Being a gadget blog, it’s kind of weird not being at the Consumer Electronics Show.  Neither Quang nor I could make the show this year due schedule conflicts.  At the same time, being away from CES gives me a sense of perspective on the show that being submerged in the whirl wouldn’t necessarily provide.  So from 3000 miles away, here’s my take on CES 2010.

Tablets tablets tablets

HP Slate (image courtesy Engadget)

Everyone showed off tablets.  Windows 7’s built-in tablet functionality makes this viable from an implementation perspective, since that feature is built-in already.  But because vendors are relying on Microsoft to provide a feature set, the tablets are boring.  There’s no product differentiation – sure some are smaller or bigger, fatter or thinner, but from the pictures I’ve seen and the product snapshots I’ve read, there’s nothing really revolutionary about any of them.  In my mind, that further magnifies Microsoft’s increasing irrelevance in the growth of mobile platforms.  The Microsoft keynote was, from all reports I’ve read, boring.  Even with Ballmer’s hyperantics, they really didn’t have much to show.  Right now, the only products they’ve got that’s generating any kind of buzz are Bing and XBox360.  Project Natal is interesting, but it’s a platform that presumes something many XBox360 owners might not necessarily have – room to move. I’d guess that a large number of gamers play in their rooms, and unless you’re wealthy the typical room doesn’t have the space to use Natal easily.  The old handheld controls may be archaic but they also don’t require a ton of space to flail around in.  Show me someone using Natal in a 10′x10′ bedroom with a full size bed, a dresser, bookshelf, desk, and piles of clothes on the floor and I’ll believe in its viability.  Otherwise, I’m guessing it will be destined for a small portion of the population.

Ebook Reader, who’s got an ebook reader?

Skiff Reader (image courtesy Crave Blog)

At CES 2010, it seemed everyone had an ebook reader.  They were practically giving them away with entry.  Many of the online vids I’ve seen make me less than enthused.  I guess I am just disappointed by their lack of speed.  It shouldn’t be a case where I press a ‘next page’ key and have to wait for the screen to refresh.  I know e-ink is slow due to the technology and its current state, but as those e-ink screens get bigger and bigger, the refresh lag gets more and more disturbing.  The few 8.5″x11″ ebook readers I’ve seen really magnify the response rate issues, and will be one of the key issues preventing fast adoption.  That and publishers’ refusal to change their paradigms.  Did I mention that I saved the publishing industry?

3D TV

Intel 3D w/o Glasses (image via Engadget)

Too soon.  Too expensive.  Wait til CES 2012.  Plus would you really want to wear those glasses all the time?  And keep spares around for guests?  Annoying.

Mobile Tech

Levnovo LePhone (image via Engadget)

Lots of new smartphones.  Lots of new Android-based mobile tech.  There’s going to be an interesting war between carriers and device manufacturers.  I don’t know that the carriers will ever be relegated to dumb pipe status, unless Google is successful in licensing a swath of spectrum and developing it itself.  But carriers will definitely be shifting to more of a partnership model than a “we tell you what to make” model.  Verizon will be the carrier to watch – if they start shifting to a more device-friendly stance, then you’ll know the power balance has equalized.  For all their talk about network access and being able to hook any device onto their airspace, I’ve seen remarkably few devices that actually do this.

Furthermore, as smartphones become more powerful and capable, many single-use devices (navigation, pictureframe, ebook readers, etc) are going to be obsoleted.  I’m just not willing to pay for three or more different devices that are best in class when I can buy one device that does on OK job at all the things I need it to.  Especially as cellphone-based cameras become more powerful and capable, that market is going to fragment into a low end and high end, with little in between.  ’Good enough’ is becoming the deathnell of many consumer electronics companies that can’t adjust to the times.

iPhone and the unicorn known as the iSlate/iTablet/iPadd/iTouch Supersized

Mythical iSlate (image via TG Daily)

Let’s face it – CES 2010 really showed the dominance of the iPhone as a platform (if it wasn’t apparent before).  There was basically an expo-within-the-expo with iLounge’s iPhone Pavilion.  But the items identified as Best Of 2010 didn’t really impress me all that much.  The risk with having such an iPhone-dependent area is that the products being displayed are towards the tail end of Apple’s development cycle.  So far, the iPhone timeline tends to be that June/July announces the new hardware version of the iPhone/iPod Touch, followed in the late January timeframe for the latest update to the iPhone/iTouch OS (after CES) followed by Mac-based updates a few months later.  So the products being shown at CES are for a form factor/OS that will soon be previous generation once the Apple announcement cycle starts.  It’s gotta be painful for the manufacturers, since they’re constantly behind the development curve (especially given Apple’s notorious secrecy levels concerning upcoming products and features).

