the room or in adjoining room.
   • If IR is used for remote control, the display includes the IR receiver, to allow for line-of-sight.
   • Display matches ambient light in room. When the room is dark, the display turns itself off.
9. Always on, or instant on. As an appliance it must have instant availability.
10. Low power consumption since it’s always on.

Special Software

The kitchen computer should be a standard, full-function personal computer for when it is needed for homework or general usage. For key tasks it should revert to a minimal, streamlined appliance mode with highly tailored apps that don’t require the keyboard or mouse.

1. Family calendar/coordination center visible at a glance, with alarms and reminders.[Has anyone cracked this critical user need yet?]
2. Digital photo frame when idle.
   • Automatic, smart photo syncing with other photo libraries devices in the house. You don’t have to do any management for the images to remain fresh.
   • “Best of” photos from prior years appear automatically.
   • They match the current season, so you don’t get inappropriate winter wonderland pictures in July.
3. Music controller
   • User can stream music from other servers in the house or from Internet radio
   • Can be controlled by the display, either with physical buttons or a touch-driven on-screen UI.
4. Recipe software? This is maybe. Recipes demand flexibility and resilience, something paper excels at. But if a simplified touch-screen UI were to be layered on an outstanding cooking site like Epicurious we would have something. Also: recipe videos on demand is a killer kitchen app, since it’s so much easier to see cooking techniques demonstrated.
5. Standard info appliance stuff to check out while scarfing down your cereal: Weather forecast so you know what to wear. Traffic so you know what to expect during the commute. Top news & sports items so you are up to speed on what’s going on. RSS feeds from the school. Buttons to most-used websites. Number of waiting email or voicemail messages.
6. Quick & dirty email checker. Quickly skim & read email messages & compose short replies, even canned replies, without having to pull out the keyboard & mouse. For full-on email answering mode, pull out the keyboard or switch to your main PC.
7. Family message center? This is another maybe. It’s a traditional scenario envisioned for a kitchen computer. But introducing yet another messaging medium could be a stretch, given how inundated we already are with messaging solutions. If it were to happen, here’s a viable way: Mom presses a “record” button on the display and speaks a message for Junior. The audio is stored on a server, and a link to it is sent via email or text message to Junior, who can retrieve it on a PC or cellphone. A bright button appears on the kitchen appliance for Junior, until he retrieves the message from any means.
8. Videophone — no longer a futuristic scenario, especially for Mac users. Dad can see that Jane, who is away at college, is available for videochat. This is simply a different wrapper around iChat, still by far the best-of-breed for video calls.
9. Integration with other home automation: distributed audio, lighting & climate control, alarm system. [Home automation is another field that is under-developed for the times, in need of an Apple-esque kick in the butt.]

With computers once again at a plateau, new outlets tend to emerge. We should expect to see a trickle of kitchen computers come to market. If they are designed around the usage scenarios they will be a welcome addition to the kitchen, not just gratuitous technology.

[Update 8/22/08 - touched up wording]

everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

Rumors of the desktop’s demise are premature. As described in my analysis of Hosted vs. Local Applications there are simply too many important scenarios for the desktop to go away. Information and creativity workers spend much of their waking lives using computers and require the fastest response possible. They require reliable access to them, even at 30,000 feet, even at overcrowded overseas cafés. They and the businesses and governments they work for require sovereignty over their sensitive information.

The solution to these needs is locally stored apps and data. This will not change for a long time.

Casual users & Internet Appliances

That said, most people on the planet are not information workers. They’re like my mom. Year after year, she uses her computer for communicating, browsing, light gaming and not much more. Her PC is both overpowered and sub-par for the job: overpowered with capacity she will never use, sub-par because it takes too long to bootstrap that capacity just to check email. The telephone gives a dial tone the moment the receiver is lifted — why can’t the machine show your latest messages the moment the email button is pressed?

Casual computer users like my mom would be better served by an inexpensive Internet appliance. For these users, it doesn’t matter whether apps and data are stored locally or remotely, as long as a stable net connection is available. New users in developing countries fall into the same camp.

This era of Internet appliances is almost upon us with new categories of products like the Palm Foleo, the OLPC, the iPhone, and the Nokia Internet Tablet. These type of portable devices (sometimes blended with, sometimes an adjunct to a cellphone) will become the only machine many people in the world will ever need. Especially when they become cheap and dockable to keyboards, mice and larger monitors for longer stretches of use (that’s a vision to steal).

Hybrid apps

Paul Graham and I need not argue about extremes like the death or immortality of the desktop. There is a happy medium between all-hosted and all-local applications, a Reese’s Peanut Butter solution. The best of both worlds is to download and cache first class applications in their entirety and run them locally with the highest-fidelity UI frameworks available. (Hint: not AJAX, not browser apps). The apps would update themselves from trusted sources when necessary — seamlessly, automatically, in the background, with no hands. They would give users access to data that is best stored locally (high definition movies, private data and photos, and so on). Since today’s OS platforms do not support this I’m counting it as another vision to steal.

