Andrew Ferrier

It’s plain that the camera industry has seen a significant degree of disruption in the last 5-10 years, almost all of it driven by digital cameras. On the back of this, we’ve seen a huge explosion in pictures on the web (most obviously on sites like Flickr), as well as other interesting changes (such as print-it-yourself kiosks in photo shops and chemists). Amateur photography seems to be going through a resurgence – I have started taking a lot more photographs, as have many of my friends and colleagues. Whether that resurgence will be permanent is unknown, but of course the increase in the convenience of cameras (no more waiting for development, easy digitisation) is not temporary.

However, whilst digital has brought innovation to the back-end – what do you do once the picture is taken? – the front-end is still as much hassle as ever. I own a Canon Powershot S80, a high-end compact camera which aims to provide many of the facilities of an SLR on a compact. Canon have done a good job – it pretty much does this – since a lot of those facilities are only in software anyway, it’s not hard. However, it still doesn’t match up to an SLR in one fundamental way – the picture quality is simply not as good (not as clear, fringing round the edges), mostly a result of a smaller CCD and a smaller, cheaper lens. Accordingly, I plan to buy an SLR at some point in the future once I can get what I want (>12MP for less than £500 – I’m betting on two years).

It’s painfully apparent that cameras themselves haven’t changed much in size or ease-of-usage since digital photography came along. Compact cameras have got slightly smaller than later-generation 35mm ones, partly because CCDs don’t need to be 35mm in size, and partly because many viewfinders have been eliminated in favour of an LCD screen. SLRs, however, are still basically the same size they always were – and I would assert this is mostly because of the large physical size of high-quality lenses (I’m sure high-quality CCDs could be reduced in size with a bit of investment).

The problem, of course, is that there are fundamental physical limitations to do with light that affect the quality of the lens. I’m no physicist, but I suspect from what I remember learning in physics at school that these are likely to be the biggest problem. However, I’m sure that there must be more one can do to shrink SLRs (and presumably their lenses). There is of course a huge pre-existing investment in lens mountings by consumers and professionals (for example, Canon have their EOS system), which is bound to slow down the rate of change and adoption, but I for one would love to see some investment going into shrinking the whole camera. I’d pay a lot for a high-quality SLR that fits in my pocket.

Updated 2007-01-11: Bit of a simple treatment perhaps, but this guide might nevertheless be useful when determining megapixel requirements. Of course it does make a (partly) abritrary choice of 300dpi resolution.

I wrote recently about my indecision surrounding the domain of information design; should detail or simplicity win out? (as always, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle – but hey, that’s boring). Google Maps and Multimap provide an interesting example of what I’m talking about.

Google’s maps are simple; straightforward; and link together yellow pages data with mapping data – together with some cool APIs that enable rip-offs (an ancient term for a mashup). However, they also strip out contextual data that any professional navigator would consider important – landmarks, land type, buildings, etc. It seems apparent that Google are trying to hit a particular market – those who find conventional maps too confusing. And to be fair, they’re doing pretty well – empirical data suggests lots of folks use them. Their reasonably robust mobile maps are also quite handy.

Multimap, on the other hand, looks backward by modern standards: a confusing array of mostly-irrelevant fluff crowds the page. They have one strong advantage, however – they provide contextual information, since they simply use OS maps (at least at medium zoom levels). OS maps are excellent for providing detailed navigation data, and Multimap seems to be the only free online provider of them.

I actually use both sites – Google when I’m searching for things (e.g. dry cleaners in Winchester, of which there turn out not to be many), and Multimap when I want a printable map to navigate to somewhere specific. I would hazard a guess that Google’s map interface was designed by someone who works in a city, as they are virtually useless outside one. Google should be able to make the additional mapping data optional as an overlay – after all, there is already a hybrid interface that mixes maps with satellite pictures. This would be a welcome improvement. Multimap should focus on cleaning up their interface if they don’t want to be run out of town.