Overall

CES 2010 seemed more upbeat than CES 2009.  All in all, however, it seemed that this CES as good a one to miss as any.  Nothing really revolutionary seems to have been announced, and the elephant in the room was definitely Apple’s pending Jan. 27th announcement of its Jesus tablet (if that’s indeed what they are going to do).  Apple’s got a LOT of pressure to deliver something truly revolutionary, which is in a way a really sad testament to the state of consumer electronics.  So many companies out there vying for a piece of the consumer dollar yet only one company is consistently able to deliver something that people seem to want.  Why do Microsoft, Dell, HP, and the like even have R&D budgets?  They should just slavishly copy Apple.  Oh wait, they already do.  Even Google, which is trying to do something revolutionary with Android and Chrome OS, is going to get bogged down by their total lack of understanding of the consumer space.  Looks like it’s going to be an Apple world….

Captured at 1/1 11:11

Happy New Year to everyone from the folks at GadgetMETER. GadgetMETER is now officially 1 year old and I am proud of what we’ve accomplished in that time.

One of my New Years resolution consists of simplifying my online and offline lifestyle.

• Get rid of junk in my house I haven’t used in years
• Eat less or no meat.
• Reduced the number of RSS subscriptions.
• Deactivated my Facebook account. (I’ll talk more about this later).
• Discovered http://mnmlist.com and http://minimalmac.com. These are two great websites if you feel you are too distracted with todays bombardment of information.
• Run a 10k
• Enrolled at UPenn for Graduate School.
• De clutter my MacBook desktop and menu bar

Now, if you are wondering how this screenshot is appropriate for this post. Well, I just happen to look at my iPhone at exactly 1/1 11:11pm so I quickly captured it. The background is a picture of Monica Belluci on my jail broken iPhone. Pretty cool huh? It must be a sign because I see it as a way to reset our tech lifestyle and look back at what’s really important: family, friend (true friends, not the persons you don’t know on your Facebook), health, and the environment. Today, we have way too many distractions in our life that really clouds our judgetment on what’s really important. Let’s take time to get rid of online and offline baggage and welcome the New Year!

So I propose this New Years Challenge for you.

• Go take a walk.
• Meet with a friend for coffee.
• Enough with Twitter already. It’s really just for celebrities!
• Delete contacts on Facebook you don’t ever engage with. Heck, deactivate your Facebook account like I did!
• Delete LinkedIn. Who really uses this anyway?
• Stop texting while having lunch or dinner with someone. Enjoy the moment.
• Volunteer at a community center or shelter.
• Donate to a charity: time, money, clothes, food. It can be anything.
• Read a long form book.
• Go camping or hiking.
• Call up a friend. No texting!

I am going to save the publishing industry from itself.  And no, they don’t have to thank me, shower me with roses, send young virgins my way, or pay me (that’s the important part).  It’s very simple.  I’ll even put it in big font so the old hats in publishing can read it with their aged eyes.  Ready?  Here it is.

Rent the books

No, no, please.  I can’t accept your praise and thanks.  It’s enough knowing that I did something good in 2009 (and boy was I cutting it close!).  Oh, what?  You don’t understand?  Geez do I have to do everything?  Ok let me explain it to you.  Pay attention, old publishing – don’t become even more of a dinosaur.

Most people I know don’t like to buy books.  I know lots of people who like to read, but they don’t necessarily want to buy every book they read.  This is why libraries exist.  However, there are times that a library is too small to have the latest book you want, or they take too long to get a copy to you when you want to read something right away because there’s only one copy and it’s being read by some geriatric who’s going to keep it the damn full three weeks plus renewals.  This is why used bookstores exist.  But those tend to be rare, messy, and rarely stock the book you’re looking for.  Turn to Amazon or eBay and you might as well buy the book new after you add in the shipping costs.  And let’s face it – most books aren’t really worth buying.  I mean c’mon – do you really need to buy the Star Wars or Star Trek or D&D books that seem to be released by the dozen every day?  99.99% of those are throwaways – read them once and throw them away.  Even the best books are typically throwaways – read once and never again.  I’m willing to bet a year’s salary that the publishing industry loses hundreds of sales each day because the number of people willing to pay $7.99 plus tax for a throwaway book is small and getting smaller.  Rather than trying to fight for a piece of an ever shrinking pie, the publishers need to think about getting a bigger pie.  Book rentals are the bigger pie.