A stepping stone to this future is the Either/Or Apps (EOAs) — web apps running in a web browser that may be local or remote. AJAX and Flex are pushing the boundaries of app richness within a browser frame. But they are still within a browser frame, an unsuitable container for a complete computing experience. Adobe, Microsoft and Sun are on the case with AIR, Silverlight, and JavaFX respectively, new platforms for rich internet applications (RIAs) that live on the desktop rather than within the browser.

As we look forward to the Internet Appliance era, we can put away the eulogy for the desktop. It will not be necessary.

8/3/07 Update: The Zonbu is directly targeted to the casual computer users described above. It is only $100! Great deal! I think. Plus $13/month for 2 years Linux PC with local applications, 4GB of flash storage and remote backup. Total cost $370.95 for 2 years. Optical drive and WiFi costs extra $49+$29=$78. Total so far $449. Monitor, mouse and keyboard are not included. Photo storage will be constrained. Flash video stutters. It’s Linux. It doesn’t work with iTunes or any other Mac-only or Windows-only app. Down the slippery slope we go. Maybe your mom would be better off with a Mac Mini?

See also:

• Hosted vs. Local Applications
• DabbleDB, FileMaker Pro, and Innovation

More recently there was a story about Internet café’s here in San Francisco and how one of the premier hotspots is just a few blocks from my house.

I would love to walk down and do some work in that environment, but open wi-fi means no encryption between your laptop and the base station. That means anyone nearby can sniff my packets and monitor my communications. Easily, and with no special tech knowledge. Hacking has become a point-and-click endeavor.

To make matters worse, AT&T (was: SBC, was: PacBell) does not encrypt email communications. If I open my email application, every few minutes it will connect to the server, broadcasting my password in the clear for all nearby hackers. Not a bright idea in an Internet café teeming with San Francisco’s nouveau dot commers.

It got me wondering why it was this way. Today, for Wi-Fi communications to be encrypted it means each user must enter a password. Not very convenient for patrons of Internet café’s. But if you turn off password protection you also lose encryption to the base station. It’s an either-or situation.

And the issue is not relegated to Wi-Fi communications. Ethernet LAN connections are similarly insecure. Anyone else on your network can sniff your packets.

For precision and clarity, here is the problem statement rendered as SSNiFs scenarios:

Can’t we have our cake and eat it too? Why can’t the base station establish secure communications to user even without a password? The router and the laptop would each generate key pairs and exchange public keys for the session. No passwords, high encryption standards. As for wired, Ethernet connections, why can’t they do the same?

Seems like a pretty obvious need and idea, doesn’t it? Surely I’m not the first to have thought of this.

Turns out I’m not. I asked my friend David Creemer, who is in possession of sixty percent of all human knowledge and therefore usually a useful resource. He wrote:

The capability you ask for is slowly getting deployed, and is part of the 802.1x authentication standard. 802.1x is mostly associated with WiFi, but works perfectly well on ethernet, etc. It provides for per-port or per-connection authentication, authorization, and encryption. On the Mac, you might see it as “WPA2-Enterprise” on the WiFi password panel. Though generally used with a password or other credential, it can do encryption with no or trivial authentication.

So, it’s coming. Eventually. Deployment of this sort of thing takes years so it could be a while.

Which begs the broader question about product vision. This scenarios is pretty straightforward, isn’t it? Obvious even, at least in retrospect? How could the purveyors of wireless networking standards have missed this use case, dooming years of users to the invisible perils of insecure communications? Moreover, Ethernet LANs have been around for decades now. How did they miss it?

Was it a fear of performance degradation due to encrypting all packets? Was it because customers do not appreciate security risks and hence do not demand stronger solutions from vendors? Or was it a lack of foresight on the part of the standards bodies — a lapse of vision into this core, critical scenario?
—
One final note: Even with the secure WiFi connection described here, your data is only safe within the café, not on its journey between the café and its destination. For that you need to establish a VPN connection. And we continue to wait for widespread, facilitated email encryption.

Local vs. Hosted Computing

This goes to the old debate between local versus hosted computing. The debate started in the mid-90′s with Sun and Oracle trying to battle Microsoft’s dominance by replacing “fat clients” — full-featured PCs with their own storage — with “thin clients” that left most of the computing and all of the storage up to the servers.

That was in the early days of the web and it didn’t stand a chance at that time. None of the infrastructure could support the quality of user experience that was taken for granted with desktop apps. All the software industry had to do was wait for those massive initiates to run out of breath and money.

