The Electric Bicycle: Crazy, (Not So) Lazy, Lots of Fun

I'm writing this on Saturday morning.  I'm a bit sore.  On Friday, I rode about 35 miles from San Francisco down to Woodside on a bicycle.  I've been thinking about buying a new electrically assisted bicycle so I wanted to try one out.

Finding any place that would rent one was tough, at least on the Peninsula south of San Francisco.  In the end, I found a place in San Francisco that would rent me the particular type of bike that I was thinking about buying.  They also (reluctantly) agreed to let me take home the charger so I could use it for several days over the weekend.

So, on Friday, I rode the bike from the rental place to my office in the city, on to a dentist appointment in Glenn Park, and the back to Woodside by way of Skyline drive, the sawyer camp trail, and then Canada road.  The last stretch - 30 miles, took me about 3 hours and left me pretty sore and exhausted.

How could I be sore when I'm riding an electric bicycle.  First, no matter what you do, the seats on bike are clearly not made for normal people.  More importantly, I made a mistake in picking Skyline drive.  These bikes are electrically assisted.  That means you still have to pedal.

And with Skyline drive, you've got to keep pedaling and pedaling and pedaling to get to the top.  I was totally unaware of just how much elevation you have to gain on that route.  5 miles into the route, the battery was down below 50% and I was imagining and truly exhausting slog home.  Indeed, these electric bikes are heavier than regular bikes, so the most basic level of assistance just tends of even out the effect of the heavier bike.

At the top level of assistance, you can really cruise.  Even uphill, it feels like you're riding on flat terrain.  It's quite thrilling and would have been more fun, had I not been worried about not making it home with any juice left in the battery.

Once I crossed the top of skyline, the gentle downhill the rest of the trip was relaxing, beautitful, but still tiring.  By the time I got home, there was still some juice in the battery, but none left in my legs.   Overall, a great experience and I can easily see how using it will actually make you fitter.  It's not nearly as exhausting as riding the bike without assistance, but it's no car ride.

Great Views On The Ride Down, Photo Flickr, CC Marc Smith

Technology Enables The Runaway Sales Force

Companies have long wanted to get a grip on their sales forces.  People who like being in field like being there, in part, because they don't like being in the office.  They don't like managers looking over their shoulders.  They don't like cadence calls or excessive paperwork either.

The best sales people combine good interpersonal skills with deep subject matter expertise - bringing more than just golf skills to the sale.  These people are very valuable.  They understand their own companies.  They understand the sales process.  They understand their clients.  And they are able to work under a high degree of deadline pressure.

But holding on to good sales people is hard.  The same independent spirit that makes them effective on the road, also makes it hard for companies to hold on to them.  And when a good sales person walks out the door, they take their skills and contacts and rolodex with them.

Companies have a long had a variety of methods for trying to get a grip on the pipeline and relationships that sales people bring to the table.  Sales Force Automation systems were designed to vacuum up contact information for buyers.  Company e-mail addresses, phone numbers and cell-phone numbers all contributed to some degree of lock-in.  With the contact information, a company had a decent chance of keeping customer relationships in a transition.

A new generation of web services is making it harder and harder for companies to keep control of that information.  Facebook, Linked-In, Skype, and Google-voice are giving individuals large numbers of ways to keep in touch with clients and maintain their networks - all outside the enterprise control.  Today, it's never been easier for a sales person to walk out the door and take their entire personal network with them.

Is there anything companies can do to combat this trend?  First, they can keep their eye on what makes their organizations a good place to work.  Second, they can build their own links to customers - creating social networks and groups of facebook.  There's risk in that too.  Consumers have long used the web to talk about their purchases.  When enterprise customers start doing so more and more, it will hard to keep comparisons and news of problems from spreading quickly.  This already happens on many online bulletin boards, but it could spread even faster inside enterprise-sponsored social networks with clients.

Free Spirits: Sales People Like to Hit The Road. Photo Flickr CC, ManPikin

New York Hilton - Times Square

At the Hilton Times Square in New York. I don't know what they did, but this place has great sound proofing. Really quiet!

Let's Build Microcell Networks

I've  had an AT&T microcell sitting on my desk for two weeks now.  I've had all kinds of stupid solutions over the years to get cellular coverage in my house.  None of them have worked particularly well.  I was skeptical about the Microcell and prepared to be disappointed, but so far it seems to be working reasonably well.

