Pablo's blog
A bit of this, a bit of that and a lot about computers
Archive for the tag “idea”
A feature we need for the post-PC era
The post-PC era is when we stop having PCs because we move to something else. You may think that’s unlikely and unrealistic but look at the evidence. At one time we had desktop computers and laptops started to appear. They were just toys for people with lots of money, then they became the second computer of people that spent a lot of time on the go, today most people own a laptop instead of a desktop computer.
The exodus from the PC is not going to be that easy, because the mobile devices are more different to a laptop than laptops were to desktop computers. But it’s not only leaving PCs for smart phones, also for netbooks. I believe it’s going to happen. Probably not as extreme as the PC to laptop but it’s going to happen. We’ll be using our phones as our primarly way to access data and communicate. And when we come home we’ll plug it in a dock station -that already exists-, so that it can use our nice big speakers -that also exists- and so that we use an external keyboard -that exists in many cases- and a big external screen -that exists, at least in the netbook market-.
What doesn’t exist yet, I believe, is external processing. When I’m at a bar I won’t play Halo and I’m OK if switching between applications is slow, but when I come home I want my device to become faster. I have seen absolutely no progress at all in being able to add processing power to a machine, to a portable machine. The closer I’ve seen were docking stations, probably IBM, which added better sound and video cards. Sharing processing power is hard, but I think we need it to go mobile.
Reviewed by Daniel Magliola. Thank you!
Papers books are going away, and so does signing them
Let’s face it: paper is dying. It’s going to be a slow death, but for some purposes it’s dying faster. Newspapers find themselves not being able to print anymore due to costs and books are starting to be digital. I’ve recently got a Sony PRS-505 which I love (and my wife does too). And of course there’s the Kindle
It’s very likely that the tradition will continue with paper books for a very long time after our book-shelves were replaced with one little device. After all, a signed book is not a book but a collectible item, like a signed baseball or a signed t-shirt. They are stored and displayed differently than their mundane non-signed counterparts.
Eventually the books being signed will be custom-printed because there won’t be any more mass production. But what if we could replace signatures with something digital, and better?
At first I though that you could have your digital book signed. That’s possible, to have a PDF that has the signature in it. That’s trivial to generate automatically so it doesn’t have any value. If it has dedication, that is, your name hand-writen by the author, then it gets trickier to generate; and more valuable. But this is the digital age, the future, we can do better than that. What if you have a PDF where the picture of the cover of the book is not the usual one but a picture of you with the author.
Now, that’s something! The signing booth would now be a photo booth. After you take the picture they’d generate the PDF which you could download instantly by bluetooth or with a code they give you. Now suddenly the digitally signed book is something even more valuable than the usual signature.
If you plan on developing the software and do the hardware integration for this, let me know, I might be interested.
If I were in charge of Audible
I have one little idea to implement for Audible: make it free for blind people.
I’m sure there are channels to verify whether someone is (legally) blind: government certificates, associations, or something like that. On third world countries, audio books for blind people are a rare and expensive luxury. Building a public library of them that can be accessed for free is a painstaking process that some volunteers do. And here I am talking about collecting cassettes.
I don’t think this market would represent huge numbers in Audible revenues (although it’s a big market, as show by screen readers which are only useful for visually impaired people). And before you say “but an mp3 is of no use to someone with a cassette player”, I’m sure it is much less effort to download an mp3 and record it in a cassette than finding the cassette with the book in the first place. Some volunteers would do it for people with sight problems that want to access books and have no means.
Unlike screen readers, Audible is useful for everybody and providing a free service to handicapped people is an amazing thing to do, and if played correctly, also a very good PR campaign. If not free, it should at least be very cheap.
Reviewed by Daniel Magliola. Thank you!
Deferred Twitter posting
Here’s an idea for those Twitter clients, web and desktops out there: deferred posting.
One tweet per hour during eight hours is much more effective than 8 tweets in a row. But sometimes you want to write eight tweets in a row and I find two reasons to do that.