Fast forward a decade. Now we have fast, cheap, nearly ubiquitous connectivity, super fast servers and local machines, cheap gargantuan hosted storage. And we finally have a nascent medium for distributed applications: web browsers with AJAX (and friends).

So the debate is back, argued this time by the likes of Google and Yahoo with hosted productivity applications that are walking and talking more and more like desktop apps. Applications like Google’s spreadsheet, Yahoo’s rich email client and now DabbleDB, a rich online database app (which I am sure someone will snap up for big bucks very quickly).

And so the pendulum appears to be swinging back to something that kind of looks like the days of yore: mainframe computers that knew and did all and dumb terminals that channeled them.

Will the pendulum swing all the way back to a fully hosted world? Should it? Let’s review the debate.

What’s good about hosted apps

A future of hosted apps are great if you travel, if you need to travel light, if you aren’t good for managing your own system or if you have to share computers. Here are the arguments for hosted apps laid out neatly as SSNiF scenarios:

What’s bad about hosted apps

Connected computing certainly has its place, but there will always be reasons for needing to have your apps and your data local. Here are the SSNiFs:

No wonder we have a dilemma. Those are some pretty strong needs on both sides of the equation. Choosing either direction trades off the other.

Vision to Steal

Meanwhile, we still wish we could consider DabbleDB but we can’t because it’s a hosted app. The same goes for other apps like Google Calendar or Intuit’s useful QuickBase. Wouldn’t it be nice if those vendors could just sell me a standalone version for my own use, or for my private workgroup’s use, without me having to be a webmaster?

Operating systems vendors: Can you please come up with a consumer-grade way to let users of standalone desktop computers run web apps locally?

Consumer-grade here means:

• No thinking about Apache or security concerns or being concerned about installing the latest version of MySQL or Perl or PHP or chron jobs.
• Install, uninstall and upgrade apps the Mac way, by dragging and dropping a single icon. Withstands operating system upgrades.
• Launch the local web app by double-clicking it. It opens into the browser.
• Allow the app normal access to the hard drive once it’s been welcomed in. Reads and writes the same types of documents as any other app.
• Let me switch on the app for others who can see my machine on the network. This way, selling into small workgroups would not require an IT specialist managing a server. It would be equivalent to the old pre-Web FileMaker Pro approach. Run it on anyone’s machine and turn on multi-user mode.

There are technical and standards hurdles to achieving this. But we need to get from here to there somehow, there being the place of convergence where we don’t care if an app is “native” or “hosted”… whether it runs as a Mac app or a Windows app or just a web app, whether the app is right here or out there. And where developers don’t have to fret over which platform to support.

Maybe someday, hosting computing will be the norm. The cost- and hassle-reduction benefits suggest that it will win out for casual users like Mom, students, information workers and by those who cannot afford their own machines (that’s a prediction). But the scenarios calling for local computing are also strong and will persist for the foreseeable future.

FileMaker falls into the trap

FileMaker Pro is probably still the best-in-breed product for mom-and-pop data management. It’s a solid product, a product of integrity: fast, reliable and plays well with others. I have used it daily for over a decade for many purposes.

But FileMaker long ago fell into the classic innovator’s dilemma. They paid too much heed to their most vocal users, database developers. Database developers are not everyday people. They are technical and they need to build sophisticated solutions for their clients. They vociferously demand power, and are far more tolerant of complexities that stymie normal people.

By giving this vocal minority what it wants FileMaker neglected its roots: the everyday productivity worker — people like teachers, baseball coaches or small business owners. While the product got increasingly powerful, fundamentals that would have made the everyday user’s life better (such as a modern auto-complete data input controls or Google-like searching) were neglected. Thus a strong unmet need has been left behind for a competitor to come along.

Coulda Been Contenders

What other everyman database contenders are there? There’s Microsoft Access, written by and for developers. It sure ain’t a schoolteacher’s database. Access just took the old relational database mentality and built a desktop app around it. There was no new thinking about how normal people could and should go about managing and making sense of their data. Access has always been far behind FileMaker in simplicity despite the opportunity to learn from it and do better. Microsoft was going after a different audience: developersdevelopersdevelopers, again leaving normal people without a simple tool for their jobs.

Anything else? Microsoft Excel probably had the best shot at consumerizing database management. People use it as such and it actually is sufficient and flexible enough for many basic jobs. Excel even has some useful, well-hidden features to help you manage and understand your data (I’m thinking of conditional formatting and auto-filtering).

But a few features don’t a paradigm make. Excel never credibly broke beyond the paradigm of the VisiCalc spreadsheet. (That was a while ago; VisiCalc is a contemporary of Ms. PacMan.) Don’t get me wrong – spreadsheets are useful in their own right, and it probably wasn’t Excel’s destiny to become a true database. The point is, the holy grail of robust yet simple data management remains undiscovered.