My first effort was a wireless radio repeater.  With one antenna on the room and another in my office, I did indeed get five bars, but calls dropped and it didn't seem to work reliably.  I suspect that there was never enough shielding between the two antennas to avoid feedback, despite placing them at opposite ends of the house with a wire across the roof.

My second try was by using T-Mobile's UMA service.  It worked quite well, and I particularly liked being able to use it like a local phone overseas with good WiFi coverage.  The solution was not without problems.  WiFi seemed to garble the calls and switching between UMA and GSM coverage happed frequently and often resulted in dropped calls.

The AT&T solution is not perfect.  There are no good transitions from micro-cell to the main network (yet) but the quality of calls and coverage is good.  If your DSL is poor quality, you can also set the system to operate in priority mode, prioritizing your voice traffic above other traffic.  So far, I have not needed to do that.  Voice quality is good and data is not used at home because the WiFi connection.

I've also added my neighbor to my Microcell and for the first time in years, he's been able to get coverage at his house.  And I think this might just be the wave of the future.  For people who buy Microcells, why not use them to knit together extended coverage for the wireless network.

The fact is that some areas are never going to be covered well.  A recent remark that it takes up to two years (or more occasionally) to approve a new cell site in San Francisco (read) means that progress will be slow.  With user-generated coverage, we could close these gaps in many areas quickly.  The key elements of the solution could be as follows:

• Fix hand-offs between microcells and with the main network
• Validate coverage and backhaul performance for new microcells before admitting them to the main network (e.g. if you are connected to unreliable broadband, you cannot join the shared microcell network)
• Cap data transfer speeds on microcells so that multiple local users do not have a big impact on usable DSL speed.  (For people with bigger connections like Comcast's 50 megabit, it should not be material from phones, but if you have AT&T's own local DSL at 6 megabits, it could be a real issue)
• Reward users to agree to make their microcells open to all other network users with a discount on their monthly bills

This could lead to very rapid coverage improvements in urban and suburban areas.  Of course, adding a couple million cells to your network could have an impact on your switching functionality and systems.  I don't understand how it could be fully implemented, but it can't take any longer that it takes the city of San Francisco to approve a new cell site, can it?

San Francisco.  Beautiful.  Hard to cover.  Photo: Flickr cc Paraflyer

How I Put My Airport Car Service On An SLA

My background is in business strategy and IT consulting.  I'm used to seeing some pretty ridiculous SLAs that are imposed upon suppliers by customers.  Five nines for e-mail?  As one my friends said, many people confuse replying to e-mail with doing work, but they are not the same.  Many big companies make demands upon suppliers that defy logic.

I have long viewed those SLA demands with suspicion, in part because they are often coupled to punitive contract terms that seem to reward customers for finding ways to bring systems down.  That said, I've just had my first experience with SLAs tied to punitive conditions.  And it worked spectacularly, I'm embarrassed to admit.

I travel frequently to and from the airport.  I've got lots of ways to get there and back and I've probably tried about every limo and taxi service in the bay area.  Price and reliability seem somewhat correlated.  Cheaper rates (about $65 from my house to the airport) are associated with low levels of reliability and drivers who always want to be paid in cash.

Higher rates sometimes result in better service, but not always.  Pick-ups are particularly tedious because I live just outside the main service area for SFO.  Apparently, this means any trip to my house should be a meter-and-half rates.  This makes car services cheaper, especially late at night when finding a flexible cab driver is much harder.

I've settled on one driver who has been consistently pretty good.  To make him better, I tried imposing an SLA.  The terms of the SLA were as follows:

1. Driver must be there within 5 minutes of my arrival at the curb.  Driver must take responsibility to tracking my incoming flight.
2. Being between 5 and 10 minutes late results in a $15 reduction in the ride price
3. More than 15 minutes late and the ride is free
4. Driver must have exact change for a cash fare paid in $20 bills and the receipt must be pre-filled in with the correct date and amount or I round down to the nearest $20 or pay by credit card.

Since requesting this SLA, I've had 100% on-time performance.  I no longer get blank receipts that I have to fill out on my own, and I've never had trouble paying with $20s.

Given the tremendous success of this SLA, I'm looking at some new candidates where I can impose service level standards:

• Wireless service
• Children
• Airllines

;)

Taxi Cab, Data Center?  Put an SLA On It. (Photo CC Tim Pearce)

Geek Protest At Comic Con - Just Hilarous

Hilarious Geek protest at Comic con, article complete with great pictures.