You are using Twitter professionally, for your work, as a marketing and social tool. You want to minimize the hit it takes on your productivity so you limit yourself to 15 minutes of tweeting per day. In those 15 minutes you generate tweets for the whole day, you want them to be automatically distributed through the day.
When you open twitter after some hours of not using it, like after sleeping, you’ll find yourself replying to lot’s of stuff as you go through it. That’s specially true if you are 8 timezones away or so from most people you follow.
I think a Twitter client should do the distribution automatically. It could distribute them evenly through the day, depending on how many you have on your queue. Whenever you want to tweet you just add it to the queue.
Why limit itself to one day? why not leave tweets for tomorrow? And if not one day, how long? A way to solve the problem is to try to maintain your speed constant, minimize acceleration and deceleration.
For example. If you normally tweet 5 times a day, and you have 10 tweets in your queue, do 7 today and leave 3 to tomorrow so that you don’t double the speed, you just increase it a little bit. If tomorrow you add another 10, you’ll have 13 and you are at a speed of 5.2 (previously you were at 5, but yesterday with 7 you sped up a little). So today you get 9 published and 4 left for tomorrow and so on.
You’ll have different speeds on weekends and business hours. There’s a curve of speed and the Twitter client should try to match it with what you have on the queue.
If you want to direct tweet, you can do that, just fine.
Another interesting way is to match the curves of you readers instead of your own. The tweeter client would measure when your readers are posting more, and presumably, also reading more. It’ll make an average and it’ll have the curve of speed of your network. Instead of posting following your previous curve, it’ll post following your network’s curve maximizing the amount of people that is likely to read your Tweet.
I would call that, Professional Tweeting.
Another interesting feature would be to set importance to your tweets. More important tweets are sent when the chances of getting it read are highest, when the curve reaches its peak.
Reviewed by Daniel Magliola. Thank you! Twitter carved-wood icon by gesamtbild.
It's time for search and replace
Web browsers, like Firefox or Chrome, are no longer document viewers, but application platforms. I’d like to see browsers start to implement search and replace. Of course not modifying the page, just replacing the matching strings in forms.
I’m really surprised it’s not implemented yet. In the last two weeks I needed this feature about 5 times. It’s time for search and replace in web browsers already.
Reviewed by Daniel Magliola. Thank you!
Comment on TWiT 204: Taste Like Dirt. Lending Kindle books
On This Week in Tech 2004: Taste Like Dirt, Dwight Silverman proposed an interesting idea: to be able to lend books in the Kindle. The book would become unavailable on your Kindle and available on the other person’s Kindle, and after two weeks the book comes back automatically. I don’t think that feature would ever be implemented because it’s not on the publicist best interest.
It would be very simple to have a web app of people lending each other books across the world in a very organized and systematic way. The reason is that there’s no danger for the lender, the book will come back automatically. It’s not the same as lending a real dead tree paper book.
The solution is simple: don’t make it automatic for books to come back. Have the borrower have to press a button to return it. And if the borrower never does then you lose the book. Then you would only lend them to people you trust (not in a p2p-network way) or when you don’t care about losing the book.
What about book swapping? I don’t see a way to implement book swapping without allowing a systematic peer to peer network to exist. That leads me to the issue of DRM, which I’m not going to talk about now.
Reviewed by Daniel Magliola. Thank you!
If I were in charge of Skype
This is what I would do if I were in charge of Skype, a product that could be doing much better. The big problem is, of course, adoption. Currently there are a lot of show stoppers:
- You have to go to the site.
- You have to download the software.
- You have to install it.
- You have to create an account.
- You have to find and add your friend.
- You have to remember to re-run it after you restart the computer.
If every obstacle halves the amount of users you are getting, Skype’s market could be 64 times bigger. That’s a lot.