I’ve written about synchronicity vs. asynchronicity before, but I wanted to revisit the subject because it seems to be so key to modern services; as more and more communication mechanisms evolve out of available technology and entrepreneurs’ imagination, understanding customer’s usage patterns will be important when developing businesses around them. An excellent article by Gregor Hohpe, Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit (included in Joel Spolsky‘s Best Software Writing Vol. 1), is an examination of why understanding computer science concepts such as 2PC (and, I would argue, synchronicity) is important when engaging in business process engineering. There’s a large overlap between business and software engineering here, and this is why IBM sells products like WebSphere Process Server together with business consultants to help customers implement them. There are a number of other essays in Spolsky’s excellent book which also discuss related subjects.

Clay Shirky, in his essay A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy (also included in the same volume; the online copy is edited slightly differently from the printed one), notes how online (synchronous) discussions frequently descend into talk about sex – and that sexual banter is much more common in synchronous communication than asynchronous (how often have you flirted with someone over the phone compared to email? – please, no anecdotes in the comments section). I’m not a psychologist, but I assume that this has something to do with it being hard to retain the thrill of adult banter over the course of a (potentially lengthy) asynchronous discussion. The same arguments probably apply in a less dramatic fashion to non-sexual communication.

There’s a related observation to be made about the perceived economics of people’s time. In general, most folks implicitly value synchronous time as higher than asynchronous – if I ask advice of a mentor over a half-hour coffee, I feel more indebted to him than if he spends half an hour hour answering my email. I suspect the reasons are a combination of my having accurate information (I know exactly how long he spent drinking the coffee), the start-up and tear-down time (he actually took 5 minutes to get to the coffee shop), and knowing that I have his undivided attention (he wasn’t multi-tasking). Nevertheless, we still continue to rate synchronous time more highly than its opportunity costs compared to asynchronous time.

To relate the two assertions, wouldn’t you rather spend half an hour in person with your spouse / significant other / other politically correct phrase than an hour writing and exchanging emails with them? Synchronous communication has a strange attraction than its poor cousin doesn’t – despite all of asynchronicity’s time-shifting advantages. This is going to be a big challenge for a multi-time-zone world.

When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time tinkering with digital sound: mostly MOD files, on the venerable FastTracker. The highlight was remixing a track by Jim Young – I’ve unfortunately lost my version, but here‘s the original (any competent media player, such as XMMS or Winamp, should still be able to play MOD files with the right plugin). I used the sound of my CD drive opening as an ‘instrument’ (slowed down many times), and felt very silly when I came to listen it to some years later. Only later did I realise that the professionals do exactly the same thing; Gary Rydstrom, one of Hollywood’s leading sound designers, describes how he used exactly the same kind of found art – bottles, floors, etc. – to design sounds for Monsters Inc. on the DVD extras for same. Nevertheless, my efforts were still pushing unlistenable.

So I was very gratified to listen to the singing computers podcast from O’Reilly recently, wherein David Battino discussed the state-of-the-art in voice synthesis, including singing. Although I never really played with this very much (voice synthesis is still surprisingly immature, proprietary and expensive; only now are we beginning to approach synthesis indistinguisable from real speech), it was still a fascinating to listen to someone tinkering with sound in the same way as I used too – with plenty of samples of speech synthesis from different devices and systems, including the giggle-a-minute Dictionaraoke site, which mashes up speech synthesis with real songs (it features up there with listening to Chipmunked songs for something to do when you’re drunk).

The future of digital music and sound as an innovative area has never seemed less certain, as digital photography enters the mainstream (see Flickr), and digital video is probably only a few years off doing the same (as bandwidth and storage continue to expand). But digital sound hasn’t reached a peak – there are still many things that are unachieveable in that world – real and convincing speech and singing being one of them. There’s still wiggle room in the area of noise cancellation too (get a pair of noise-cancelling headphones if you value your music). It’d be a shame if sound has to take a back seat after years of innovation – 8-track, compact cassette, CDs, MP3s being but a few inventions we now struggle to see ourselves without.