Bookmark: http://ping.fm/hIY8G

You can find more of prbrody's bookmarks at
- http://ping.fm/jNDgg

New York Times Brilliant Article on the Web, Technology & Forgetting

Today's New York time's has a wonderful article about how the web enables us to never forget, and why that could be such a bad thing.  The article (link) shows the impact of the never-forgetting-web on people, privacy, and their relationships and jobs.

It also talks about how we might work around it - technological and legal solutions that would help us to forget or, over time, bury negative information about each other.  What I liked most, however, was the discussion of what happens if we can't forget.

If we cannot forget, we must learn to forgive.  We all make mistakes, and many of them are pretty bad ones.  That does not mean that we are bad people, it means that good people do bad things from time to time.   I don't think there any people who don't do bad things.  If you subjected someone to enough scrutiny, I am sure you can find reasons to criticize or embarrass.

And if we can eventually see all the bad things that everyone does, and we cannot find a way to forget them, then we must find a way to forgive each other.  And maybe that wouldn't be the worst possible outcome.

Lots of Data.  From the Flickr collection of See Ming Lee (CC)

Service Subject To The Limitations of Our Enterprise Software

I really think this is the new disclaimer that should be added to the already overlong click-through agreements and signature pages for consumer products. It seems more and more these days, companies are making offers they cannot actually deliver upon.

Take AT&T, everyone's favorite whipping boy lately (along with Apple). Sure, you can have a family plan with two phones on it. But not if they are from different parts of the country. Verizon and T-Mobile have no such problem, but at AT&T, it seems, if you're not in the same region, you cannot have two phones on the same family plan.

Being on a family plan would save me $30 per month for two and about $60 per month for three of us and $90 per month for a family of four iPhone users on unlimited plans. One of my phones, however, is from a different region so I'm required by AT&T to have a different account. That cuts me out of $30 per month in savings every month, $330 per year and $660 over the life of a two year iPhone contract.

You won't find this limitation anywhere in AT&T's documentation, it's something you only find out when you go to port the numbers in at the time of activation, after you've ordered the phone. AT&T just says they can't do it.

In defense of AT&T, I can say that their customer service reps have done a terrific job, within the limitations of their systems. I've been impressed with the courtesy and professionalism of their staff, as well as their efforts to make things work. Lots of supervisors have gotten on the line and tried to figure things out. An AT&T rep even got on the phone with me to call Apple to try to resolve a separate deliver issue. Not because I complained, but because reps were going up the chain of command trying to resolve problems.

So far, no resolution, however. So, in the meantime, maybe companies should start disclaiming liability in the event their enterprise software can't cut it.

So much fine print, so little time

Image from Flickr - SunDazed - cc.

Adjusted for Delays, United Tops Ontime Performance

I think they're vastly underrated, but even I was surprised by this result. Great data crunching.

Bookmark: http://ping.fm/M68rx
prbrody's notes: United is America's most reliable airilne.

You can find more of prbrody's bookmarks at
- http://ping.fm/PPIox

Yes, You Can Take Photos On A Public Street

Police and security guards are acting beyond their authority when they try to stop public taping and photography.

Bookmark: http://ping.fm/n22Ht
prbrody's notes: Stopping intimidation of people taking photos.

You can find more of prbrody's bookmarks at
- http://ping.fm/NBspb

Tablet Tsunami Ahead

Bookmark: http://ping.fm/UJNaV
prbrody's notes: Tablet tsunami ahead. Lenovo LePad.

You can find more of prbrody's bookmarks at
- http://ping.fm/WmECW

Why Can't You Just E-mail Me The Bill?

For many of the companies that I use, a visit to their web site usually includes a request to go "paperless" and to "autopay".  It's a great deal for these companies.  They get to take my money out of my bank account, usually a few days before the bill is due, and they skip on sending me the bill.  It reduces the chance I will notice errors in their billing, it gives them extra cash float, and it saves them money.  My reward for being so generous to these companies?  Absolutely nothing.

Most of the time, I click the button that says "no thanks, I'd rather destroy the rain forest with paper bills".  It's out of spite but it's also because I want my bills delivered to me.  I don't want to have to go to the company's web site to get a copy of my bill.  I want it sent to me every month before it's due.