(I should mention that if you are looking for a hosted database solution to use, check out Intuit’s QuickBase. It is a simple, flexible and well-established online database app giving FileMaker a run for its money.)

The Innovator’s Dilemma predicts that sooner or later someone will come along with a paradigm-busting innovation that renders the past thinking obsolete. I’m not sure this is it yet, but DabbleDB is bursting with new thinking. It should make the old skoolers think hard about how they are solving customer needs and what has been possible all the while, going back ten years, if only the problem had been looked at in a different way.

DabbleDB’s Innovations

DabbleDB is getting a lot of attention because of how it pushes the envelope on interactivity within a browser (need we say “Web 2.0“?). It is an exemplary role model for a desktop app-like experience. But it’s the thinking behind how users should be able to view and manipulate their data that excites me. Some examples:

• DabbleDB lets you flip between table view and grouped lists like it’s no big deal. This capability lets you group a list of names by profession, then by city then by company. In FileMaker you can only see grouped information as printable reports. You cannot edit or act on data in this view, an ancient limitation.
• DabbleDB allows ad-hoc changes to the data structure – especially in converting flat tables into relational structures so you can look at your data inside out. This type of conversion is a bear in FileMaker Pro, requiring that you set up tables, munge data, import multiple times and make sure things are connected.
• DabbleDB rethinks the balance between optimizing for fine-tuned control over layouts versus quick & dirty data analysis. FileMaker gives very fine control over layout. This control is no doubt needed in many realms but comes at a trade-off of convenience and speed. DabbleDB instead emphasizes letting you twist your data around until it makes sense, and then letting you save that view. It’s this ability for normal people to do ad-hoc data mining that is so badly needed.
• DabbleDB lets the user search across all fields Google-style. This is an everyday need that we’ve grown accustomed to thanks to search engines. It’s basic functionality in DabbleDB, but requires advanced techniques in FileMaker.
• DabbleDB attempts to pull off relational databases without invoking obtuse relational database theory. I’m not sure yet whether it succeeded. They may have just subbed in other concepts. For example what we know of as a table, they call a category.
• DabbleDB starts to integrate alternate data views, specifically a calendar view. If you have timestamped data, DabbleDB lets you view, filter, edit it in a calendar view like it’s no big deal. A calendar view is just the beginning though.

Let me see! Let me see!

It’s another disappointment that for the last fifteen years, in order to see your information you have needed to wrestle it into Excel’s charting feature.

I’d like to see a data visualization arms race with vendors competing on how well they can help you see — and therefore make sense of — your data. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to explore scatters, trends, correlations, distributions, maps, timelines and networks by poking a few buttons directly from the database environment. (There’s a vision to steal, by the way.) It’s not the data that matters as much as the insight gleaned from that data.

(Another vision to steal: Someone please create a solid timeline view of data for mapping out historical events or future plans. It’s hard for us humans to visualize chronologies. We’ve been without a mainstream tool to help with this forever.)

Tag, you’re it

Here’s a specific design to steal for everyday database products, including DabbleDB: Support tagging as a data type. Tagging is just a new name for the old concept of keywording, but it’s useful whenever you need to assign an indefinite number of categories to something, from a growable list of possibilities. (If you need examples, check out any blog or Flikr or Technorati.)

A tagging feature in an end-user database app would let end-users apply zero or more tags to a record, provide an efficient input UI that facilitates applying existing tags, let the user search against tags, and support adding new tags on the fly as an option.

The Big But

As interesting as DabbleDB is, I cannot imagine trading Filemaker in for it. DabbleDB and QuickBase are hosted web apps. This can be great if you need to collaborate with distant colleagues. But if you are just dealing with your own data there are some significant downsides. I wish there was a native desktop app version of DabbleDB. I’d be happy just to be able to run the DabbleDB web app on my personal laptop.

For more on the trade-offs between hosted versus local apps, see: hosted vs. local computing.

Meanwhile, here’s hoping that Filemaker, or another plucky upstart builds a new generation, desktop-based generalist database product.

Readers: If you know others involved in working on generalist databases, please forward this article. The URL is: http://stealthisidea.com/articles/dabbledb-thoughts/

Wikipedia + Launchbar = Information at Your Fingertips.

Accessing Wikipedia is greatly facilitated thanks to LaunchBar. As if a king, I get to invoke vast chunks of human knowledge with just four keystrokes: [cmd-space]wp[space], plus a search term like, say, Scientology.