A recent BBC In Business episode discussed the recent innovations in the on-demand air-taxi market. One of the startups hoping to make a name for themselves in this market are DayJet, who are in the process of launching a service which allows for buying seats on charter aircraft from and to airports you nominate. The logistics are solved in real-time by an automated system, and the wider the time window you allow for your journey (which permits drop off/pick-up of other passengers), the cheaper the ticket. DayJet are hoping to offer prices not far off the cost of a standard economy/coach ticket on scheduled flights. They are also planning to use extremely cheap (only $1.5 million) jet aircraft produced by Eclipse. I think all of this combines to produce what seems to be a pretty novel service, although to be fair they aren’t the only ones exploring this market.

There’s a slightly witty irony in that the CEO of DayJet, Ed Iacobucci, is an ex-IBM executive, and he’s entering an on-demand business. Well, I found it amusing.

Google have created a powerful brand based on creating simplicity from complexity (what all good IT is about). Their tools aren’t perfect, but they’ve made life easier for billions, and so I think they still deserve some free feedback from time-to-time. So, a few thoughts:

• Mr. Google, please develop a podcast search engine. So much interesting content is now being released as podcasts (quick plug for my favourite: EconTalk), that it would be useful to be able to search them. All you have to do is invent a speech-to-text interpreter that actually works reliably. Simple. [Note: as I sometimes do, I wrote this post in advance of it being published. I've since discovered that such a tool already exists. However, I thought I'd leave the original prose here: Google, if you get one out soon, you could still corner the market]
• Mr. Google, please stop developing so many interfaces – and plug them all together. If I want to do an exhaustive search for something, I now have to search Google Web, Google Images, Google Groups, Google News, Google Video, Google Blog Search, Google Book Search, Google Scholar, and possibly others. This is not a good thing – you’re straying from the simple search you started with. Some of those searches do show up in the main search results, but you could do a better job of tying them together to show what I’m actually looking for. This could be a real competitive edge, especially since the basic searches that MSN and others provide are now actually quite reasonable.

Google still have an edge in providing what people want – for a company so technically-focused, they either have talented marketers or are just lucky. Please, Google, keep it up.

I’ve upgraded my interweb connection to Web 2.0 in the last few months. Although no-one can really point to what Web 2.0 is (even though there’s a validator for it), many people feel that they know it when they see it. I now defend the term against cynics because I think it’s genuinely useful. To me, it’s a combination of little things: blogging and feedreading, a good quality web browser, in-place dynamic web sites (mostly driven by AJAX), to name but a few. For a technically minded person, I’m atypically late adopting, and so I’ve only recently happened on two powerful aspects of Web 2.0:

• Social bookmarking. I now use delicious, so I can manage my bookmarks properly across the many computers I regularly use, as well as discover high-quality sites other people have stumbled upon.
• In-browser Flash-based video. You can argue until the cows come home about the technical superiority of this method, but the success of YouTube shows that it’s the way forward. I use to shy away from web-based video because of the hassles involved: Download or stream? Do I have the right codec? Which media player to use? Flash-based video solves this problem.

However, the Flash-based video technique does highlight a problem that users of Web 2.0 sites are likely to encounter for a few years as they become more prevalent: interface inconsistency. It’s been long recognised that consistent user interfaces are a good thing, but everyone thinks that they can make a better scroll bar, and although Flash has been around for some time, it’s so far mostly been relegated to those websites created by designers who value form over function.

Now that there’s a great use for Flash (no, hang on, really great), and AJAX is becoming more widespread, we will go through some years of pain before the UI conventions are worked out and those who stray are vilified, rather than held up as paragons of originality – it seems to have already started with the hourglass, as well as on some of the cruddier YouTube-imitating sites (several of which don’t let you skip forward in videos). This phase of inconsistency has happened plenty of times before in UI history, although never in an uglier way than some of the first web sites. Brace yourself, it’s coming again.

Here’s a fun thought experiment: imagine what innovations would be necessary, feasible, or useful if the fundamental biological or physical restrictions of our world were different: not generally, but in a specific area.