If these companies offered me the opportunity to receive these bills as PDF files each month by e-mail, I would accept that gladly.  It's as effective as mailing me the bill, but costs nothing.  It does not require any special infrastructure either, just an SMTP server.

So why don't companies do this?  I have no idea.  I'm guessing they think e-mail is just not secure enough.  Technically, that may well be true.  But that does not make it an insurmountable issue.  Encrypted e-mail solutions are widely available and stripping a bill of information that might be sensitive is also possible.  Is it really a big issue if someone hacks my gmail account and find out how many watts of power I consumed last month. 

While e-mail is generally not encrypted the truth is that it's remarkably hard to intercept.  Finding one phone bill in a sea of viagra solicitations is going to be difficult and if someone wants that information badly enough, there are other ways that are probably easier.

Image Flickr, CC, from Pink Sherbet

Wiped Out!

Exhuasted from Andrew's super mega bed time tantrum but too wired to sleep now. The joys of a 2 year old.

Think AT&T Is Overloaded? That's A Taste of What's Coming In Emerging Markets Very Soon

We like to complain in the US about how AT&T's network has been overwhelmed by the iPhone.  But despite some big challenges, several reports have shown that AT&T's network is not so terrible in most places and it's data service is actually better on some measures than Verizon.  Indeed, all four US mobile networks set a very high standard in terms of service and reliability.  In Europe, Korea and Japan, high population density and even higher wireless service prices fund an even higher standard of service.

At the other end of the spectrum are markets like China, India, and much of Africa.  In these markets, wireless pricing is a fraction (and I mean a small fraction) of US pricing.  Per minute voice rates are 80% lower than in the US and data pricing is also much cheaper.

Carriers in these markets have to work hard to make money.  They operate simpler infrastructures and they accept lower standards of service as well.  And they stretch their infrastructure over a much bigger user base.  As a result: even without large numbers of smartphones, networks in emerging markets are already jammed to capacity.

Right now, a small core of urban professionals in China and India are walking around with iPhones and Blackberries.  In the coming 2-3 years, that will change dramatically.  Just as the first cell-phones transformed communications in these markets, cheap smartphones and connected tablets with revolutionize access to the internet as well.

At $500, the iPad is just within reach for the middle class in emerging markets.  Apple enjoys a hefty margin on that device - somewhere between 30-60% depending on the model.  While Apple isn't going to be engaged in any slash and burn price war, the same won't be true in the Android space.  In 2011, we should start to see large numbers of Android tablets in the $200-300 price range and prices will drop from there.  And those devices will quickly become ubiquitous in the developing world.

The demand for mobile broadband that will come with these cheap connected tablets will push many network operators in emerging markets into rapid consolidation.  In these price sensitive markets, raising rates may not be a feasible option without dramatically affecting demand.  The alternative will be rapid consolidation to drive out cost and fund a rapid transition to LTE.

This will create a huge new set of opportunities for the world's mobile network equipment providers, primarily Ericsson and Huawei.  It could also reset the cards in the global market for smartphones and tablets.  Right now, most of these devices are bandwidth hogs - architected as if bandwidth was free.  But it doesn't have to be that way.  The Blackberry consumes a fraction of data used by an iPhone.  Implementing some of the same highly efficient approaches used in the Blackberry in the more general purpose and consumer devices could give the company that does so a significant competitive advantage.

Indeed, the strongest play might be an integrated solution from a network equipment operator and device maker, using both device smarts and network intelligence to manage data consumption.  So far, no signs of such a solution in making, however.  So next time you're in India or Shenzhen, bring some patience with you, because you data connection is going to be very slow.

 Overloaded here, there, and everywhere: (Photo Flickr CC, Chuck Coker)

UA893, JFK to SFO.

Self Assembling Your Own Office Suite

Before Microsoft office, you bought different software applications from different companies.  A word processor here and a spreadsheet there.  In that dark age, you even had to pay for e-mail.  Today, most people use a single, integrated office suite: Microsoft Office.

Going forward, however, that may become less true than in the past.  While I don't doubt that Microsoft Office will continue to dominate in some areas, I think the glory days are past and competitors are picking off Microsoft's office suite applications one at a time.  Companies may still buy the whole suite, but increasingly, it's being reduced to it's original core: Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

Microsoft OneNote is perhaps the most vulnerable part of the office suite.  Online applications like Evernote and other collaborative services have done a far better job of moving into the cloud and accepting input from a huge range of devices and solutions.  Evernote today is less of a program and more of platform, gathering data from all different sources and then indexing it and syndicating out across multiple devices.

