Monthly Archives: May 2010

Internet Software

Native applications are the new future?

May 16, 2010 –

Internet services are more and more complimenting their service with native applications. The rise of the Iphone — including derivatives like the Ipod Touch and Ipad — and Apple’s appstore have boosted the availability of internet connected native applications. Applications to read news stories on newyorktimes.com or Twitter clients to keep everyone updated on your life.

A bit of history
Computing more or less started with the mainframe era. Mainframes were the primary computing unit and users accessed the mainframe using dumb terminals.
In the 80s and rise of Microsoft Windows and personal computers the paradigm changed to standalone usage. Individual computers were islands only connected through floppy disks. Next came the rise of computer networks. Companies connected computers together. These computers used servers to store and retrieve information. The era of client – server computing was born.
When the internet gained popularity and became mainstream with the invention of the worldwide web another paradigm shift took place. Computing moved to the web and using sophisticated — but standard — web browser software personal computers could access information on the internet. The new trend was to move all applications to the web. The web would offer a standard and uniform way to interact with applications.

Ipod, Iphone, Kindle, Evernote
And then another thing happened. A myriad of special purpose devices were created. Devices like the Ipod to listen to music, smartphones to connect to both the online and offline world and ebook readers to read your books. And all of these devices have one thing in common. That is that they use the internet as part of their content delivery network. Ipod are loaded with music through iTunes and iTunes loads its music from the internet. Smartphones access emails and twitters from the internet and ebooks get their books using online bookstores.
But these devices also have in common that they do not use a web browser. Some, if not most, of them are capable of running it but they use native applications for their primary use cases.

During this time I also see this trend translate to internet services who use personal computers as their primary platform. Services like Evernote and Kindle offer native applications for the personal computer. These services think they can offer a better service to their users this way. The reasons vary from a more powerful user experience to offline usage of the service.

Google Gears and Adobe Air
Companies like Adobe and Google have recognized this need and developed their own solutions. Adobe developed Adobe Air. Software to develop and run flash applications as a standalone application on the desktop. And Google created Gears to use web applications without an internet connection. Gears has not been a great success. The adoption rate beyond a few Google applications is zero. The result off Adobe Air is still in the air so to speak. There are 900 applications available through Adobe Air’s website. The availability on Android will boost its adoption. But there are two reasons why I do not think it will happen. First is the user interface which looks alien on any platform and the second is that it is a standard controlled by a company. Eventually this always leads to failure.

Trend to offer a more powerful user experience using native applications
I see a definite trend to offer next to an internet service a native application experience on individual platforms including personal computers. Even HTML5 cannot change that. There are so many advantages for native applications in specific use cases and companies start to recognize that web is not the end of all others. The web is great for general purpose applications and will never go away. But for specific use cases native applications are back. And the internet plays the role of content store and content delivery network.

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Internet

Electronic media: the price is right

May 10, 2010 –

The trend to make content available as electronic media has been going on for a while now. It started with music back in around 1997. The introduction did not go very smoothly since the music industry did not understand the potential of electronic media and you could argue that they still do not.
Back then music was made available in music formats like WMA with limiting options on using the content using digital rights management (DRM). Around 2009 music became available without restrictions using the MP3 format most of the time. This led to a price increase.
Pricing of ebooks on Amazon.com were lower than real books on introduction. But with the introduction of the iPad and Apple’s bookstore the publishing industry managed to increase the price of ebooks to the same level as real books.

Overall the prices of electronic media is more or less the same as their physical equivalents. The question is if that is fair?

I argue this is not fair and I have several reasons for that. First reason is that it is not physical good. This means no printing and packaging costs. Moreover the stock and logistic costs are much lower than for a physical good. Second reason is that most electronic media come with restrictions on its usage. I cannot simply resell my ebooks to someone else when I am done reading. I cannot lend a book to a friend for instance. And the third reason is that I do not own the content itself but I get a license to use to content within a set of restrictions.
To me electronic media has a much lower value than real physical goods.

If you look at the revenue model of the publishers there will be a significant increase in volume because of the restrictions on electronic media. As I cannot lend or resell my item to someone else other people will have to acquire their own copy. This increases volume.

In short to make electronic media really take off the publishing companies have to seriously consider changing the prices and bring them in line with the actual usage options users have. The changing media consumption is a real revolution for the industry and clearly this industry is struggling to cope with this change. They have to understand that this change will happen anyway. The companies who really understand the new game of electronic media will end up coming on top. Unfortunately most publishing companies show that they have a long way to go.

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Hardware Software

Why AI is hard

May 2, 2010 –

Artificial intelligence was one of the first buzzwords I can remember from the previous century. It promised a future with intelligent computers or devices which could understand you and act autonomously.

Up until now we still do not use AI-enabled devices in our daily life. Why is that?

Our brain has 10 billion brain cells. Each brain cell has 10.000 connections to other brain cells. Neurons activate pathways to brain cells. The activation of brain cells along those path pass along the message of the neuron to other brain cells. Some pathways end and the message is not forwarded. The combination of brain cells and pathways between brain cells is how the brain processes and stores information.

To make AI happen we should be at least be able to mimic the brain cells and pathways functions. There are two options available; hardware and software emulation.

You could compare the brain (without memory) with a CPU. Current top-of-the-line computer processors contain 2-3 billion transistors. That comes close but each transistor has only a few pathways and is in the end only a transistor. If you would emulate the pathways the current CPU need to contain at least 50.000 more transistors than they today. Based on the Moore’s law (CPU transistor count doubles every 2 years) we can have to wait until 2025 to get to this point.

From a memory perspective you need to store the values of each of the pathways of the brain cells. This would require 10B * 10k * 1 byte = ~90TB of data. The biggest individual memory units currently available are 12GB. Applying the law of Moore again and we reach 90TB memory units in 2023.

With current technology we are able to emulate the brain function of an insect. Hence you see all those insect-like autonomous robots.

Based on these calculations it looks major progress can be made in AI in 15 years from now because the necessary computer hardware is available to be able to emulate the brain functions. Of course emulation is only the first step. The emulated brain also needs to be programmed to work. Much like any brain is programmed before birth.

Picture by toad(Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic)

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