Imagine you’re an average reader.  Average in that you buy maybe one or two books a month (if that – I consider myself an above average reader and I buy maybe one book every three to four months).  What if you could get access to a set number of books per month for a flat fee?  And to add spice to the offer, what if you could get a free e-book reader for signing up?  Let’s say you could rent books in units of five, ten, twenty, or thirty books a month for a range of prices.  Five books might cost you $15/month, while ten books might cost you $25/mo and so on.  Every month, on the first of the month, you get access to your alloted limit of new books.  Those could be books you pick out that day, or over the course of that month, or you could build up a list of books you’d like to read, from which a subset would be released to you each month.  Of course the books you’d already rented for the previous month would disappear from your reader, but that’s OK cause you can always re-add them to your list.  You read through your allotted books and everything is hunky dory.  Every month, you’re guaranteed access to your subscription limit.  But you read through your limit already?  Well, you could be offered the chance to increase your limit for the month or from that point forward.  Similarly, you got access to 20 books but only touched three of them.  Maybe you get asked if you’d like to downgrade your subscription.  The point of the service shouldn’t be to maximize immediate  revenue – the point of the subscription should be to maximize long term usage, and you do that by making things as convenient as possible for the user.  If that means giving up some short term revenue for long term gain, so be it.  And the thing is, Mr. Publisher, you’re getting money for books that YOU NEVER WOULD HAVE GOTTEN OTHERWISE.  Let me say that again.  YOU’RE GETTING MONEY FOR BOOKS YOU NEVER WOULD HAVE GOTTEN OTHERWISE.

People are going to say that there’s nothing like the feel of a book in your hands.  Those people are, frankly, luddites.  Are there some books I’d rather own permanently rather than temporarily?  Sure.  I can name maybe a dozen or so.  All other books I own are books I’ve bought, read once, and have thrown onto a bookshelf because I was too lazy to sell it or wouldn’t get enough money from the sale to make it worth my time.  This service removes the need for me to have bookshelves of paper that I rarely use (the bookshelf industry is screaming bloody murder right now) plus gets me access to a universe of books I’d never have bought in the first place.  For authors who still live for book signings, there will always be a cadre of fans who will buy a physical copy of your latest tome so that it can be graced with your signature.  But those people would have bought your book anyways, and I guarantee you that that set of people will only get bigger when you combine them with the set of people who will read your book once and never think about it again.

The beauty of a subscription model is that it’s a steady revenue stream for the publishers.  The only cost to them is for an e-book reader and digitization of their collection.  Once those are funded, they can count on a constant flow of dollars, punctuated by the occasional best seller that people decide they absolutely must own a physical version of.  It removes the need to front a bunch of stock to booksellers that they then have to buy back.  It encourages reading and the concept of temporary ownership – a key point upon which the music industry floundered.  Most importantly, it means that it DOESN’T MATTER what books people read.  If I decide to read the same five books over and over again each month, it DOESN’T MATTER because I’m still paying the publishers for the same five books.  Can you do that with a paper-based model?  Likewise, it doesn’t matter if I read 30 books a month because most likely those were books I wasn’t going to buy if I didn’t have a rental option.  The number of people who can afford to buy 30 books a month (much less read all 30) are probably less than 1% of the US population.  But the beautiful thing about such subscribers is that the publisher is still being paid for 30 book rentals a month regardless of whether or not those rentals are actually used.

What about sharing?  What if people get a 30-book subscription and share the reader amongst themselves?  WHO CARES?  At some point, the publishing industry (and every other industry) needs to get out of the mindset of maximizing every dollar and decide how to grow for the long term.  Even if five people share a 30-book subscription, there’s only ONE reader.  Think those five people can shuttle that reader amongst themselves for an entire month without impacting their ability to enjoy/read the books?  I doubt it.  It’s easier to just get a single reader for each person with a small monthly subscription.

Here’s a great example.  Manga.  How many people actually buy manga and read it more than once or twice?  Not many.  My daughter goes through manga like a pig goes through excrement.  Each book is $10 a pop.  How many do you think I buy her on a monthly basis?  One?  Two?  (Try none.)  Instead she spends tons of time at Borders or Barnes & Noble, sitting on the floor and reading.  And she’s young enough that coffee has no allure, so those stores aren’t making any money off her (and neither are the publishers).  What if she had an e-reader with a five-book subscription?  Five new manga every month and each month a check from me for the service.  Maybe she finds one or two that she wants so much that she asks for a physical copy.  Well hey – a bonus of $10-$20 on top of the monthly subscription, shared between store and publisher.