The next victim in the Microsoft Office herd could be Outlook. While many people swear by Outlook, Microsoft has been unable to keep pace with the rate of change in messaging and task management.  Services like Remember The Milk do a better job of enabling collaboration, integrate GPS with tasks, and run across a wider range of devices.  Indeed, like Evernote, RTM is more web platform than specific application.  And e-mail itself on outlook feels weaker than Gmail these days, with it's rich and evolving set of lab functions and third party plug-ins like eTacts.

Will MS Office go away? Probably not.  I can't live without Powerpoint.  But I use the other applications with  ever less frequency as web services increase the emphasis on collaboration and integration over local client functionality.

This trend is furthest along in small businesses and with consumers, and further with Mac Users, who have long had poor office suite choices, than it is in large enterprises and on PCs.  But where consumers and Mac users lead, enterprises usually follow (if rather slowly.)

Remember The Milk is one of my favorite new "office suite" applications. Photo from flickr, cc 

Ok. Just linked my ping.fm to twitter, facebook, and my blog. Ubiquitous, interactive, online never-ending narcissism. Is that healthy?

Crazy or Lazy: Should I Buy An Electric Bicycle?

So, I'm seriously considering buying one of these electrically assisted bicycles.  I live up the side of the hills in Woodside, California.  (Not very up the hill, as prices go up the higher you get!).  A bicycle ride down to Palo Alto is a nice easy down-hill.  Not so on the way back up. 

The cruise down and back seems like a nice reasonable workout for the weekend.  However, if I just want to go for a quick trip to the supermarket or grab a coffee in Palo Alto, it's a bit much.  I can't afford to arrive at my meetings dripping in sweat or do three work-outs a day.  Still, I like the idea of biking more and driving less.

Hence the electrically assisted bike.  I can zip around without using a car and I can tune up or down the level of effort based on whether or not I need a work-out (at the weekend) or I’m just avoiding using the car.  Compared to a high quality racing bike, prices of $2,000 to $2,500 seem reasonable, but that's a lot more than a $600 hybrid I normally ride.

Is anyone actually using one of these and has experience to report?

The Trek 7200+, one of the bicycles I'm looking at.  Photo from Trek web site.

AT&T's New 3G Microcell, Now Hiding Beneath My Desk

The idea behind the AT&T 3G is so outrageous, it would irritate any normal person. Pay $150 to AT&T to buy a device that fixes gaps in their appalling bad coverage. Provide your own broadband coverage to make the device functional and then buy minutes and data gigabytes to use your device on your own broadband connection when near home. Sounds good, I'll take one. The whole thing reminds of a review I read of the very first portable Mac back in the 1980s. The reviewer summed Apple's first, very bad, effort at a portable PC: "Overweight, overpriced, undepowered. Where can I get one?".


And so it is with the AT&T 3G Microcell. In order to give my mother an iPhone for her Birthday, first, I had to fix the coverage holes in AT&T's network. AT&T claims that they cover 97% of all Americans. It seems that several times a day, I pass through the other 3%. That includes my house.


Set-up was pretty easy and my test calls seem to be pretty good. I have Comcast internet. If I were Comcast, I'd screw all the VOIP packets going to AT&T, so I'm not sure how will it will hold up. I have the 50 MB package (50 down, 5 up) so I think I should have good bandwidth even when I'm watching a movie on Zediva.com or TV on Hulu. Latency tested online seems low too.


I tested the microcell and found I had five bars throughout the house (except when I hold the iPhone "incorrectly", in which case the bars drop down to 1, though call quality seems unaffected). I also was able to use the MicroCell all the way down the street, which was handy too.


In a week, I should hear from my mother how well it works. If she likes it, I will switch her number over and consider getting one for myself. I think it's unconscionable that AT&T charges for both the device and the service when connected to your home broadband line and it seems silly that we're all busy installing microcells when WiFi is everywhere.


One more odd thing I noticed about the Microcell: you can restrict the user base. On the one hand, I like that option - you don't want just anyone mooching your broadband. On the other hand, most phones use relatively little bandwidth and I'd like the option to let anyone who's around use my Microcell - and kind of reciprocal coverage improvement model. If thousands of people buy Microcells, we could all collectively fill AT&T's coverage gaps. A kind of "crowdsourcing" for your network.