I would start by writing a Flash implementation of Skype: Skype-on-the-web. Then going to skype.com/call/bob would call the Skype user bob without having to install anything or even create an account. With this feature Bob could tell his friend Sally, in an email or chatting with a competing product: “Go to skype.com/call/bob, let’s talk”. Personally, I would prefer Silverlight, but someone at Microsoft decided to halve its market by not supporting the microphone.
That’s open to abuse because anyone can call Bob at any time, anonymously. What a nightmare! That can be solved by requiring some random password, or hash. Bob would have a button on his Skype client that says “Generate call-me address” that would generate a use-once URL like skype.com/call/bob/dckx that would even work only for a short amount of time.
That last solution got a little bit too complicated. I would offer it, but I would also offer something much more intelligent. When Bob wants to talk with Sally he would go and add her to his buddy list by email address. That would automatically create an Skype account for Sally with a randomly generated password. Sally would get an email saying “Hey! You now have a Skype account! You can download Skype or just go to skype.com/on-the-web and start using it”. The most likely outcome is that Sally won’t do any of those things and will just throw that email away. That’s all right because now comes the best part.
The next time Bob calls Sally, since Sally is a non-convert yet, she’ll get an email saying: “Bob wants to talk with you! Answer him on skype.com/call/bob/dckx”. When Sally goes there, she doesn’t get a call-only-bob Skype, she gets a full featured Skype-on-the-web, automatically calling Bob. She’ll be able to call other users but what’s most important, she’ll have Bob in her buddy list. And when John does the same as Bob to call her, Sally will have Bob and John in her buddy list. Skype’s value for Sally is growing! She now has two good reasons to start using Skype
To increase the network effect hugely, I’d make it so that Bob won’t be able to see that Sally is not a Skype user. He won’t search for Sally and give up because she doesn’t have an account. He’ll just add her and it’ll seem to him that Sally is a Skype user. Because eventually she will. This model is nothing new, it’s how Paypal became the number one (only?) player in its field.
With the upcoming feature of screen sharing over Skype, tech support could also improve
Another thing I would do is target the support market. I would allow companies, like Dell, Microsoft, Apple, etc, to open corporate accounts and get the ability to have a lot of users under the same name (like “Dell Support”, “Microsoft Office Support”, “Apple iPod Support”, etc). Skype would handle all the routing and distribution of calls to each user using the typical call-center algorithms. Currently you call a local number and Dell routes you over the internet to where the call center is: India. That routing over the Internet is most likely paid by Dell. If their customers used Skype they’d be calling India directly lowering the bandwidth bill for Dell.
For the users it’s a huge win because sometimes it’s a hassle to find the right local number to call. And if you don’t speak the language of the country you’re in, or are traveling, it’s always a problem. Serving a global market globally is the way to go. After all, Skype knows which language you want to speak most of the time.
But the real jewel of this idea is this. Skype could try to discover the type of machine it is installed on and what products are installed alongside. You download Skype for MacOSX? Here’s Apple Support on your buddy list automatically. Microsoft Office installed? Either Mac or PC, here’s Microsoft Office Support on your buddy list. Running Skype on a Dell laptop? Here’s Dell support on your buddy list. The next step is letting any developer and company register a support line with Skype and enable it at install time of the application. For example: when you install Picasa, Google is added to your buddy list and, through a Skype API, Picasa has a “Call support” button that triggers Skype if locally installed or Skype-on-the-web otherwise.
Suddenly, Skype is becoming the dial tone of the internet (instead of that Twitter thingy).
Reviewed by Daniel Magliola. Thank you!
Closing tag in XML
I always wondered why they didn’t allow an optional closing tag of “</>” that would close the corresponding open tag.
For example:
<p>This is a string with something <b>bold</> in it.</p>
where “</>” is closing the <b> tag. Or:
<blah><bleh><blih><bloh>bluh</></></></>
which is shorter than:
<blah><bleh><blih><bloh>bluh</bloh></blih></bleh></blah>
I fell it is a shortcut like the stand-alone tag <tag/>.