[Here is that search template if you want to add it to LaunchBar: "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=*"]

But Wikipedia does not yet answer a juicy meta-question: Who else is curious about this topic? Wouldn’t it be fascinating to see how worldwide interest in topics like Islam, Intelligent Design or Louis Armstrong wax and wane as the events of the world unfold? This is the type of insight into what is on everyone’s mind, hitherto available only to the lucky few with access to search engine logs.

Wikipedia already has the raw ingredients of an amazing meme tracking tool: tons of traffic, tons of content, the ability to capture usage statistics. They need only a little chopping and sauteeing.

Here is a vision to steal for Wikipedia: Show how much interest this topic has garnered historically.

We’d like to be able to see, at a glance:

• How much traffic has this article been getting?
• What is the popularity trend? Spiking? Declining? Flat? Over the short and long term?
• How much editing activity has it been receiving?
• How does it rank among all searches?

I’ll leave it to as a design research topic to play out how this might look. (Feel free to forward mockups my way.)
A couple of other requirements:

• The data would likely have to be normalized against the growth of general Wikipedia traffic so as not to confound the message.
• We’d want this information to be available proactively (without clicking) but without interferering with the content of the article.
• It’d be nice to be able to drill in deeper to discover the next level of information such as where in the world do people care about a given topic?

[What other interesting types of questions could be gleaned from analyzing Wikipedia traffic?]

Also: wouldn’t it also be nice to have a set of robust APIs, so researchers could go wild analyzing the cause and effect of human curiosity over time and geography? Software architects: how might you build such APIs and hook up a scalable traffic monitoring system to the open source MediaWiki (the technological foundation of Wikipedia)?

See also

• Google Zeitgeist, a form of meme tracker, scrubbed for your protection, that carries the fascinating message that pop culture is really popular. (And that I’m really out of touch with it.)
• Wikipedia statistics (such as they are)
• Overture keyword searching – enter keywords, see how popular they are with search engines today. (Then contrive ways to pepper your articles with the most popular phrases like “sharon stone” or “britney spears sculpture” or daylight savings”, in order to attract hits.)
• Google Trends is interesting. It lets you look up any search phrase, see its popularity over time and what geographies are most into it. The Colbert Report searches are bigger in Canada than in the USA. Digg is on the rise. Searching for Sex is especially popular in Islamic countries. [Update 5/16/06]

Micropayments are a good idea. Today, providers of worthwhile content must make a difficult choice: do they charge for their content or for a subscription, knowing that a miniscule proportion of visitors will ever do so? Or do they give it away, hoping to fund their efforts via advertising? Micropayments will allow vendors to charge an amount small enough to be inconsequential to the buyer. If done in an unimposing and efficient way, they can open the floodgates to a torrent of impulse purchases.

How else can micro-payments be used?

Here are some scenarios:

• Content providers large or tiny could provide much of their content for free, convey how high their quality is, and charge a nominal amount for extra content.

• Pay to download: pay $0.50 and get a royalty-free photo, or a template or a sound or a font or a set of flash cards to study with.

• Web tools : charge per usage of speciality web apps, calculators, etc.

• New York Times: Read today’s editorialists, or any article from the archive for 5 cents.

• Video: Watch last night’s Jon Stewart without commercials for $0.50.

What are today’s precedents for micropayment user experience?

• Amazon’s One Click checkout – the ultimate enabler of impulse purchases

• Microsoft’s Passport: We know who you are and you’ve given us your purchasing credentials. When you log into a site you’re also all set up to buy something.

• PayPal: vendors, generate a button and stick it on your site. Visitors need only click it, authenticate, and be almost done with the purchase.

• iTunes Music Store: You’ve charged up your account in advance and can now make purchases based on it.

• BitPass seems to be on the right track. Their system is simple for vendors and for customers. [Anyone know how they are doing? Are there other more successful competitors?]

What are the ingredients for micropayments to thrive?

The concept of micropayments is not new, but after years it still hasn’t taken off. However the specifics play out, for micropayments to take off the systems need these characteristics. The absence of these factors has deferred the future explosion of micropayment.

• Standards and interoperability – Credit cards wouldn’t work if there were dozens of clearing houses and fragmentary usage among consumers. Desirous as we are for competition, we need a small number of standard providers of micropayment services for the concept to take off. If they can agree to interoperate it will be better for the entire market. (Think of SMS interoperability agreements that in Europe versus in the USA.) And as a natural consequence of any such market regulation will eventually be required to counterbalance the power of the monopoly or oligopoly.

• Tiny transaction fees – one penny for a five cent transaction, five cents for a 25 cent transaction. [Can someone tell me if there is a minimum transaction fee for credit cards?] Building up the infrastructure and demand will be expensive and we can expect impatient banks to want to recoup these costs quickly. And banks will walt to start from a price they can reduce later. Greed will kill the concept, however. Everyone needs to remember that the point is huge volume and no-brainer impulse purchases. (Steve Jobs understands this: consider his battles with the music industry to keep all songs at $0.99.)

