Wired Disruptions

I am late in sharing about various activities of the past two weeks. The activities used up the time for blogging! Exiting the train at Grand Central last Monday morning was followed by a nice walk down Madison Avenue to the magnificent Pierpont Morgan Library to attend the WIRED Business Conference: Disruptive By Design.

It was a superb day, featuring interviews and highlights from WIRED editor in chief, Chris Anderson as well as an impressive group of speakers including Jeff Bezos, Jeff Immelt, Shai Agassi, Elon Musk and Vivek Kundra, the newly named CIO of the United States. Alll of the content is available at wired.com.

The speakers were excellent with the exception of Scott Thompson, President of PayPal who was doing a non-stop pitch for how great his company is. All the other speakers shared their vision for the future of various technologies and business strategies and in particular talked about how disruption can be a problem or an opportunity depending on how you approach it. Jeff Bezos, always the consummate visionary talked about how electronic books will disrupt traditional publishing business models. When I see small children carrying 50 pounds of books in their backpack it seems so obvious that an e-book -- which weighs less than a half-pound can hold all of their textbooks -- is going to prevail. Jeff said that books have "had a nice 500 year run". Critics say that the market is limited for devices which can only do one thing, like enable you to read a book. Jeff said "what could be more important than reading". He believes a "purpose built" device serves an important and growing market. Many business leaders in Amazon's position with the Kindle would tie the content and the device in a proprietary model. Jeff says that Amazon plans for the Kindle to be the best device and their strategy is enable the device to read content of any format. In parallel the Amazon format will be made available on competitors e-books. He clearly follows a long-term strategy.

Jeff Immelt also demonstrated strategic leadership in his comments in numerous areas. He said that the Chinese have developed an MRI scanner that is a third the cost of what GE enjoys as their richest market segment today. Many companies would put their head in the ground, but GE is planning to compete directly with Chinese pricing and expand the MRI market on a global basis. I was quite impressed with the comments of Vivek Kundra. The former CTO for the city of Washington DC who is now the first US government CIO. He has a very aggressive approach to opening up government to the people. Today there are more than 20,000 government web sites and most do not make it easy to get data. Vivek is planning to make all non-secret data available to the public through data.gov, His visionary theory is that by making the data available people will find ways to build applications to explore and exploit the data. Privacy will be an issue but the upside is very large. While some people fear the government "watching us", the strategy behind data.gov will allow citizens to watch the government.

Overall, the conference was exceptionally well produced. Upon leaving at the end of the day attendees were given a nice Golla Mobile Lifestyle bag containing a couple of WIRED magazines plus a copy of Chris Anderson's new book -- Free: The Future of a Radical Price. The summer read pile growing already -- but mostly on the Kindle.

As usual, one of the best parts of the conference was seeing former colleagues from years past. It was very nice to catch up with Nicholas Negroponte and Ann Winblad and to compare notes with Jay Walker. Jeff Bezos hung around with attendees at the reception at the end of the day and answered questions from several of us. He is a brilliant businessman that makes it a habit to listen to what people (customers) have to say. I would say that is also why Amazon has a market capitalization of $36 billion.

Conferences , Gadgets , Healthcare June 27, 2009 06:37 PM

iPhone - Update No. 17

I am sticking to my story -- the iPhone is fantastic. There are issues but Apple seems to be addressing them and has transformed the iPhone from a cool device to a major platform is just two years. The primary change in their strategy is that Apple came to realize that the iPhone is much more than a "cell phone" -- it is a developer platform where thousands of applications can be created that are fun to use and that drive demand for the iPhone. The six basic elements of the platform are the iPhone itself, the network (AT&T in the United States), iTunes, the "App Store", MobileMe and, most importantly, the applications.

With the announcement of more than 1,000 API's (application programming interfaces -- these are commands that programmers can use to cause the iPhone to do something; sense a GPS location, sense that the iPhone was shaken, etc., it is a certainty that there will be many thousands more applications for the iPhone. To get an app you go to the app store. To get the app on your iPhone you have to have iTunes. You are tied to Apple. It is what the industry calls a "lock in". It used to be that when you needed a new cell phone you would go to the store of one of the operators and pick from a multitude of brands and phones. Now that you are hooked on various applications and the data in them you need to have a phone that can work with iTunes which is where your apps and your data are stored. Guess how many brands work with iTunes? Just one.

