Magic and Lies

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

- Steve Jobs

I don’t know why I feel slightly shaken up by this news, but I do. Perhaps in recognition of the fact I’m only a year younger than Steve Jobs and my achievements are but specks in comparison. Perhaps its the realisation that death cheats us all in the end. It only seems like a couple of weeks ago that Steve Jobs stood down as chief executive of Apple and although it was difficult to see him as a man who would enjoy retirement, if anyone deserved some quality time with his family it was surely him.

Whatever you think about the products, Apple is a company that changed the world, and without the focus, determination and vision of Steve Jobs, both Apple and the world would have been poorer places.

image by Jonathan Mak

Combobulate – to bring something out of a state of confusion or disarray.

Cloud computing is a game changing innovation that will change the way we think of computers for ever. Unusually for game changing plays, this one is the product of incremental innovations delivered over a period of several years. Service Oriented Architecture, Virtualisation and Grid computing to name but three.

These core technologies, together or in isolation allow IT to be offered as a ‘service’. We are used to thinking of IT as a consumable. Software as something we buy, own and install. This is beginning to change. The areas that almost everyone agrees are core to Cloud computing are Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Peer to Peer Computing.

Software as a Service is exemplified by the office productivity suites offered by Google Apps and Lotus Live and it is on this area that I want to focus here. Applications that run in the browser. This flavour of Cloud offers dramatic cost cutting opportunities to large organisations and the commoditisation of storage for example allows smaller organisations and individuals to step up to the technology without extraordinary investment.  Developments in the area of media are particularly interesting in this respect.

Photography benefits from digitisation in two ways – firstly through the growth of online storage enabling photographs to be shared almost instantly. FTP has been used to transfer photographs from photographer to editor, but even in the windows client was clunky and required a client and a server. The advent of online storage offered by the likes of 4Shared enabled photographers to post photographs and invite clients to download them without requiring them to be a member or install any software. More recently, Dropbox offeres an install that synchs a directory on the desktop between any number of computers. Simply drop the photograph into the directory and you’re done!

The second way that photography benefits is through the availability of digital processing online. Not yet as powerful as Photoshop, but Adobe will be watching with keen interest as applications such as Piknik allow users to play around with effects online. Though simple by comparison there is enough on piknic to keep the keen photographer occupied for hours, if not days. Used in tandem with Picasa or Flickr, photographs can be edited, treated and published in the browser.

Beyond photography, a personal favourite of mine is Evernote, an application that allows me to store notes and various file formats in the cloud, synchronising the content across all of my computers and my mobile phone.  In Film and Television these applications offer a very significant difference. Near instant information sharing.

Apple offer me.com, a cloud based service that synchronises your contacts, offers storage and eMail. With the PC, iPad, Android, the iPhone and the MacBook range of computers often co-existing in the same household, the reasons for the consumer to investigate cloud computing are increasing daily.

As a final note, we are also seeing changes in the pricing of these services. If I buy Photoshop it costs me several hundred pounds and I have to pay more every couple of years to enjoy the upgrade. Typically, a cloud based service will offer a substantial amount of functionality at no cost, but charges either for the storage or for increased features. This is significant, because the accessibility of these services will open the market up to many more people.

I’ve barely scratched the surface, but in future articles I’ll be talking about online communities such as Facebook, and streaming services such as LoveFilm and NetFlix.

There comes a time when resistance is futile, and when that time comes, the smart operator holds his or her hands up and admits it.

Now, I’ve always been a PC user and Android is my preferred platform for mobile phone, but in the iPad, Apple have produced a gadget that has my attention. Derided at first as a giant phone, without the er phone function , the iPad has confounded it’s critics by shipping over 3m units since May. Not bad for a fashion accessory. Meanwhile, the rumoured Android powered tablet from HTC remains as elusive as mist.

The iPad offers rather more than just sleek looks. It is primarily a device for consuming media. Not a laptop, not a mobile phone, not even a camera. It offers a decent size, readable screen, email, wireless and 3G connectivity, productivity applications and games. An iPod function, iTunes and a web browser. Street maps, video player and notepad. Contact book and Calendar.

I downloaded the following applications form the iStore, for the princely sum of £29. Many of them are free.

1. iBooks – online reader, free books from the Guttenberg project. I got hold of Don Quixote and Moby Dick to while away the train time….
2. Keynote – to knock up some effective presentations. Yes I know content is all, but I love those transitions…
3. Pages – to knock up some articles and blog posts while I’m on the train, not reading Don Quixote…
4. Friendly – a Facebook client. Perfectly adequate for the purpose
5. Sobees Social Media – Updates Twitter and Facebook statuses simultaneously, sadly only those two, unlike the desktop client which is well nigh unbeatable.
6. BBC News – Essential reading
7. Weather Pro – well, it beats looking out of the window…
8. Dropbox – File sharing app which allows me to bring files into the iPad without invoking iTunes
9. Twitter…
10. GoodReader – Enables me to read the files which are not supported on the iPad. Well, most of them
11. BBC iPlayer – beta version of BigScreen. Awesome.
12. Mashable – New Media News aggregator
13. Dash Four – foursquare client. Hmmm
14. Cogs HD – Excellent steampunk styled spatial visualisation game.
15. Epicurious – recipes. Possibly wishful thinking, I’m far too busy.
16. Things – To Do lists. Increasingly essential – is this age or simply multitasking. Don’t know, don’t care it’s essential.