AT&T's 3G Microcell, Now Hiding Beneath my Desk.  Photo jtjdt, cc

Looking for A Nice Home PC Monitor - You're Probably Out of Luck

Now that I'm going to be working more in the US and (I hope) a bit more at home, I've decided to go off and see if I can find myself a nice monitor for my home office.  Sadly, this has proven to be a very difficult experience.  My first stop was the Apple store.  Lo and behold, the perfect montitor was on display.  The Apple 24" Cinema Display for the MacBook.  This enormous high resolution monitor looks amazing.  


It's not just the clean lines and shiny case either.  The monitor itself has an incredibly bright picture with great color rendering.  I'm told that it uses the same high quality panels they use in the iPad - designed for high color and ease of viewing across a range of angles.  Just $900.


I headed over to Fry's to compare.  It seems that $900 is rather steep for a 24" monitor.  It turns out the cheapest monitors are closer to $200 for the same size display and similar resolution.  So, why after a weekend of window shopping, is my desk still bare?


In a word; FUGLY.  That's the only way to describe how most monitor companies make their products.  Are they aware that there are materials and colors in this world than black and plastic?  It does not appear to be the case.  I would gladly pay $400 for a Samsung or LG monitor, double the typical low prices, if I could find something that was not so hideous.


Instead, I find myself seriously considering paying $900, about 4X the comparable price, for Apple's gorgeous display.  As a piece of electronics, it's ludicrously overpriced.  As a piece of furniture I have to look at every day, maybe not.  I paid $3,000 for a dining room table.  I paid $500 for each chair around it.  Yes, I could have gotten a plastic hair at Wal-Mart for $19.  But financially-stretched drug-dealer is not the look I was going for in my house.  


In the TV business, high style has become almost a commodity.  Samsung, LG, and SONY all make a huge variety of thin and stylish TVs in a huge range of colors and finishes.  They should apply just a bit of that skill to their monitor businesses.  Until then, I'll be seriously contemplating that new Apple Cinema display.




It's not just a monitor, it's a piece of furniture in your house.  Picture from Junapol, cc

Sensitively, Carefully, Making Fun of Outsourcing

Can it be done?  This fall, NBC will make the effort.  I've been to India more than 20 times and I count many Indians among my best friends.  I laughed out loud several times in this NBC trailer.  It's careful to make fun of Americans more than anything else.


I fear, however, that all the best moments have already been used in the trailer and the pilot and that it's downhill from here.  Still, the pilot looks good.  You can watch it here, but only if you live in the US (geoblocked by IP address)

Surging Wages in China Are Good News for the World

Surging wages for manufacturing staff in places like Shenzhen and increased worker discontent in China looks to me like good news for the world.  According to the New York Times, workers are demanding, and getting, raises of as much as 50% in China's major manufacturing regions like Shenzhen (link).

Simple electronics assembly is one of the first businesses to boom in most export-driven economies.  It helped lift up Japan and Korea in the 1970s and 1980s and it has been a huge engine of growth in China in the 1990s through to today.  As wages rise in coastal China, it will push manufacturing inland to more impoverished areas, bringing with it higher incomes (relatively) and huge capital investments.

Eventually, this wave of low cost manufacturing will work it's way through across Asia and into Africa.  Manufacturers have largely avoided the continent because the cost and difficulty of doing business in countries with very poor governance and bad infrastructure.  Eventually, however, they may have little choice and when that happens, it could have a radical effect on region itself.

Every big wave of industrialization leaves behind a richer and better off country that moves up the ladder economically.  Even if Japan is struggling today, it's still a far cry from the country that existed before the rise of it's manufacturing industry.  With it's cheap components and minimal capital requirements, electronics is always the first industry to move when wages rise, and so it's often at the leading edge of economic growth.

The Seagate Factory in Wuxi, from Robert Scoble, CC

iWork for iPad Frustratingly Close, But not Finished

For the last two months, I've been trying to find ways to make use of iWork for the iPad.  I'd really like to use Apple's slick iPad office suite to create and edit documents.  I even purchased iWork for my Mac with the idea that this will improve integration.