Are you getting the idea now, Mr. Publisher?  Do you see how magical this is?  And how easily you could implement something like this?  All you’d need is a Kindle equivalent with Whispersync but minimal local storage and featureset.  No need to provide external storage because you only need it to hold the maximum number of possible rentals (and 30 rentals won’t take up more than a gig).  No need for a keyboard – you could have them manage everything via a web site.  Every 30 days you’d get a burst from the transfer of data, but it’s basically the data equivalent of a 30 minute phone call (if that).  You could start with books and then expand it to magazines, newspapers, comics…the possibilities are only limited by what you can print electronically on a regular basis.  I can even tell you what the starting point should be in terms of a price per rental.  Want to know what it is?  Are you sure?  Want to maybe guess before I say it?  Here it is.

$3.00 per rental MAXIMUM

Why $3.00?  Because Amazon charges $2.99 for shipping used DVDs and $3.99 for shipping used books, and you’re not shipping anything.  At $3/rental for a five rental subscription, that’s $15/mo, which seems reasonable when you consider that buying two paperbacks will run you almost $16.  And it can only get cheaper from there.  In fact, over time, I’d recommend dropping the maximum price per rental to $2 once you figure out how many people will buy what price points.  DON’T GET GREEDY.  The music industry got greedy and they’re being destroyed.  The movie industry is greedy and is in the process of trying to fight getting destroyed.  You guys don’t know how to fight and you’re not big enough to make it a big fight.  Do it right and focus on the customer.  More so than music and movies, your industry is based on a fickle public.  Don’t give them reasons to hate you.

Now go on and build this thing before Amazon or Google does.  You’re welcome.

So today was Avatar day.  The fiancee, kids and I took in the 3:40 IMAX showing of James Cameron’s latest epic at a nearby megaplex.  I have to admit that I was not having the greatest of expectations for the movie, though I’d studiously avoided all reviews, critics, discussions, and associations with the movie to keep myself pure.  And of course I had to see the 3D version, because there was no way I was going to sit through a 2.5 hour standard movie.

We got to the theatre about 40 minutes ahead of showtime to find a rather large line.  But we only waited about 10 minutes before they let us in, and we got pretty good seats near the middle of the screen, in the row right before the dropoff to the next lower level.  I’m not sure if you’re aware but there are seats in an IMAX theatre that are useless for movie watching, and the number of bad seats increases for 3D movies.  In general, if you’re in the lower levels and on the outer ends the rows, you should probably just leave and get tickets for a less crowded showing.  This becomes critical for movies that Avatar is going to spawn because of how Cameron does 3D (more on that later).  I’m sure if you google “bad Avatar 3D seats” or some such, you’ll find plenty of articles talking about the details.  I personally have a rule that I will not sit below the midline of an IMAX movie, and for 3D movies, that rule has been amended to not sit below the midline or towards the ends of any rows.

So enough preamble – how was the movie?  In a word, amazing.  The glasses were uncomfortable at first but you get used to them really fast.  And after a bit, they disappear and you immerse into the screen.  The 3D is incredible.  Not the popout type of 3D, mind you.  That whole market has just been effectively rendered dead by Avatar.  No, this 3D was more about general depth.  There was a distinct difference between the foreground and the background, and the focus had a sense of being in front of the screen, almost as if it were being extruded from the screen itself.  And because Cameron doesn’t rely on the popout type of 3D, it means that you can’t focus on the background or you’ll get a migraine.  Flat movies can use an in-focus background to add depth to a scene or to shift attention.  If you remember Speed Racer, one of its signature visuals was that everything was in focus simultaneously, both foreground and background.  Avatar is different.  You have to look at what Cameron wants you to look at because if you don’t, the background won’t come into complete focus and it will give you a headache.  The few times I felt the most vertigo was when I was trying to pick out details in the scenery rather than watching the characters currently in focus.  That is a darn shame, because the visuals of the planetary ecology are just incredible and you want to see all the detail.  That may be the main advantage to the 2D version – you can catch more of the side stuff.

If you haven’t seen Avatar yet, I strongly urge you to see the IMAX version.  Even if you have seen the regular version, go and see the IMAX one.  I’d be pretty curious to know if you thought the movie was a deeper experience because of the 3D.  I can’t imagine seeing this moving in a flat version now, and quite frankly it’s going to color my decision to buy the DVD (Blu-ray of course).  The 3D was that good, and because it ran through the entire movie, there were no real “gotcha” moments where arrows leap off the screen or animals jump out at you.  The only times I saw anything like those types of moments were in a few scenes where ash or insects were flying around the characters – they appeared to be in midair, and seemed so natural that you almost wanted to brush them away.  I am not sure that Avatar will make a billion dollars like Titanic did.  But it will make a mint, and there will be sequels.  I’m not really looking forward to those, because the story is not anything to write home about.  But what I am certain of is that Cameron as a visual pioneer has raised the bar on immersive movie experiences and Avatar will now be the starting point for a whole new generation of movies that blend 3D into cinematography as a natural extension of filmmaking rather than as a gimmick.  My kids are going to be a bridge generation between flat screen films and true 3D, and their kids will probably grow up never knowing what a 2D film really was like.  Few people are able to advance an industry overnight.  With Avatar, Cameron joins the ranks of those few.  Absolutely amazing.

