The fact that Amazon has recanted and said “sorry, we’ll never do it again” is kind of beside the point. They have taught people the object lesson that this is possible. The goods they thought they were buying are in fact a license, and that license can be revoked at any time. If the Bittorrent era has taught us anything it is that consumers, when faced with untenable choices, will take the power into their own hands and circumvent these barriers put in place to stop them. Likewise, when given a fair shake, consumers will gladly pay for digital content. The general industry trend is towards openness, but it strikes me that we need a new consumer compact around expectation of digital goods – one that swings the pendulum back in the consumers’ favor. Otherwise the absolute power of the rights holders will continue to corrupt them, absolutely.

Email as a medium is not keeping up with how we interact, how we do our jobs, how we live in the modern world. It’s overtaken by spam (encouraged by its nature as an open and free medium and the relatively little it costs to send out emails in bulk). It has no intrinsic trust mechanism (and developments like sender policy framework are basically a band-aid and do not address personal trust circles, only whether an email is from where it purports to come from). Email has no intrinsic semantics that allow email clients to do anything useful with them. Even advanced email clients can do little to help with this mess. Email is actually follows a typical trajectory for innovation. In the book Why Things Bite Back, Edward Tenner takes us through a history of technological innovation and why some innovations have “unintended consequences.” The unintended consequences of Email have become all-to-clear: lost time, “inbox anxiety,” spam and “BCC cultute” are only some of them. My view is that email is fundamentally mismatched with an “always connected” world – and these days we are always connected – and it’s been hopelessly outpaced by the far more powerful social paradigms of social networks. Email is a monster which has grown to enormous proportions and which we are all spending our time feeding, to the detriment of our real lives. Email can also be ambiguous. I receive so much email that I have to filter my CCs into a separate folder which I don’t look at as often – but then people will CC me on a message that requires my urgent attention and get annoyed when I don’t respond right away. Email woes are accentuated by the fact that no significant innovation has happened in the world of email clients in 10 years.

Imagine a life without Email.

Need to get in touch with a friend?  Use Twitter “direct message.” It’s much more difficult for you to be spammed, because you control who connects to you. Bonus: you have to be terse. Need a longer conversation? Use Skype or another IM solution. Need to send someone a file? Again – IM. More immediate and you KNOW the recipient has received it. How about you need to arrange a meeting or a drinks out?  Social networks provide all the mechanisms you need for this. Need to share a file with a large number of people?  Use a Web-based sharing service like Google Docs or Zoho and then alert them using one of the means above.

Ok – technically most of the services mentioned above require access to an email account (for registration and identity verification). Zipiko is an example of one that doesn’t – you can sign up with only a mobile number.

I imagine an email-free world as a kind of utopian existence where people no longer spend hours and hours of their time each day “clearing their inbox” or methodically filing mail away into meaningless folders. Close your eyes and visualize it with me.

Crazy? Someone at IBM is already living the dream.

So why is this at all interesting?

Well. I’m always interested in new smart card technology and how it changes our behavior and impacts our society. I participated in a digital cash trial in Manhattan in 1997 (that famously floundered). I’m an early adopter of this kind of stuff, and I also am drawn to the promise of greater convenience. Convenience was a notably missing element from the Mondex trial in Manhattan (where you had to bring your card to a special equipped ATM and load money on it in order to bring it to a specially equipped vendor so they could schlep out a huge multi-part card reader – for which you would have to use a separate pin in order to buy a 60¢ orange – the glares I got from these people, let me tell you!). The Paypass system, however, isn’t a separate stored value — it’s just an easier way to make regular credit card transactions for low (under £10) amounts. But will combining this contactless payment approach with the Oyster really yield greater convenience?

Like many other Londoners, I keep my Oyster card in a separate little wallet I can take out and wave at the Oyster terminal when I need it, instead of taking out my whole wallet and waving it around in a crowded Tube station. With a combined Oyster-Visa-Paypass card, it seems likely I’d take the same approach, but what if I want to use the card as a regular Visa card? It’s not clear to me how this will all work in practice.

Check out David Birch’s take for more info on the Onepulse rollout, by the way.

So today I decided I’d try it out. I have to say, I’m not impressed so far with the application process. First of all, I am already a Barclaycard holder, so I can’t use the online form (according to very small text at the top of the form that I happened to read). Thanks. Ok I called customer service. After being transferred around for a while, I was told that I would have to “apply” for the card and that they couldn’t do it over the phone so they would have to send me forms in the mail. Is this really the future of digital money? I’ll keep a log here of the process of signing up for and using the Onepulse card.