Sadly, no luck.  There's no doubt that iWork is far and away the most polished office suite for the iPad.  Documents2Go is good and does a particularly good job in managing Microsoft Office formats, but it lacks the touch-perfected interface that Apple offers with iWork.

iWork itself, however, doesn't quite do it either.  Some PPT presentations just won't open and even presentations imported from iWork on the Mac are mangled as well.  Without the ability to smoothly and reliably move content between the two devices or be assured that formatting will stick, it's hard to make a switch and really invest further time and effort.

What's more, I have to admit, fingers are clumsy.  Perhaps it's just my lack of fine motor skills, but precision is much harder to achieve on the iPad than on the Mac at home.  Using the Mac's touch pad, it seems easier to manipulate images and select items.  It's particularly frustrating trying to actually select and delete items.  I don't know what the right combination of touches and squeezes seems to be.

So, for the moment, my iPad is confined to viewing media and content and taking handwritten notes (thank you Penultimate) but not heavy duty editing of powerpoint documents.

Using the iPad still not quite right for prime time at the office.  Image from Myuibe

As True As Ever: Today's Abuser is Tomorrow's Average User

AT&T surfs the Data Tsunami

One of the nicest things about AT&T's replan of their mobile data rates is that it has brought a lot of new clarity to the discussion about mobile broadband consumption.  So far, based on the all the online dialogue I have been reading, two key things have been uncovered:

• The lowest consumption tier is too low for most people, pushing them into the higher rate category or leaving them with significant overages
• The highest rate category is fine for almost everyone and for those on the $30 unlimited plan, switching will save $5/month

But, based on the latest report from Nielsen, that may not always be true.  According to a new report from Nielsen (link) the top 1% of smartphone users are consuming about 1,800 MB per month today, just under AT&T's bandwidth cap.

More importantly (see chart below), those same users are consuming twice what they did a year ago.  In fact, at just about every level of consumption, the difference between 2009 and 2010 is about 100%.   A year from now, users in the top 5% of so will be bumping up against their bandwidth caps and another year on as many 20% of all users will be bumping up against those caps.

Source: NielsenWire

It's likely that AT&T will have to adjust these caps going forward.  The deployment of LTE in the next two years makes this feasible, but even without that, competition will demand it.  With T-Mobile and Sprint both offering unlimited consumption on their 3.5G and 4G networks, it will be hard for AT&T and Verizon to avoid that competitive position.

Surfing image, Flickr, CC

United Airlines: No, You Cannot Have A Diet Coke

Sitting on the plane last week waiting for departure, the flight attendant came around offering pre-departure drinks.  Orange Juice, Sparkling Wine, or Water.  Would it be possible, I asked, to have Diet Coke.  "No" said the flight attendant.  Eventually, realizing that this might be really a rude way to speak to a customer, he explained that they cannot open the bar until after take-off.

I travel about 400,000 miles a year.  I ask for a Diet Coke just about every time I am offered a pre-departure beverage.  About 90% of the time I get one.  About 10% of the time, I get an explanation that like "we can't open the bar until after take-off."

Not being an expert on aviation regulations or a flight attendant myself, I don't know if they're just violating the rules for me or if they're lying. Truth be told, as with so many "regulations" that are announced by flight attendants, they are not really rules.  They are just make things easier for themselves.

No Diet Coke for You

Creative Commons Photo, Flickr

You Think Your Helpdesk Sucks?

At my company, the help desk has several suggestions for people with problems:

• Reboot your machine
• Re-image your machine

The first suggestion cures 75% of all issues and everyone (these days) should know to try that before calling in.  The second suggestion, however, is like nuking a city to deal urban blight.

Stil, it sounding better after reading about the tech problems of Russia's latest batch of accused spies in the US.  Imagine being forced to us an Asus EE PC and having to wait months for desk-side service?  The article is BoingBoing and it's hilarious.

Read.

Moscow: A long way to go for tech support

From Flickr, CC

Penultimate for the iPad Gets Even Better

Penultimate is already my most-used iPad application, and in release 1.2 it just got even better.  Penultimate already had smooth and clean writing that was great to use.  The big innovation in Penultimate, however, has been "wrist protection."

Capacitative displays, like the iPad and iPhone, "feel" all touches from a person.  They can't tell the difference between a resting palm on the screen and a stylus attempting to write something.  The result: while there are dozens of applications for the iPad that enable drawing or note taking, most of them must be used without resting your palm on the screen.

