Category Archives: Internet

Internet

Google Android under attack and rightly so!

August 4, 2011 –

David Drummond – Chief Legal Officer of Google – is complaining on a company blog about Apple and Microsoft are banding together to attack Android. He finds it unfair.

His arguments about the patent system are completely valid but he is completely missing the point. Microsoft and Apple are annoyed by Google disrupting economics in the smart phone market by giving away their operating system for free. Google claims it spurs innovation. I disagree and personally I find Android anti-competitive. They are destroying the smart phone market and doing that from their advertising revenues.

To be honest I watch with interest how Apple and Microsoft are trying to put a price tag on Android which is reasonable and bring back functioning economics back into the smart phone market. For ones the ridiculous patent system is used to do good!

And to David Drummond I would like to say good luck on reforming the patent system. I totally support your cause. Google is now grown up and part of big boys league – see it as a compliment. This how they do business. If you like or not.

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Internet

Mobile roaming rates can be so much lower

July 10, 2011 –

Telecom operators make a huge profit on international mobile roaming rates. During my last visit to The Netherlands AT&T told me that the roaming data rate was $19.95 / MB. These rates are higher than what I paid for my internet connection is 1993.

In Europe Neelie Smit Kroes – European Commission vice president for the Digital Agenda – has introduced caps on international roaming costs within the EU. She determined maximum rate for roaming costs and set a schedule to bring the costs down in 2 years. In her opinion the market is not working in this area because there are only limited number of telecom operators in the EU. I think that is a fair assessment. Though I do not agree with her solution. Her proposed costs are still much higher than you would expect based on the actual costs charged.

The European Commission has tackled this problem before in another area namely the costs for money transactions within the EU. Here they set the benchmark that money transfers should be treated the same in the complete EU. In practice most money transactions are gratis within the EU countries. Since banks did not want – or could not change – the associated transactions costs it meant that for most Europeans money transfers are free. This is very close to the actual cost of a transaction. Free money transfers are a great thing to have. I see that every day going wrong here in the United States where the banking system is still in the stone ages compared to Europe.

I think a similar solution for roaming costs can work as well. The costs of mobile phone calls is largely associated with building the infrastructure, length or usage of the connection and connection distance point-to-point. A fair cost structure should cover all three in some way. That got me thinking about a price model which works better and is more fair to consumers.

All mobile phone users have a subscription plan which is aimed at the country they live in. They pay a certain amount for partiular types of call – mobile or fixed line etc. In case of roaming they should pay the same when they are in their own country given that the call is local to the country where they are roaming. The same applies for a call to a mobile who is also roaming and is in the same country. All incoming calls should be free like it is in your own country as well. In this manner the cost follows the actual cost structure much closer and it makes the costs much more logic for the user.
The same can be applied for data roaming. Telecom operators let the roaming data users enter the internet via the local telecom operator. There is really no reason why that is more expensive than in your own country using your own telecom operator.

I think there is ways to go to make roaming data costs much cheaper than they are today. Telecom operators abuse their market power to keep prices high. There is no competition on international roaming costs. They compete in their local markets and the international roaming market is just too small for them to pay attention. But from economic perspective it is good to facilitate some market mechanisms to enable this. We are currently in a catch-22 – the market is small due to the large costs and without any steps the market will stay small.

Of course this proposal only works in the concept of the EU. As an international user I am not helped by that. But it is a good first step.

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Internet

The internet moves from reading to listening

September 21, 2010 –

The internet has been designed around the concept of pulling information to the user. Users lookup information or interact with a social network or any other web application. The user decides where to go and which information to access. Even applications like email or chat which push information to the user it is still a pull concept since the user has actively enable these application to reach them.

But there are new services getting immensely popular like Twiiter, Identi.ca, StatusNet, Plurk or Foursquare which change that concept around. Here the information just flows onto the internet. The user can access this information midstream or go back into time to see what has happened in the past. Bur the information is not targeted at a specific user but just happens. The user can decide which parts of the flow of information he is interested in and plugs into that part of the stream. He ignores the rest of the streams.

The concept of streaming information onto the internet is a very powerful paradigm which opens a lot of new opportunities for people to communicate to large audiences. They can target audiences without knowing who they are. Interested parties can just tap into the stream where their own interest lies.

The time component of the information stream is another important aspect. A lot of information is only relevant as it happens. Think about news, discussion or discount campaigns. Up until now it was hard to universally communicate time sensitive information without direct targeting specific users like via newsletters or ad campaigns. But these are all broadcasting large audiences who may or not be interested while missing other users who are interested but reached using these methods.

