We Lose Another Pioneer

Well I guess we are at the point where we are going to see many of the early pioneers of IT pass away now. I am nearly 60 and most of first rung CS leaders predate me by at least another 20 years. So it is time.

Yesterday we lost John McCarthy at 84. The unparalleled voice of Artificial Intelligence and the co-developer of the LISP programming language. He was known as a cankerous sort but an acknowledged leader in several fields. McCarthy unknown to many was also significant in developing core systems used by a firm called BBN. Lest you know, BBN was the hand maiden to the Internet, being the firm that DARPA turned to for turning a paper idea into a physical net reality.

Wired has more here.

A huge loss.

The Path for Newsies …

… in the tablet market. I read with some interest the idea that my compatriot posted below. The topic of course the idea that NYT or CST develop their own tablets. —

For the love of God, please stop trying to make your own tablets.

The Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times and several other newspapers and television stations, is reportedly the latest media giant to be seduced by the sweet siren harmonies of multitouch gestures and brushed aluminum. “More than half a dozen current and former Tribune employees” confessed to CNN that the Tribune’s CEO is smitten with the idea of a tablet of his very own, first requesting “anonymity for fear of losing their jobs or of souring relations with a former employer.”

According to these accounts, the Tribune would like to partner with Samsung to produce a modified Android tablet, even though Samsung already makes a popular and quite capable Android tablet, and the Tribune Co. to date has no tablet-optimized Android apps for its newspapers. (Is any part of this making sense yet?)

Source

The author of the piece goes on to recount tech companies better than NYT that flat out failed in the market place. So like the author, I agree that I do not hold much hope for a newsie to get it right. Considering that NYT’s paid for website is not doing all that well I don’t consider they have the track record to pull it off. However —

There is a route that a news publisher could go and still have their tablet narviana. The core of this idea is you don’t build one, you subsume one. It would go something like this:

• Contract out the development/construction with an already existing design and merely brand the thing as yours. That has been a tradition in the consumer electronic marketplace for years. The are multiple OEDs (Original Equipment Development) in Taiwan and China that can make this happen using existing systems.
• STICK WITH EPUB AS YOUR BASE FORMAT! Don’t go off trying to create a new standard. You container yourself and give up the opportunity to cross sell other products if you don’t. As short a life as ePub has had as a format it has already become the dominant format. So much so, that Amazon in its next release of Kindle will support ePub internally. Nuf said?
• Work with a good design house to develop a in-house style using CSS and some embedded fonts. Same reason as the point above.
• Pull this all together as a bundle. Put your name plate on the frame. That ends the technical discussion. Period. End of story. Don’t buck the marketplace trends.
• But marketing. Take your bundle and do the cell phone mamba. The Telcos are the CPE model you want to follow. You offer your bundle at a discount for a 2-4 year subscription to your newspaper. Its delivered over whatever means is appropriate for your locale — WiFi, Cellular, etc.
• You then also cross sell with Amazon and Barnes&Noble books and magazines with your device. Work deals to sell extended coverage articles and commentary at .25¢s an article.

Do that and you will have an fair chance of make a transition technically. However I should caution that all the tech in the world will not make up for trash content. Too many papers today are a walled garden of mental trash. Seriously, when the primary reason that many people buy a paper is to read the `Page Six` gossip content? Well then you have become nothing more than a move up from The Inquirer.

Good night and Good luck.

Wait I Hear an Echo!

This blog has been up nearly 4 years. In that time we have been beating the drum that its the governemnt – telecom axis that has delayed US deployment of faster, better, cheaper services. Don’t take our word for it –

Internet
Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

If you’ve stayed with friends who live in European cities, you’ve probably had an experience like this: You hop onto their WiFi or wired internet connection and realize it’s really fast. Way faster than the one that you have at home. It might even make your own DSL or cable connection feel as sluggish as dialup.

You ask them how much they pay for broadband.

“Oh, forty Euros.” That’s about $56.

“A week?” you ask.

“No,” they might say. “Per month. And that includes phone and TV.”

It’s really that bad. The nation that invented the internet ranks 16th in the world when it comes to the speed and cost of our broadband connections. That’s according to a study released last year by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society on behalf of the Federal Communications Commission.

It’s not surprising that we lag behind such hacker havens as Sweden (number one worldwide, according to the study) and Finland (number seven), nor densely-populated Asian nations like Japan and South Korea (numbers three and four). But the U.S. also trails countries that are poor by European standards: Portugal is just ahead of us in 15th place; Italy is number 14. (The full rankings are on page 81 of the study.)

Source

We’re barely behind of Portugal folks and by next survey we will have sunk even further. Count on that. We as a nation are sinking in the morass of a cabal that likes it the way it is. Its, the 4th of July, Ben Franklin would be pissed if he saw our current state of affairs.

We’re Not Nuts!

Lest you think my cohort is sniffing glue in Time Warner’s metering plan is back, perish the thought. The rates he is quoting are actually high. Here’s in fact is a real life example –

In the U.S., if you want a 50- to 100-Mbps connection, it is going to cost you plenty: about $105 with a triple play plan. On the other side of the planet, however, you can buy a 1 Gbps broadband connection for $20 a month, as long as you sign-up for a 24-month triple play contract with Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited, a division of local Internet service provider, City Telecom.

The same company had launched 100 Mbps to the home back in 2005. In February 2010, you could buy the 1 Gbps connection for $215 a month. According to the Akamai State of the Internet report, at the end of 2010, Hong Kong was the fastest place in the world when ranked by average peak connection speeds of 37.9 Mbps.

The reason it can offer at such low prices is the low cost of passing each home with fiber — it’s about $200 per home. Hong King is an extremely dense environment, and that lowers the cost of the network buildout. At present, HKBN has about a million homes passed for its fiber network and is on target to hit 2 million homes passed by end of 2011.

In the U.S., there are a few pockets that will or do have access to low cost 1 Gbps fiber connectivity — the cities of Chattanooga, Tenn. and Kansas City, Kan., for example. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in an interview with GigaOM said that fiber is the key to future Internet innovation.

Source

Now I will grant, Hong Kong is a high density area, so that favors the providers as far as mile cost per household, but not at the rates being quoted. in the article above. New York, Chicago, Boston have some of the same urban densities in sections.

The point is, the consumer is not being fairly served by either the carriers or the FCC. We are being taken and we should not take it.

They’re Lying