• Instantaneous purchase. Avoids registration hassle with each vendor, a cost in its own right. Amazon’s one-click payment is the ultimate. Requiring authentication is the maximum amount of extra effort on the user’s part that would be imposed.

• Incubation time – Email is a pretty good idea, wouldn’t you say? But if you remember it took quite a while for it to catch on. Similarly it will take some time for consumers to get over the hump and fund micropayment accounts en masse. The more it catches on, the more it will catch on.

• Content worth purchasing – some think that micropayments will fail, then cite as examples things that are no more interesting than any random thing on the Internet. It will always be hard to sell such content in volume. Payments will work if the content is valued highly enough. The tricky part is getting users to trust that what they will get will be worth their dime as well as their time.

• Brand name sponsorship – There is an “activation energy” needed to get consumer over the hump and sign up for something new. A well-known, trusted brand needs to step up, offer something people want and put it behind a micropayment, to kick-start mass adoption. Notice Apple’s iTunes Music Store essentially did this, albeit with proprietary, Apple-only accounts and relatively large micropayments. People barely notice the new business model they are partaking in, and partaking in it they are, by the tens of millions. Similarly, for payment processors, a MasterCard or Visa will carry more trust and credibility than ElCheapoPayments.com.

• Anonymity – As a consumer, you have good reason to be concerned about what is being gathered about you over the course of decades of living online. (Expect this to come to a boil in the next few years.) Micropayments can do well without this need being addressed. But those establishing the standards now would do the whole industry a favor by offering consumers the peace of mind that the transaction is certifiably anonymous. Remember, the game is to maximize purchases by eliminating every barrier to purchase. Hopefully these factors will come together soon, so I can charge you a nickel or two to get in.

Visions to steal

What would a StealThisIdea article be without an idea or two to steal?

Vision idea #1: CMS and blog tool makers: integrate with micropayment infrastructure. Let bloggers indicate what content is paid and what is free. The visitor would see the title and excerpt of the article and a button: “Click here to continue reading. You will be charged 3 cents.” They click once and they’re in the article. Even better, facilitate Salon-style user choice between paying with loose change versus paying with a moment of your attention. On the server side, allow hits from search engines to get in for free once per day so they can index this valuable content and have it be findable by content.

Vision idea #2: Micropayment vendors and/or CMS & blog tool makers: set up referral incentives. So if B refers visitors to A’s page, B gets a cut of the take. Recommendations are important because the user needs to feel that what they buy will be worth paying for.

Vision idea #3: Micropayment vendors: provide web content vendors with a dynamic pricing model, where the cost adjusts itself automatically in response to demand. If a product sells well at 3 cents, raise it to 4, 5 and 6 cents, until total revenue — cost times volume — rate peaks out. The market could then value a piece of content dynamically and automatically.

Vision idea #4a: MasterCard and Visa: offer one-click web micropayments as an extension of credit and debit cards services. No special authentication is needed if you are using the same browser, say, transactions of 25 cents, up to $5 in purchases per month. Provide this service to millions of vendors as easily as PayPal does to its. (In other words, no merchant account required.) Micropayment totals are included on the regular credit card bill. This space is just waiting to be owned!

Vision idea #4b: PayPal: provide a special "instant payment loop" to content providers. The user would see a PayPal version of the "click to view. It will cost 5 cents" entry point. Present the customer with an option to buy with one click from this browser, to a maximum amount.

Vision idea #5: Web publishers and CMS tool makers: Once the user has bought two or three articles at 5 cents each, they may be reluctant to keep buying. Rather than charging 5 cents to view every single premium article, consider charging 15 cents to view all premium articles for a day. To be even more customer-focused: automatically top out daily expenditures per user once they’ve reached the daily rate. And stop collecting money from a user once they’ve hit the annual subscription maximum of $25. This is radical and the opposite of pricing theory. Th point is to experiment with the pricing mechanics to minimize the customer’s discomfort.

[Readers: got other ideas?]

Other reading

• Jakob Nielson has argued for micropayments for ages and thinks they should have happened long ago.

• Not everyone agrees that micropayments will ever happen. Clay Shirky thinks that micropayments will always fail because they are simply an untenable idea. (Compare his reasoning with the ingredients to success above. I think he is missing the psychology of the impulse purchase.) He reaffirmed his belief as recently in 2003 and was lucidly rebutted by cartoonist Scott McCloud (whose book Understanding Comics is required reading for everyone).

My lazy rebuttal: what if Apple were to charge ninety-nine cents to download a song? Would they sell any music?

• There’s a worthwhile discussion of micropayments at MetaFilter.

• Commentary of 8/19/05 on Amazon’s micropayment scheme.