Penultimate fixed that in release 1.1, recognizing most palm touches.  In the newest version, they've added some bells and whistles and fixed bugs.  Most importantly, they've fixed one of the last major usability issues: the accidental touching of the next page and erase functions on the bottom on the screen.  This happens when your palm is resting, leading to page advances while you're writing a sentence.

I have bought most of the different note taking applications on the iPad but this is the best one by far.

Screen shot from Penultimate, (Cocoa Box Design):

WIll In Memory Change ERP Implementations? I Think So

SAP is set to announce a shift in the company's approach to transaction systems this year- from systems based on relational databases to those based on holding all main transaction data in a system's Random Access Memory (RAM). SAP is calling this technology "In Memory" and it could signal a big change in the environment for enterprise IT systems. The argument for his technology is speed. RAM is very very fast. Relational databases stored on storage networks are slow. If you hold all major transaction data in RAM, your ERP system can become incredibly fast and responsive to queries. You can easily parse and present data in near real time and respond to queries. If companies actually shift to In Memory ERP systems, the result could be a big change in the enterprise IT landscape. For a start, most BAO systems that extract data for analysis might not be needed. Why extract data for faster analysis, if you can do almost any analysis you want in near real time? Similarly, most advanced planning and scheduling systems, including SAP APO might no longer be needed. Most APS systems are in-memory systems that extract only a subset of enterprise data needed for quick supply chain analysis. As the price of memory declines, the possibility of this vision coming true increases. While traditional hard drives have proven resilient for consumer use, enterprises have a proven willingness to pay for performance where they can find a true ROI. The power and speed afforded by an in memory ERP would generate just such a return. Is it possible. Larry Ellison, now a hardware guy and a software guy thinks not. Certainly, for it to work, companies will have to learn to exercise some restraint over their transaction volumes- and learn to use the archiving functionality in the ERP. If I had to place a bet, it would be here. APS systems were the first big IT systems to use a purely in memory model, and the result was a powerful new set of analytical and business tools. To make APS work, you had to carefully select the data you would pull from the ERP into memory. That was ten years ago, probably 5 cycles of Moore's law. Today, why not just use it all? If this vision of the future comes true, then there are profound implications for leading software companies. Databases and BAO offerings might need to be rethought. There would still need to be BAO, but now, instead of working on our database, we would need to access the ERP in memory through an API, giving much more control to SAP. In services, we would need to work much more closely together between ERP implementation and BAO and supply chain planning, since all activities would draw upon the same system. The rise of in memory could also lead to another enormous ERP implementation boom. It is likely that current ERP systems will need to be reimplemented or restructured to take advantage of this technology. This is no simple technical upgrade and it could also require huge amounts of new hardware. When i worked at i2, I installed demand planner at Compaq. In the quarter we completed the install we needed so many high end servers with maximum memory, we reduced their revenue for the quarter by taking up those servers. And that was just demand planning. Such an enormous demand for hardware might further accelerate the transition to cloud computing, as companies look for ways to get in memory ERP benefits without spending too much up front. It's a long chain of events from the first in memory ERP to global re-implementation of ERP and a shift to the cloud. Right now, it's all speculation, but if we ignore it, we risk finding ourselves unprepared for a very different future. The Economist Article. Photo from Creative Commons:

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Dude, You Got A Dud: Crowd-Sourcing Your Supply Chain Strategy

Nothing invites scrutiny like secrecy.  Apple does a great job of fanning interest in their new products.  That scrutiny goes far beyond features and functions - it delves all the way into engineering designs and supply chain planning.  Thanks to bloggers, readers, and observant and interested experts, we probably know more about Apple's supply chain than any other technology company in the world.  

All that transparency is probably doing a lot of good at Apple.  Since the iPhone 4 came out, antenna issues and shattering glass have received tremendous attention.  Apple has had to be fairly clear and forthcoming about the causes of these issues.  One liners on how to hold the phone notwithstanding.

Let's contrast that with the lawsuit against Dell published in yesterday's New York times.  (Link).  Without the disclosure required by law, it may be that few people would have ever found out about the defective parts.  It seems it took Dell years to deal with the issue - something that would never have happened had all those component failures been blogged about intensely.

There a lesson here and it’s not about keeping things secret.  If you're not Apple or a scandal-plagued celebrity, there's a good chance that you won't get lots of extra scrutiny if you try hard to keep secrets.  For regular companies, increased transparency is a good thing, not a bad one.

Picture from Flickr, CC