The real holy grail, of course, is putting all of the above onto a… you guessed it… mobile phone. I know Transport for London is already doing trials on using NFC-enabled phones as Oyster cards (as reported by Card Technology and discussed by Janko Mrsic-Flogel, TfL’s mobile technology guru, at Mobile Monday London last month). Fantasy, you say? The Japanese don’t think so…

One more footnote on this topic. I was out at dinner with a friend in the States earlier this year and I noticed that his credit card had a hole in it, approximately hole-punch size. I wanted to know — was this some new card feature? Turns out that, when he received his new Mastercard in the mail and found that it had a Paypass RFID chip on it, he took a hole punch to it and punched it out. Why? Because, as widely reported and summarized here, there are very legitimate privacy concerns associated with RFID technologies (which is why privacy advocates have generally been up in arms about RFID’s use in machine-readable passports). I figure I’ve already destroyed any chance of digital privacy by becoming part of the Iris program, but I do wonder: will these technologies coming down at us, which are intended at least in part to reduce the threat of identity theft, instead encourage new and smarter methods of identity theft?

The hard drive on my Powerbook was giving up the ghost. First, it started making a high-pitched squeal. Then it started “sticking” intermittently – the machine would just hang there until I gave it a bit of a shake – very unsettling. Finally it just refused to boot.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him.

Three weeks ago, I received my Powerbook 12″ back from Daystar technologies.

It left me with a 60 gig hard drive (dead), a 1.33 GHz G4 processor and 768 meg of ram. Having undergone essentially a brain transplant, it has returned to me with a 1.67 GHz G4 processor, a 120gig hard drive and 1.25 gig of ram. Total price including shipping was £437.88. Was it worth it? I only paid £850 or so for the thing off the apple reconditioned store in summer 2004. I could have bought a refurb Macbook for £580 today. So from a price / features perspective it may not have been the most rational choice. However, I really don’t like the Macbook — for one, I can’t see myself getting used to that keyboard and for another the thing’s just too damn heavy! I really like the form factor of my 12″ Powerbook so I was reluctant to give that up. But that was the choice I was faced with.
Well… having used it was three weeks, I have to say that the operation was a complete success.

The only issue is that this thing gets hot. Subjectively, it doesn’t get that much hotter than it used to. I can still comfortably use it on my lap. But the fan is nearly always running at low speeds. Before the upgrade, I only used to hear the fan kick in when I was doing something
comute-intensive (for example, the few times I booted up Second Life, it started to sound like a jet engine). According to my “istat nano” system monitor widget the normal operating (CPU) temperature tends to hover around 131ºF.

One other minor issue I had was with Apple’s backup software. Upon restoring, I found that, when asked to do a “full” backup of my personal folder, it apparently did not back up my iTunes music or my iPhoto photos. Luckily, I had recent copies of both on our home machine so I didn’t lose too much, but I found this rather annoying, to say the least. Something to watch out for.

The speed boost is definitely noticeable, and is probably due to a combination of all three upgraded elements (CPU, memory and disk driver — which is significantly faster than the old drive). The result is a machine which feels new, and which for my uses remains more than adequate.

Am I a happy customer? Definitely. Daystar was also a pleasure to work with. They were friendly and efficient and there was always someone on the end of the line when I wanted to know how things were going. It was only after receiving my Powerbook back, by the way, that I learned that the lead “tech” who had been working on my powerbook and who I had been talking to all this time, Gary Dailey, was the president of the company. Thanks, Gary, and all the rest of the Daystar staff for rescuing and upgrading my Powerbook!

Late-breaking news: there are renewed rumors of a light-and-thin Powerbook making its way into the Apple line-up sometime soon, so I am now doubly sure I made the right choice.

Betavine is now launching three exciting features: student competitions, APIs and the open source zone. The competition offer students the opportunity to win up to €5000 just for developing and uploading an innovative application in one of four categories (Social Networking & Communications, Information & Entertainment, Office & B2B and Social Impact). Very cool stuff.

The API section (which will be previewed at JavaOne next week by Stephen Wolak, the pioneering soul behind the Betavine initiative) will feature, well, APIs. APIs into network functions, such as location and messaging functions, have been something small company developers have been asking about for years. The Betavine APIs will be initially provide SMS messaging, WAP push and access to Betavine itself (to allow for Betavine mashups). Watch the site for the launch and to find out more details.