Updates

October 2005 – The New York Times has decided to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. I guess times are tough and they need more revenue. Their drastic response was to put their most popular content — their editorials — behind a new TimesSelect service that costs $50 a year. They will soon know whether this will pay off business-wise. Certainly their readership numbers will be slashed along with the powerful influence of its editorialists, who must be awfully sad at the loss. It would have been interesting to see them experiment with a micropayment scheme or at least a Salon-like forced ad choice. I expect they will.

Online newspapers like the New York Times have been around now for ten years and this need to preserve and reconstruct the experience of a moment in time remains unfulfilled.

If newspapers see it as part of their mission to serve as a historical record, they will appreciate that the record it is not just the a database of articles, but how the articles are packaged and presented.

(This is an instance of how, in the transition to new technology, some needs get left behind. It’s also an instance of how the benefits of paper are perennially overlooked in the transition to online media. It doesn’t have to be this way, but avoiding it first requires appreciation for what is taken for granted, and compensation in the new system.)

Vision to steal

�ĢNewspapers: let the user recreate the experience of viewing the paper on any historical day, both hard-copy and online versions. Let the user step through changes made within a day, or over subsequent days and weeks to see how coverage of a story unfolded over time. This would let the papers squeeze more value out of their historic content, while providing a useful resource to readers and researchers. Businesswise, they might do it either out of the kindness of their hearts, or to make some change by encircling the historic front pages in advertising. Or they may provide such a service to promote the purchase of articles that require payment.

• Content management system (CMS) vendors: differentiate from their competition and provide reconstruction of the experience at any snapshot in time.

Questions for Readers

Which CMS’s are the most popular among online newspapers? Do any CMS’s provide this capability?

See also:

• Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you punch in a URL and see historic snapshots of it. Here is the NY Times on 9/11.
• Newseum.org has front pages of print newspapers on important historical days. [Update 2/6/06 courtesy David Cortright]

As anyone who’s had to remove one’s shoes at airport security knows, there is a trade-off between security and convenience. But by trying to make email security perfect, it has been made too complex. Email encryption is out of reach of regular users, leaving them with no security at all.

In this article we will discuss who should care about secure email and isolate the reasons why it’s still not commonplace. Then we’ll describe a vision for a radically simpler approach that can clear the path for mass adoption.

Should we be concerned?

Should unencrypted email be a concern? Yes, and here are some reasons:

• Email is transmitted in the clear. Email has been aptly compared with sending a postcard through the mail. It travels through multiple store-and-forward systems before reaching the recipient. Anyone with access to any of the systems along the way can read it.
• WiFi is unsafe: WiFi traffic including email can be intercepted using hacking tools available to any teenager (as this CNN article describes).
• Email accumulates. Every email you send and receive, over the course of years can be stored indefinitely and searched instantly. GMail and Yahoo! Mail already provide gigabytes of storage. [Readers: How strong are the laws forbidding this type of filtering and capture of email?]
• Email interceptions are not detectable. We have no way of knowing what happens to our bits as they filter through the Internet. We can’t tell who is collecting or filtering through it. But what we do know is not comforting.

What are the use cases?

Concern over intrusions is not just for libertarians and the paranoid. Here are some key scenarios, represented as SSNiF scenarios:

Why hasn’t email encryption caught on yet?

If the need for encryption is so high, how did we get from 1985 to 2005 without it being as common as the CC: line? In fact, encryption capabilities have been in the email clients for years. Why has it not caught on? There are a combination of factors:

• Consumers are not aware that they need it. The risks of having one’s email intercepted are nebulous. “Can email realistically be intercepted? I don’t have anything to hide. What could really go wrong? I don’t know of anyone being hurt by this.” Until there are a series of highly publicized cases, the issue is not likely to hit the radar of most honest consumers.
• Corporate IT officers don’t seem to know they need it. Although it’s common for corporations to establish VPNs, limit WiFi usage, provide shredder bins and require passwords to be changed every couple of months, protecting sensitive information from being exchanged over the open Internet is rare. Executives seem to not understand how much sensitive information is left exposed through this path (at least until they get a demo from a company like Vontu).
• There haven’t been high-profile cases of corporate or government email espionage to raise awareness. It’s hard to detect, and even when it is, companies are loathe to disclose such security violations, which are disconcerting to customers and shareholders. [Readers, do you know of any good cases?]
• There are multiple chicken-and-egg problems. Consumers aren’t vocal about encryption so vendors don’t provide it (especially in a consumer-friendly way). There are zillions of different email systems in use, some which have encryption, many of which don’t. All will need to become interoperable before it becomes mainstream. Fortunately, it looks like an industry standard has been established: S/MIME.
• The network effect hasn’t kicked yet in. As with the telephone, fax machines and instant messaging, encrypted email becomes more compelling as everyone around you gets it. It has yet to reach this tipping point.
• Nobody has forced it. Encryption would gain a foothold if a critical mass of companies and government agencies were to mandate its use. Bold policies, such as bouncing all non-encrypted messages off either side of the firewall, would accelerate adoption.
• The end-user experience is too complex. Anyone who attempts to set up encryption will be left with the conclusion that it is way too complex for consumer-level use. The parents of encryption are the fields of mathematics and security, both highly technical fields not renown for their sympathy for mortal users. Even Apple’s mail.app is not very easy to set up. (If you want to do so, here are the best instructions I found for Mac users. Here are instructions for Outlook 2000).