It is just looming under the horizon. Current services like Twitter or Identi.ca are just scratching the service of what is possible when going from pull to push information streams. In the next years services like these will transform to more generic services or others will stand up and fill this gap. The major jump is made when the push information stream is made available for generic use. This could either through standardized protocols or via one or more service providers. Just imagine you are interested in buying an Apple Ipod and waiting for the right offer to come along based on price and location. How cool would that be?

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Internet

Mashup your content!

June 25, 2010 –

Imagine the following: you are a designer and wants to make and sell your stuff online. You use a myriad of services available like the ones from Ponoko, Shapeways or Etsy. How do you go about that?
That is a real life question which I hear a lot and is definitely one worth looking into. A lot of services create their own little universe around their specific content or market. But the needs of users go beyond those little universes. But what can you do?

Another example: you have your own blog, you post your photographs on Flickr and you keep everybody up to date on your life on Twitter. But if friends ask you where can I find your photographs or read your blog posts, do you want to point them to you each of these individual services? Or how about your wishlist on Amazon, your favorite bookmarks on Delicious or your movies on YouTube.

A smart person will shout Facebook! right about now. But Facebook is definitely not the answer. It is just the same approach from a different angle. Facebook tries to do everything, but is not that good at anything particular. If you compare Facebook videos or Flickr photographs the service of Facebook is not even in the same universe. Whereby YouTube and the likes offer great services but are quite limited. They only do one thing great.

I am waiting for a service which enables users to bring content together. This service unlocks the content of individual users and enables them to mash them together to create their own little universe. Like Facebook it would enable groups of users to connect their content together create user groups. Just imagine families share their photographs of their last family day or hobbyists working together on their latest project.
While this aggregating mashup service connects content together it also let the content stay at those great services. Because those great services exist because sometimes you want to find content while you do not know the group or individual. You are just interested in the content. Then you would start at YouTube or Flickr to get respectively your video or photo fix.

A lot of the earlier mentioned services offer options to get their content and host it on another site. But there is no standard way of doing this. From a technical point of view there are different options available but there are also terms & conditions to consider. Services just do not allow to use their content in just any (commercial) setting.
To make this happen content should be made available through using standard protocols and interfaces. This is the easy part. It takes convincing and a compelling business case to make this companies move.
But the bigger challenge is to get the internet at large to agree on fair use of that content. Question mark number one is to determine who owns the content? Does YouTube own your video and can they decide what you can do with it while it is on their service or is the other way around and can you determine how YouTube should use your content. Without reading the terms & conditions of YouTube I can guarantee it that they are different than those from Flickr, Delicious, Blogger or Lastfm.

The next barrier of the internet is to break open the little — or in some cases large — universes created around services and enable users to mix content together to create new content. This would stimulate a lot of new innovative content to be created and make the web a more coherent space to live in. The internet now feels like you have a car parked in the next street, your bedroom is at the neighbours and your garden is 5 kilometers away. And I am curious how this will evolve in the future.

Imagine the following: you are a designer and wants to make and sell your stuff online. You use a myriad of services available like the ones from Ponoko, Shapeways or Etsy. How do you go about that?

That is a real life question which I hear a lot and is definitely one worth looking into. A lot of services create their own little universe around their specific content or market. But the needs of users go beyond those little universes. But what can you do?
Another example: you have your own blog, you post your photographs on Flickr and you keep everybody up to date on your life on Twitter. But if friends ask you where can I find your photographs or read your blog posts, do you want to point them to you each of these individual services? Or how about your wishlist on Amazon, your favorite bookmarks on Delicious or your movies on YouTube.
A smart person will shout Facebook! right about now. But Facebook is definitely not the answer. It is just the same approach from a different angle. Facebook tries to do everything, but is not that good at anything particular. If you compare Facebook videos or Flickr photographs the service of Facebook is not even in the same universe. Whereby YouTube and the likes offer great services but are quite limited. They only do one thing great.
I am waiting for a service which enables users to bring content together. This service unlocks the content of individual users and enables them to mash them together to create their own little universe. Like Facebook it would enable groups of users to connect their content together create user groups. Just imagine families share their photographs of their last family day or hobbyists working together on their latest project.
While this aggregating mashup service connects content together it also let the content stay at those great services. Because those great services exist because sometimes you want to find content while you do not know the group or individual. You are just interested in the content. Then you would start at YouTube or Flickr to get respectively your video or photo fix.
A lot of the earlier mentioned services offer options to get their content and host it on another site. But there is no standard way of doing this. From a technical point of view there are different options available but there are also terms & conditions to consider. Services just do not allow to use their content in just any (commercial) setting.
To make this happen content should be made available through using standard protocols and interfaces. This is the easy part. It takes convincing and a compelling business case to make this companies move.
But the bigger challenge is to get the internet at large to agree on fair use of that content. Question mark number one is to determine who owns the content? Does YouTube own your video and can they decide what you can do with it while it is on their service or is the other way around and can you determine how YouTube should use your content. Without reading the terms & conditions of YouTube I can guarantee it that they are different than those from Flickr, Delicious, Blogger or Lastfm.
The next barrier of the internet is to break open the little — or in some cases large — universes created around services and enable users to mix content together to create new content. This would stimulate a lot of new innovative content to be created and make the web a more coherent space to live in. The internet now feels like you have a car parked in the next street, your bedroom is at the neighbours and your garden is 5 kilometers away. And I am curious how this will evolve in the future.
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Internet