Apple's new OS 3.0 offers 100 new features including a search capability across the entire phone contents, cut-copy-paste, multimedia email, and landscape mode for all the apps. The most stunning and useful for me is the ability to do gmail in a landscape view. The difference in productivity is huge. There will be a lot of smartphone competition from Palm, HTC, Dell, Nokia, Acer, and many others. The phones will all have great hardware features but it is the app store that ties things together. The other guys are building their own app stores but chances are that they won't do it as well as Apple. Apple knows how to make things easy and people seem willing to pay a premium for the ease of use and they don't seem to mind being locked in.

Crowds waited in line to get one of the new iPhones this week but I practiced what I preach and ordered mine online. I was on the road quite a bit as previously reported but when I got home on Friday afternoon, the little brown box from UPS with an iPhone 3GS in it was waiting for me. Every aspect of the iPhone is quite impressive. The packaging is discreet. No indication that it is a high value item from Apple. After opening the box and turning it on the iPhone showed an animated diagram that made it clear that the next thing to do was to plug the iPhone into a computer that was running iTunes. After doing that a dialogue appeared showing my mobile phone number and asking me for my zip code and last four of the social security number. After entering that information the dialogue said that it was contacting AT&T for activation. Then it said that contact had been made and that activation was underway. I looked over at the iPhone and it said it was activating. After a few seconds it said that activation was complete. I took the iPhone out of the cradle and called my home phone. It rang. I then put the phone back in the cradle and iTunes asked if I wanted to sync my data -- photos, music, email settings, home screen photo, dozens of applications, etc.  It took an hour or so to restore all of these things from the latest backup of the iPhone 3G that was being replaced. After it completed, everything worked just fine including all the new goodies that come with the iPhone 3GS and OS 3.0. like voice dialing and platform wide search. It was a totally seamless experience. No technical expertise required. No dumb messages like we have been getting for years from Windoze. No phone calls to wait in a queue.

One of the few negative aspects of the new iPhone 3GS is the pricing. If you are a new customer you can get the 32 GB iPhone 3GS for $299 plus the normal (onerous) AT&T fees. If you are a long term loyal iPhone-AT&T customer (as I have been since the first iPhone two years ago) then you have to pay $499 instead of $299. How can this be? It is irritating millions of customers -- including me. The price gouging of more than 100% is being questioned as to whether it is ethical, sensible, reasonable or even legal. The FCC may be launching an inquiry as to the fairness of the "lock in".

The logic for the premium is that the iPhone 3G S does not really cost $200. The $200 is just a down payment and you pay the rest through the remaining months of your contract with AT&T. I have had an iPhone since day one and have paid the price of being an early adopter. But the arrangement between Apple and AT&T requires that i pay even more. If you haven't paid for enough months then you have to pay a premium to get the newest iPhone early. Most iPhone fans (including me) consider it gouging.

The next step was to sell the iPhone 3G on eBay. What to ask for it? A logical view would be to ask roughly $100 for it but looking at eBay listings it seemed people were asking and getting more. I looked at it from the perspective of a rational buyer and concluded that $169 was the ceiling. For $199 you could get a new 32 GB iPhone 3GS so I started the auction on my 16 GB iPhone 3G at $10 and set a "Buy Now" price of $169. Within less than 10 minutes my phone was sold. All things considered I am very happy with how things came out and now I have the latest and greatest features of the iPhone 3GS. I hope the lady in Minnesota who bought my iPhone 3G enjoys it as much as I have.

At some point Apple will be considered the "evil empire" -- they already are by some people. It goes in cycles. In the late seventies many thought IBM was taking over the world. Then in the eighties it was Microsoft. Then Google. Apple may be next and then probably someone we are not thinking about yet. For right now, Apple is on a major roll with a market capitalization of around $125 billion, just a tad less than GE. For me personally I have greatly enjoyed the many smart phones I have had over the years but at this point I can not imagine giving up my iPhone.

Other patrickWeb stories about the iPhone

Gadgets , Mobile , iPhone June 21, 2009 08:54 AM

Busy Week

Add category , Conferences , People June 19, 2009 07:03 PM

Net Attitude

Net Attitude has reached a new status - the entire book is now available to read for free here on patrickWeb. This is something I have wanted to offer for a long time but in the prior years my publisher would not allow it. I believe studies have shown that books that are made free to read on the Internet actually get incremental sales -- sales of the book that would not otherwise have happened. Perhaps the protective attitude (lack of Net Attitude) of publishers is why they are in the soup.