For example, let’s say that the hair on our heads grew not at the rate it does now – approximately 0.5mm/day – but at 1m/day. It seems clear that hairdressers, as least as they are currently organised, wouldn’t be able to keep up. Either we’d need hairdressers to be everywhere and very efficient, or, more likely, we’d need some form of automated haircutting machine – perhaps with one installed in every bathroom. Brides-to-be would struggle to look just-so at the right moment, so there’d need to be an emergency hairdresser on standby.

Another example, perhaps even more far-fetched, but nevertheless pertinent – what if rubbish expanded in volume in an unbounded way after being disposed of – at a modest rate of, say, 10% a year? We’d already have had to have found a way of either vastly cutting down on rubbish disposal or offloading it to other planets – or perhaps, more sinister, cutting down on the population generating it.

Both of the above scenarios are clearly nonsense given our current understanding of science, but they help in jogging the brain into thinking in a more open-minded mode, and they clarify the consequences of our actions (although rubbish doesn’t expand, we are using more landfill space every year – the scenario merely amplifies the logical conclusion).

Here’s some more to try:

• The average air temperature at ground level in temperate areas is -50°C.
• Most insects are fatally dangerous to humans, and almost impossible to vaccinate against.
• Water cannot be frozen artificially.
• Paper decays within 2 months.

Is this a new technique? I’ve never come across it anywhere.

For those who don’t keep up with such things, the American car industry is in big trouble. Detroit‘s sales have been declining for some time, hurt by high costs, and Japan is stepping in to take their place. Some Americans, of course, will only buy American, but many seem to be taking the more pragmatic approach. High gas prices and a preference for marketing big cars and vans among America’s car markers haven’t helped.

Chevy seems to be upping the ante with a controversial new advert for their Silverado truck – with an admittedly catchy tune (video; I’m not sure what Stephen Colbert has to do with it). A recent Slate podcast deconstructs this in detail; suffice to say that images of Katrina and Vietnam are hardly likely to avoid heated discussion. A slightly blunt and clumsy parody is already doing the rounds.

This is all particularly interesting at a time when alternatives to petrol-guzzling SUVs finally seem to be becoming viable. David (site down at the time of writing) recently discussed an In Business podcast that looked at the Tesla Roadster, the first electric car that seems to actually have both a realistic marketing and engineering story. Tesla claim a 135 mpg equivalent energy consumption and 0-60mph in 4 seconds: not a bad combination. The car is currently being marketed only in California due to EU regulatory problems (please, government, get out of the way of the entrepreneurs saving the world). But it looks like it might finally herald the start of a more sustainable future.

I don’t think it’s an unreasonable prediction to say that the car industry will be one to watch closely over the next decade.

IBM loves patents. We’ve held the record for thirteen years for the most U.S. patents granted each year. IBM’s margin over the competition is also good (2941 in 2005, compared to 1828 for our nearest competitor, Canon). IBMers are actively encouraged to develop patents (which is probably why we do so well in the patent charts), and IBM is a large company with a lot of resources and a disproportionately large R&D spend – perhaps no-one should be too surprised.

But in the chart position / size stakes, Nathan Mhyrvold‘s company, Intellectual Ventures, is impressive. Their only products are patents – in much the same way, says Mhyrvold, as Coke‘s product is a brand (trademark), and Microsoft‘s is software (copyright). In other words, they are just focusing on another aspect of IP. A recent In Business episode looked at Intellectual Ventures, and they hold the record at 25th place for most U.S. patents granted in a year, despite being a minnow in a world of IBM and Canon. It’s an unfair comparision with IBM really, as IBM produces much more than just copyrighted product (a substantial portion of IBM’s business is services, not software), but IV has a fascinating business model, and one that’s still comparatively rare.

Update 2006-10-23: It’s unlikely to calm the debate I’ve been seeing on this topic any, but as Richard points out, IBM has just filed suit against Amazon for patent violation.

Update 2006-10-25: Greg at IBM Eye has more details on the suit.

Update 2006-10-29: John Simonds from IBM Analyst Relations (We allow these guys to blog? Wow!) has a personal perspective on the IBM-vs-Amazon case.

Update 2006-10-30: For some comment in defence of Amazon, see this article from PC Magazine.