Internet wants to be free

June 20, 2010 –

StarBucks announced this week they will start offering free internet in their coffeeplaces later this year. McDonalds already offers free internet in their restaurants. Several hotel chains offer free in-room internet. Internet access is used as an incentive to bring in customers.

Internet access at home is very affordable nowadays. This is also part of the reason why those $10/hour WIFI networks simply do not work anymore. People are not prepared to pay for internet access. It is as cheap as electricity. Know a hotel where you have to pay for your electricity usage?

The major challenge is how the economics around internet access will work out. I see 3 relevant parties on the internet:

  1. content provider
  2. network provider
  3. site provider (physical location of internet access)

The telco’s should better be prepared to become the electricity companies of the 21st century. Their role will be relegated to building and maintaining the network. Content will move more and more outside the reach of the network providers. As long as net neutrality is kept intact there is nothing they can do about it.
The site provider owns the physical location of the internet access point. They pay for making the access point to the internet available.

Value is only created on either end of the internet connection — either by the content provider and the site provider. For most site providers the internet access is a service they provide to their customers. But like StarBucks there is much more opportunity to make money from internet access. StarBucks offers a physical location enabling to mix online and offline marketing. Via affiliate marketing StarBucks can get extra revenue from their internet access point.

Internet wants to be free. In the near future the internet will be available everywhere without or for very low costs. Google gladly wants to pay to get people on the internet. They have to because that is how they make their money. More people on the internet are more people which use their service and see the ads. Google is a content provider and they are not the only one. Amazon, Facebook and all the other major destinations are content providers too and without internet users they cannot make money

The next 5 years will be very interesting. Question is will it be a rocky road — like with the music / movie companies — or will the companies part of the internet ecosystem adapt?

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Hardware Internet Software

Companies who are control freaks

June 13, 2010 –

One of the major drivers behind innovation is openness. Through openness knowledge is shared, reused or build upon to create bigger and better things. And this openness is at risk. Companies – but also universities – are becoming control freaks trying desperately control the use of their knowledge, products and content. This is a serious risk for keeping pace with innovation and moving society as a whole forward. The examples are abundant: In this article I will highlight some of them.

One of the most visible examples is digital rights management (DRM). You will find it everywhere. It is part of every television sold, every copy of Microsoft Windows, ebooks and game consoles like the Playstation or Xbox.

Using DRM companies control the use of content. The user does not own the content anymore but buys a license or right to use it. The user may only use the content based on license bought. This seriously restricts the options the user has for the content. Without technical circumvention a user cannot for instance copy a DVD to their Ipod for viewing on the go.

Sometimes this leads to very odd situations – especially from the consumer point of view. A prime example is what happened with the ebook 1985 of George Orwell sold by Amazon. At some point it was determined that Amazon did not have the right to sell this ebook. Amazon promptly send out a recall command to all their Kindle devices which erased the ebook from these devices. Just imagine you were halfway through the book you thought you owned and then it suddenly disappears. Of course this led to some very disappointed customers and Amazon had to apologize publicly for their mistake. But it also showed clearly the problem with licensing content and not owning content.

In the past you could lend a book to someone, but this also not possible with ebooks. The companies selling the ebook restrict the copying of ebooks. This is a serious restriction for sharing knowledge. And overall ebooks are sold for the same price as regular books which you do own and can lend to a friend.

Another example are closed ecosystems around products like you see with Apple products or in the game console market. The barrier of entry to create an application (like a game) on a platform like Sony’s playstation or Microsoft’s Xbox is quite high due to high cost of their software development kits. It is just not that easy for a developer to create an application for these devices.