What makes this device a winner is very simple. The weight, or lack of it. I’ve been in the IT industry for fifteen years or thereabouts, I’m sick of lugging laptops wherever I go. They ruin my suits and keep my osteopath in expensive wine. I’ve never been convinced by the Apple corporations “Creative Computing” schtick, but their products are beautifully styled and engineered. The OS has been superior to Windows for some time now and I think this little gadget will be enough for me to show presentations to my clients, collect my work email and connect to the work intranet. And that’s all I need to do when I’m visiting clients. I’m going to try and use this thing as my principle mobile business platform. I’ll let you know how I progress!

One observation – Apple have a multi million dollar laptop business. Will the iPad displace the laptop? You do the maths!

Windows Mobile OS can finally be consigned to the dustbin. In Android, Google have come up with a mobile operating system that is super slick, lightning fast and paired with HTC technology represents a very real threat to both Blackberry and iPhone.

Hardware

The Phone is impressively specified:

3.2 inch TFT Screen

5 megapixel Camera

420 minutes talk time and 750 hours standby (WCDMA)

Onboard 512mb ROM, 288mb RAM expandable via MicroSD Card

Bluetooth® 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate and A2DP for wireless stereo headsets

Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11 b/g

The most notable innovation is that the touch screen has been improved in both sensitivity and responsiveness and enhanced by the addition of a Blackberry like tracker ball with scroll and click functionality.

Software

Android is the operating system built on a Linux kernel by Google with the intention of competing with Microsoft, RIM technologies (Blackberry) and Apple in the mobile market.

The immediate advantage Google have in this space is evident the minute you provide your Gmail credentials. The telephone leverages the full range of Google Apps, so if you are already using Google Calendar for example, you will find your phone calendar automatically synched with the online version.

The operating system supports VGA, 2D graphics library, 3D graphics based on OpenGL ES and as you would expect from a Linux based distribution, virtual screens. The HTC Hero provides a total of 6 full screen estates.

Android uses SQLite for data storage and for connectivity, supports GSM/EDGE, CDMA, EV-DO, UMTS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The web browser is, like Google Chrome, based on the WebKit framework and the OS has a development kit with an emulator, debugging tools, performance profiling and a plugin for the Eclipse platform.

Android, like Apple have organised a virtual mall, Android Market , where developers can sell or give away applications written for the Android platform.

Verdict

First impressions are jaw droppingly good. The phone is everything its Windows based predecessor (HTC Diamond Touch) wasn’t. It is fast, flexible and intuitive, largely down to the dropping of the Windows Mobile platform. The Google tie in has ensured that Microsoft document formats are supported and there is support for multiple mail accounts and social software support in the shape of Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. HTC still persist with the USB supporting but proprietory connector for headphone and laptop connectivity. It’s a minor irritation, thankfully mitigated by the addition of a standard headphone jack on the top of the phone.

This is a serious piece of kit and fully deserving of the fistful of awards it has already picked up. Even the arch Apple apologist Steven Fry has conceded that  “you have to applaud HTC, they have gone all out to rethink every detail of the user experience … It’s an impressive device, really really impressive”

A lot of talk recently about using Social Software to increase ones visibility. This is a positive step forward from the amusing stories about people being sacked for injudicious observations about their employers, or in a twist on the old story about being snapped participating in a riot while supposedly ill in bed, posting observations about the quality of their hangover…whilst pulling a sickie. So, this is a development, and the thinking behind it is very closely linked to the art of public relations.

We are to the world, the sum of what we make available for others to consume.  We are judged by our words and our actions. In this new world of social software, whether we like it or not, that amounts to a hell of a lot of personal data and believe it or not, we can alienate people just as easily online as we can in the flesh! It is a two way street.

Let me explain – on a course recently I was asked, as part of my introduction to name one thing about my colleagues that I found profoundly irritating. The course was called ‘How to make lifelong enemies out of potential friends’ or something similar. I wracked my brains for a non controversial answer, but eventually, after dismissing the possibility of ‘brown shoes’ and ‘golfing trousers’ (well, actually I find everything about golf profoundly irritating from it’s accessories to its supposed invention in Scotland, but that’s another story), settled on flagrant self promotion as my answer.

I used as an example, some Tweets I had randomly seethed at – ‘Am sitting with a Vice President, two Distinguished Engineers and a Prince of the Realm’, ‘On a conference call with the Sultan of Brunei’, ‘Having a mineral water with the CEO’. To my astonishment, virtually everyone in the room was totally in agreement, except for one chap in the corner who was feverishly punching away at his mobile phone… These tweets are nothing more than self promotion by association and I would ask the perpetrators of this nonsense to consider whether they would repeat the tweet out loud to a room full of their closest friends before sending!