Because email encryption has not yet been done simply, there is an assumption that it is intrinsically complicated. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Why is encryption so difficult today?

The pioneers of encryption have poorly prioritized the use cases. They allowed concerns for certification to complicate the more fundamental need for encryption. Certification (aka signing) is a solution to the use case of impersonation: someone maliciously posing as another person or company, fooling you into believing or doing something in their interest. Aside from scammers posing as PayPal, how often has someone tried to impersonate your coworker or family member? Perhaps official communications from financial institutions should be certified as a defence against phishing. But there is no need for casual email to be.

Secondly, obtaining encryption keys is a real burden. You must first validate with a trustworthy organization (like Thawte or Verisign) that you are who you say you are. As Microsoft puts it, “digital ID requires signing up with an independent certificate authority. To get a digital ID from a certificate authority, see Digital ID on Office Marketplace to find services that issue digital IDs.”

There is a far more immediate use case to solve: getting a message from person A to person B without anyone being able to gather and read it.

Vision to Steal : Build simple but powerful encryption into email clients

Rock-solid security comes at such a high cost of convenience that users settle for no security at all. For everyone to get on board with email encryption radical simplification is called for.

There are three parts to be simplified: 1. acquiring your own key pair, 2. trading public keys with those with whom you communicate, and 3. actually sending and receiving encrypted mail.

The third part is somewhat smooth once the first two are established, especially with Mac’s mail.app. If you create a message to someone for whom you have a public key, the message is automatically and transparently encrypted.

Visions to steal for vendors of email clients:

• Decouple the certification from encryption. Certifying email is more complicated than just encrypting it for the recipient’s eyes only. Regular users will always have trouble understanding what certificates are and why they are needed, while still needing to send protected email. This simplifying assumption makes the encryption problem tractable: it makes it possible to consumerize encryption technology so that casual users can trade sensitive information without having to learn or do a lot.
• Cut the abstract concepts and terminology that goes along with certificates, certificate authorities, signature validation, Digital IDs, Root Certificate Stores, etc.
• Let users generate encryption key pairs directly from the local email client for free, in two steps, so they don’t have to go out of their way to get it. Propose this as a default for everyone.
• Have email clients automatically request public keys from each other. (This is described in a separate article, Automatically exchanging public encryption keys.)

Visions to steal for webmail services: Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail, Google GMail:

• One of you, be the first to support encryption and make it easy to make key pair generation, encrypted email exchange and public key exchange as simple as it can be. (See: Hushmail) Store the messages securely at the server side and decrypt them on the client side (which probably requires a Java component).
• Process signatures on incoming messages now, so they can be used by financial institutions to cut down on phishing.

For PIM makers and standards-bearers like vCard:

• expand standards to serve as the repository of public key fields, supplying them to email programs.

For IT infrastructure vendors:

• build gateways that block unencrypted email from passing through the firewall. Make it hard or impossible for employees to send unencrypted email outside the corporate walls. Force external partners to encrypt email to get it through.

Notes

• The Blackberry encrypts data from the handheld device to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server installed within the corporation. Messages that are destined outside the corporation get decrypted before leaving. The Blackberry supports S/MIME as of 2004. [True?]

More questions for Readers:

Communications security is a large, complex and dynamic field. Help me out here.

• Are there any corporations that insist that only encrypted emails pass through their firewalls?
• Does anyone know of reports of electronic dumpster diving, for corporate espionage? (I expect this to be extremely hard to detect without a whistle-blower.)
• Are there laws prohibiting interception of email? Do the email service providers promise they won’t dumpster dive in their legal agreements?
• How do we know there isn’t widespread email espionage going on? Are there cases that resulted in demonstrable material damages?
• Would authenticated/certified email really reduce the phishing epidemic? How?
• Are there countries or cultures where email encryption is commonplace?
• How come PayPal and other major institutions don’t already sign their emails?

See also

• Design to Steal: Automatically exchanging public encryption keys.
• S/Mime tutorial

[Update 8/21/08: Changed the old name "USN use cases" to "SSNiF scenarios"]