And although the openness of the Apple product line (mainly Ipods, Ipads and Iphones) is much higher than in the game console market developers still need to pass the nod of approval to be able to offer their software through Apple AppStore. The requirements to get your application approved are not very clear and applications are rejected for unclear reasons.

Companies create these closed ecosystems to control the use of their own products.

But industries grow based on openness. Standards and open platforms enable other companies (or organizations or individuals) to take part of the ecosystem. Perfect examples are GSM standard for mobile phones or MP3 for digital music. You can buy your music at one store and play it on different players. Without these open standards the industries would have grown much slower.

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Internet

Successfactors internet rating systems

June 7, 2010 –

Every selfrespecting internet service has a rating system in place. On YouTube you can rank their videos and Ebay you can rank sellers and buyers. Rating is a very powerful crowdsourcing tool to help users to decide. But not every rating system is very succesful. In this article I would like to get into these successfactors.

I start with two examples of rating systems; a successful and unsuccessful one. One of the most successful rating systems is employed by Ebay. Ebay lets their users rate both buyers and sellers. It is successful because Ebay users actually use this information to decide if they want to buy from a seller or not. Therefor it is essential for sellers to have a high rating to be successful on Ebay. Due to this interaction the quality of sellers is very predictable on Ebay.
To me the rating system of YouTube is a complete failure. You can find lots of videos with the number of views in the hunderd of thousands but with only a couple of votes. YouTube users cannot really rely on the rating to determine if they wanna watch a video or not. If less <1% of the users vote the rating is not really representative for the group.

So what does determine the success of a good rating system? I identified three of them:

Sense of purpose to vote

Rating makes only sense when the rating has a clear purpose in the context of the users. If you take the YouTube example the reason people are not voting because there is no real use to vote. The rating on a video does not tell the user anything about the relevancy of video for him or her. The person giving a rating could be watching the video for an entirely different reason than another person. You cannot compare these ratings.

Sense of purpose of the vote

In line with the previous successfactor the rating has to have a real need for the user. Take for example the seller/buyer rating on Ebay. This rating has a clear goal for users. They can use the rating to determine if they want to buy or sell with a particular person.
Without a clear sense of purpose of the vote users will not use the rating system because it has simply no use.

What’s in it for me?

To entice a user to vote you need to be able to answer the question “what’s in it for him or her?”. Users do not rate just because they can. They rate because it gives them or others benefits as with the Ebay example.
You see that on YouTube rating is not really used because there is no point to use it. It does help you find new videos or determine if a video is worth watching.

Conclusions

Any rating system to be successful should take into account these three successfactors. A unsuccessful rating system is even worse than having no rating system. It confuses users and sets wrong expectations leading to disappointment.
The internet is full of rating systems and every selfrespecting internet site has some form of rating system. But most of them are pretty useless.
Examples of rating systems I like are:

  • Ebay – their buyer/seller system
  • Last.fm – recommend songs based on your ratings
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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 Internet

Touchscreens bring new requirements for web design

April 26, 2010 –

A new class of devices are becoming more prevalent and these are touchscreen enabled devices. The touchscreen is a very common interface on mobile devices nowadays, mobile phones and mp3 players use them very often. And now with the release of the iPad combined with the upcoming slate pcs of companies like HP, Dell and Asus the touchscreen is growing up. And this has an impact on the design of websites (among other things like application user interface design).

With the growth of these devices web designers need to take care of yet another class of devices.  In this case a new class of devices with a particular input method. Using a finger to navigate and manipulate directly on the screen requires changes. A mouse can be controlled very precisely. But using your finger you can still hit very specific areas — arguably maybe even more precise as a mouse — but the interaction area is much larger. In other words a finger is bigger than a mouse pointer.

Web designer need to take these new class of devices into account when designing new websites. Things they need to consider:

  • Easy to hit buttons for navigation and actions
  • Leave enough space around links to avoid miss clicks using a finger
  • Employ other user interface paradigms in line with touchscreen use:
    • Dragging feels more natural with fingers than with the mouse
    • Gestures for navigation or manipulation of items

Another aspect with touchscreen devices unrelated to the input is that the available screen estate is smaller. This means that website need to be optimized for screens with low resolution. Also these screens are often used in portrait mode instead of widescreen like most laptops and monitors.

Also very important to note is that these devices have often the ability to dynamically change the orientation of the screen. It is possible to catch this event using Javascript and dynamically update the stylesheet to change the screen layout for the chosen orientation.

Touchscreen devices bring new requirements for websites and with the launch of the Apple Ipad it is now time to think and implement optimizations to cope with these devices. In my opinion these devices will become very important for reading and using internet content and web designers need to be ready for them.

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