Finally, the open source counterpart to Betavine has now launched: Vodafone Betavine Forge. This is a fully functional open source community site featuring CVS, bug tracking, etc… the whole shebang. Along with the launch of the site are three internal Vodafone open source projects that have been released, including a Linux driver for the Vodafone Connect Card and something called Vodafone Mobilescript (an extension to JavaScript for Windows Mobile devices). Both of these are being released under the GPL.

All in all, it’s a big step forward for Vodafone into the developer community. Next week, I’ll be talking it up at WWW2007 and Stephen will be presenting and demonstrating the site at JavaOne. Let the evangelism begin!

This is not a tech-heavy neighborhood, so it seems like we’ve quietly crossed some kind of threshold with regard to WiFi penetration among the general populace. This could have some interesting unintended consequences as more and more devices (both mobile and otherwise, like the famous Nabaztag rabbit) become WiFi enabled.

“Devices will become intimate companions.” I believe this is true (though it raises a number of privacy and security issues). This vision of the future could easily turn into a dystopian nightmare if these issues are not correctly understood.

“Leapfrogging” – users in developing markets will use the mobile device first as a connected [Internet] medium and will effectively leapfrog the existing [PC] paradigms.

“Semantic Search & Find” – the importance of giving people the information they are looking for with far greater accuracy then is currently happening on the PC Web.

Cool stuff. Nokia continues to push the envelope.

Yahoo! had a really big stand this year at 3GSM where they were showcasing their wizzy new version of Yahoo! Go (more coherent thoughts on that later). They were giving away dishes of yummy ice-cream as well, but by the time I got to their stand to get some they had run out of spoons so I had to go source my own by raiding the adjacent cafeteria (who actually had also run out of spoons leaving me in the position of having to eat my Yahoo! ice-cream with a stolen fork).

In retrospect, I wonder: is this a metaphor for what Yahoo! is doing in the mobile space right now? I think it’s possible, but then again they may have just run out of spoons.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, the BBC are doing their own soul searching around DRM. The BBC Trust, which is a kind of watch-dog organization that sits on top of BBC, has launched an online “consultation” regarding its use of DRM in the on-demand services it plans to launch shortly over the Internet (branded iPlayer). They want to know how long users of this server should be able to save content on their PCs for later playback. They also want to know how important it is to be able to support multiple OSs. The current plan is for the player to support only … you guessed it … Windows DRM format (currently not available on Macs let alone Linux). As a Mac user (despite what the Guardian says, they just work better) I was appalled when I heard this, but even if you’re a PC user, think about this: I can go buy a Tivo or get a Sky+ box and download shows and save them for as long as I want. Furthermore, I can download most television shows without DRM protection over the Internet for free. My view, which I made my thoughts quite clear in my response to their “consultation”: do not DRM encode the content at all. Forget about trying to limit the way people can use the content once they’ve downloaded it. It comes down to this: the BBC is publicly funded and if they are launching a major content-over-Internet push (which I applaud) then they need to make that content available to anyone in the UK – not just Windows PC owners and (in my opinion) they need to release it without DRM encoding of any kind.

If you live in the UK, I strongly urge you to participate in this consultation and make your voice heard by the BBC Trust.

It was interesting to then read today that Jobs, who has been so instrumental in making DRM part of our everyday lives, is now coming out in favor of a DRM-free world. Maybe he’s suffering some remorse from having opened the DRM box. DRM is a kind of regressive technology adds a level of complexity on top of systems and usage which adds no value while simultaneously holding back innovation. Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear to me that DRM can be stuffed back into its box, despite Jobs’s admirable change of heart. Will 2007 be the year that DRM died?

Anything can happen.

The site itself is still in the Beta phase, but will continue to improve over time as we keep rolling more featutes into it. This project is being run like a Web 2.0 startup within a big corporate. As such, continual releases and improvements as well as direct feedback from and communication with the site development team will be a key aspect. This is something new for Vodafone and we’d all appreciate your support with making it a success. If you’re a developer and you have an app that’s in some way related to mobile or communications, go to the site, create a developer account for yourself and upload it.
Thanks for your support!

On the minus side, do I really need another device to lug around with me? I actually already have an iPod, a Blackberry and an N73 and I don’t realistically see the N800 replacing any of those. And you can’t drive presentations off of it so it can’t replace the laptop either, except in very specific situations. I suppose it could theoretically replace the iPod, but what about all that Fairplay-DRM’d music (doh!).

No. I’m fairly sure that if I did buy this, it would sit around in my living room gathering dust, only occasionally picked up to look up some obscure trivia on IMDB or Wikipedia. I dunno — am I wrong? Am I missing something here? I’m happy to be convinced.