I wrote Net Attitude during the summer of 2001 and it was published in November of that year. The timing was not good as at that point business, management, and technology books were not selling much for obvious reasons. However, the book was published both in the U.S. and also outside the U.S. in Chinese, Italian, and UK English. After roughly 30,000 copies, the book sold out, althought there are some new copies floating around and selling on Amazon. There is also a version available for the Kindle and now the new version right here on patrickWeb. My thanks to Andy Grachuk at JingotheCat Web Design for creating the Web compilation.

2001 was a long time ago but not as long ago as 1994 when Tom Brokaw appeared on " Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" to talk about "Early Reports About the Internet". I was in Las Vegas at the conference that Brokaw refers to and the camera caught me with a few comments (see video). Bill Gates got most of the attention, understandably, but it is sad to hear that Brokaw called Gates one of the "founding geniuses of this new technology". That same year both Bill Gates and I gave presentations at an IDG conference in Paris. Gates said the Internet was too slow and too insecure to be used for business. Needless to say, my speech represented the opposite point of view and was in the same camp as Eric Schmidt (then at Sun) who said that every business, large or small, will be on the Internet.

Thanks to Julie Moran Alterio,Technology and business reporter at The Journal News for telling me about the Brokaw video. She called it "A blast from your past". Meanwhile, with regard to Net Attitude....

Read the book online for free
Buy a hardbound copy at Amazon
Buy the book for your Kindle
Read the latest at the patrickWeb blog

June 14, 2009 09:31 PM

IBM Happenings: May 2009

The month of May was another busy one at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list here and an index for prior months here. A major focus area in addition to a "smarter planet" is an effort using IBM's World Community Grid "virtual supercomputer" -- consisting of the spare computing power of more than a million personal computers around the world -- to allow laboratory tests on drug candidates for drug-resistant influenza strains and new strains, such as H1N1.

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch will use the World Community Grid to identify the chemical compounds most likely to stop the spread of the influenza viruses and begin testing these under laboratory conditions. The computational work adds up to thousands of years of computer time which will be compressed into just months using the vast computing grid. As many as 10% of the drug candidates identified by calculations on the grid will hopefully show antiviral activity in the laboratory and move to clinical testing.

Influenza claims the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world each year and the current H1N1 virus outbreak is a reminder of how quickly influenza mutates and how easily new strains of the virus emerge. Traditional methods of flu vaccine development can not keep up with the high rate at which viruses change. The World Community Grid can run virtual chemistry experiments to determine which of the millions of small molecules can attach to the influenza virus and inhibit it from spreading. There is the potential to make the world a better place because of this project.

If you want to donate unused computer time to the World Community Grid, take a look at worldcommunitygrid.org.

Other IBM Happenings for the month

Healthcare , IBM June 9, 2009 06:08 PM

Special Libraries

I am really looking forward to visiting with the Special Libraries Association at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. on June 17. The SLA 2009 Annual Conference will be attended by 2,500 - 3,000 Information Professionals from 75 countries. "IP's" are library and information science experts -- people that are vital to libraries, information centers and corporate information and knowledge resource departments. I will be part of the closing panel at the conference where there will be a discussion about the future of information -- where it will come from, how it will be managed, how people will retrieve it and use it.

The closing conference panel will be moderated by TV newscaster Judy Woodruff. The panelists will be Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Robyn Meredith, and yours truly. Judy Woodruff was born in Oklahoma and has had a distinguished career as a television news anchor and journalist. I remember her as chief White House correspondent for NBC and as host of Frontline on PBS. Neil deGrasse Tyson is also a television personality -- not typical for an astrophysicist. Among many other distinctions, Dr. deGrasse Tyson hosted PBS's educational television show NOVA scienceNOW. Robyn Meredith is the author of the New York Times best-seller The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What it Means for All of Us.

You might say it is eclectic group -- I am certainly humbled to be part of this panel. Judy Woodruff will have a heyday asking questions and no doubt will bring out insights that the audience will find of value. I will not be surprised if I get asked about Twitter, the mobile Internet, the semantic web, and Internet security. I also look forward to learning from the other panelists.

Conferences , People June 2, 2009 04:15 PM