The principal of ‘Brand Me’ is well established and executives in forward thinking companies are encouraged to use social software to advance both the brand they work for and by association, their own imprint on the public consciousness. In IT, people who have done this to great effect (although not necessarily with social software) are Steve Jobs, synonymous with Apple, Bill Gates – Microsoft, Larry Ellison etc etc. These are bona fide celebrities with a lifetime of achievement in their lockers.  However no technology has done more to advance Andy Warhol’s claim that ‘in the future everyone will be famous for five minutes’ than Twitter.

Twitter is a global phenomenon, we have rappers dissing one another, celebrities celebrating and a pattern of usage that extends from the useful to the banal.  Twitter can be fantastically useful – in breaking news, in serving small virtual communities, simply in keeping in touch these technologies enable an exchange of ideas which is extraordinarily potent.

My point is this, self promotion is not straightforward. In some cultures it is practically compulsory (the music business, fashion), in others, frowned upon (law). It’s a difficult trick to pull off without offending someone, somewhere. My own view is that self promotion is necessary at times, and that in this information frenzy, so is self editing. A judicious tweet will win hearts and minds – an injudicious posting will live for ever!

Who killed the recorded music industry? In the light of Apple’s veiled threat to shut down iTunes in the face of demands from the music publishing industry for a larger slice of the pie, this question is suddenly a lot more relevant. The central issue is not about Apple, it is about the way that society rewards artists and the failure of the free market to keep up with technology.

Before the gramaphone (ignoring the wax cylinder) there was no recorded music industry. Musicians made a precarious living by playing real instruments, live, in front of real people. Songwriters had a share of the sheet music sales from popular songs. as I said, the living was precarious.

The music industry as we know it, evolved during the sixties – by this I mean the infrastructure of the industry, the distribution channels, the manufacturing, recording and marketing instruments, the fundamental structure of a recording contract that tied an artist into promoting records on tours underwritten by the record companies, ultimately paid for by the royalties on successful records. and by records, I mean the physical vinyl artifact.

This arrangement suited the record companies very well, so well that when CD’s and digital file formats arrived, they completely failed to see the writing on the wall. It was abundantly obvious to anyone with the wit to look, that recorded music would be passed from person to person via computer networks. In one fell swoop, the record companies lost control of the medium and some would say, the industry.

Napster, the peer to peer file sharing service was the first to really get under the record companies skin – hugely successful, the companies invention, a peer to peer music sharing system created a model for a decentralised distribution channel that has proved impossible for the traditional industry to control. It took a federal government to close down Napster, but there are a host of similar enterprises still in semi legal business.

This is why it has been so difficult for the industry to deal with. For each track there is an owner of the sound recording, the record company. There is also a separate work, the musical composition – the song the artist sings. By law, each track of the CD is also considered a reproduction of the musical composition. On a typical CD, there may be 12 sound recordings and 8 separate music publishers. Multiply that times 3,000 record companies in the US, and 25,000 music publishers, times 27,000 new CDs per year. Separate individual negotiations for all these rights are simply not a viable option.

With CD sales falling last year by 20% to ($7.4bn (£4bn)), the record companies now have a major problem. The artists do too, but the good ones are now making up the shortfall by playing live – this has to be good for the long term health of the art. By which i mean that new technology has been seen by the record companies as primarily a means of reducing recording costs – to the detriment of the quality of the product, as the art of songwriting took a back seat to the art of sampling. In the current climate, forcing acts to play live may encourage the use of technology to entertain the audiences again. But it’s not that simple.

Traditionally, the audience / society, pays the piper – prices are hiked and artists, record companies and publishers all live happily ever after. Now however there is a problem. Apple don’t own the medium, they are just the de facto owners of the largest share of the market. Rivals include Sony, who as a record and hardware company themselves, would be very well placed to mount a strong competitive alternative. So Apple will not want the price of recorded music to rise. The record companies, watching their profits dwindle daily are unlikely to want to take the hit, which leaves the publishers and the artists themselves.

Interesting times ahead. Should songwriters be paid for writing songs? Is it reasonable for the record industry to seek to sustain its profit levels when they no longer own the medium? What does the record industry do in these days of digital recording technology, to justify its profit? Should Apple simply raise the price of digital music?

What if the artist retains control of the recording? Is there any point in recording 12 song albums any longer? What are the implications of selling less songs? Would a tour the size of Madonna’s for example be sustainable on the back of the profit gained from a couple of singles? Actually the answer to that one is yes, ditto The Rolling Stones, but what of the middle ranking acts that depend on touring to shift albums?

But back to the central issue – we have an audience, millions of music hungry people with money to burn, who are quite happy to spend it. We have a computer company, Apple, capitalising on the digital format to charge the audience for the music at 99 cents per track. We have a music industry desperate to play ball with Apple because they no longer own the medium. We have a music publishing industry asserting its right to gain a higher percentage of the digital rights – so who loses?

Answers on a postcard please!

• Apple threatens iTunes shutdown over royalty dispute – Wired
  
• iTunes store shutdown feared – BBC