I read the New York Times recently published “Search, but You May Not Find” and find it to be one of the most biased and misguided articles from a supposedly reputable news source. The article discusses net neutrality which prohibits Internet service providers from discriminating or charging more for access to certain services or applications on the Web. The author, Adam Raff, uses the same net neutrality argument to support his claims for a “search neutrality” which you will see is a slippery slope argument

Adam explains that Internet search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, are becoming gate keepers of information and that their results should be unbiased and ranked on relevance. There is truth to this. If Search Neutrality should be the case, we would essentially have a single search engine for all our needs because they would all share the same algorithm to rank sites and content. However, what search neutrality implies is that all the engines would have the same exact results which would be anti-competitive. A user is not forced to user Google or any other search engine. The openness of the Internet allows for anyone with the best service to succeed without prohibition. Isn’t that what Net Neutrality is all about? Google itself hardly ever advertise it’s service. Users flock to Google because it does provide the most simple and effective search results. By having different search engines with varied results and services, creates competition for all sides and ultimately benefiting the users.

Adam Raff does disclose that he works for Foundem – a search site to compare products. Raff alleges that his site’s Google search rankings disappeared and thus stunted his company’s growth. Writing an article against Google on the NY Times is also a sure way to bring exposure to your company doesn’t it? What Raff doesn’t explain is why his site disappeared from search results. Gaming the system by adding keywords hidden behind background colors can do this. Listing your site on link farms solely for the purpose of Search Engine Optimization can also put your site in the “bad neighborhood”. Raff does not explain how his site might have been black listed by Google or what he tried to do to remedy the situation.

Raff further claims that Google isn’t innovative as people expect but instead buy a lot of other companies such as YouTube and Applied Semantics (now AdSense). AdWords is developed by Google but licensed under its inventors Overture. My response to this is – so what? Is buying another company a moral crime? What does acquisitions have to do with search neutrality? My understanding of what Raff is trying to say is that Google can provide preferential treatment to search rankings for it’s affiliated services as somehow it is not beneficial to the user. Hey, Raff, remember, you can still use Bing or Yahoo if you want Search Neutrality as you claim. Why is Google singled out in your article? You didn’t mention Microsoft’s interest in providing Bing as the search engine for Yahoo. I take it because your site wasn’t black listed from them.

Raff has a lot of superfluous reasons for search neutrality. However, he can best support his argument by presenting a case where if a site is black listed from a search engine without justifiable cause, then there should be an explanation and process to fix this. However, Raff’s article seems more like a kid ranting he didn’t get picked to play basketball. Maybe Raff’s next article should be on Sports Neutrality where every player no matter what his skill set, gets to score.

Google doodle featuring Popeye

• Google doodle depicts Popeye eating spinach
• 115th anniversary of E.C. Segar’s birthday

When I was 5 years old, I went through a phase where I was really into Popeye. I remember as a kid walking around acting tough (and even enjoying my spinach). An aunt still calls me by Popeye till this day. I even had a pipe through blew out bubbles!

When I opened up Chrome this morning, it went straight to the Google home page where I saw this latest doodle. It brought back a lot of childhood memories. Popeye was an inspiration to me where the little guy can beat the brute (his nemesis was Bluto) and still get the girl Olive Oyl. Whenever Popeye and Bluto fought, Popeye would lose at first until he finds a can of spinach in his back pocket or laying around some where. As soon as he eats it, his fore arms grew 3x its size. I always wondered why Bluto wouldn’t just eat the spinach as well. Heck, even Olive Oyl could use some calories.

Sithsense Paper Laptop

I have been following Pranav Mistry’s SixthSense technology since his debut at TED conference in which he had a standing ovation. SixthSense allows for an ultra portable and interactive augmented reality based on genstures. It enables interactions between the real world and digital information.

His latest invention which he displayed at TED will kill any iTablet rumor from Apple or likes. Better yet, it is the introduction of the paper “laptop”. It works by attaching a microphone on the paper to sense the touch. Check out the whole video.

Via Engadget