There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Technology (page 4 of 60)

Schmoozing on-line with the Junior League may or may not get you a listing, but TwitBooking is corporate networking on steroids.

Spam from ARMLS:

On February 13, 2012, at a Special Called Meeting of the ARMLS Board of Directors, Bob Bemis tendered his resignation notice as ARMLS CEO, to accept the newly created position of Vice President of Partner Relations for Zillow, Inc. in Seattle.

Good on him. I’m thinking the retirement plan might be better, although I wonder how Bemis will fare in a non-DMV environment. I might start to worry about an echo-chamber, too, if it were me at the helm, but I don’t have much to do with social media — or with that kind of networking — to begin with.

Two years ago, when the iPad was introduced, I said: “Google and MicroSoft can’t even copy genius.”

Vide licet:

With the iPad and its closed software universe, has Steve Jobs committed an unforced error — unnecessarily created an obvious opening for Google and MicroSoft to compete?

Today, Google says: “If you throw enough crap at the wall, sooner or later something’s gotta stick.”

Today, Microsoft says: “Pigs will eat anything.”

The revolution is not the technology.

This is the revolution: The consumer is now in charge.

Learn to love it — or get liquidated. PT Barnum’s day in the marketplace is done.

Debunking Artificial Intelligence — while programming your computer to be almost as smart as your dog.

Everything you’ve been taught about Artificial Intelligence for your whole life is false. AI researchers are not frauds, I don’t think, but they’re exuberant when they talk to reporters, and the reporters are ignorant, thoughtless and brash. In real life, AI is Siri, which can reliably lead you to the nearest closed-down super-market. In your imagination, AI is C-3PO, who can lecture you on Chinese lithography while clobbering you at backgammon.

This is the truth — and telling the truth about AI is as rash as telling the truth about Anthropogenic Global Warming or abortion, an incitation to a frothy wrath: There is no Artificial Intelligence anywhere — nor will there be any time soon, if ever. This is a case where new theory really is required. The theories currently being deployed in AI research will produce ever-more-competent Siris — which achievements will be hailed as “proof” of Artificial Intelligence — but they will never produce any actual intelligence.

Why? Ontology and teleology, of course.

AI fails because it is not actually attempting to model intelligence but simply to mimic the effects of intelligence. In this respect, AI is a cargo cult, and its argument of “proof” is the same as that of any cargo cult: Post hoc, ergo propter hocafter this, therefore because of this. If the destination turned out to be a super-market, even if it’s a bankrupt super-market, then Siri is “intelligent.”

Just that much is an error of identification. When you play chess against your iPhone, this is not “man versus machine,” it’s you versus a team of programmers — and they’re cheating, which is how they win. If you could pop out to do 50,000 pre-programmed calculations per move, you’d kick their program’s ass.

It is that error of identification that produces all the absurd AI claims in the popular media: Someone is doing something differently! It must be a miracle! So far, there is nothing in AI that cannot be adequately explained as human ratiocination. The fact that software is written in advance does not mean that the process is driven by anything other than human intelligence. The Read more

Building the perfect beast: A round-up of my recent technology posts.

Caveat lector! The words you are about to read are unvetted, unhomogenized and unlicensed. One of my longer-term projects is to write essays on reasons why you should dismiss the things I have to say. I’ve only done two so far: You should dismiss me because I don’t care if you do and because I can see right through you. There are zillions more reasons, whether I get to them or not, but the one that matters most, in this context, is this one:

I am completely without credentials.

That’s a statement I could quibble with, but I don’t want to. There is no limit to the caviling to be found on that road, and I don’t care, anyway. I am writing about tools that could and should exist, and if you want to dismiss what I have to say because I don’t fit your profile of a nerd — so much the worse for you. The world is awash in a billion blends of stupid, and credentialism is hardly the worst of the bunch. Looking outside yourself for your intellectual self-defense is the parent of that error, though, and that one is deadly.

Whatever. I think these ideas are fun. I’m looking at a much bigger picture, philosophically, but the technology I’m talking about here is a way of effecting those larger ideas in everyday life. You might plead for better organization — and, truly, there is a book scattered around in this stuff — but I believe reading these essays will repay your effort.

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There’s more. Here are the essays I wrote about the iPad, at the time of its introduction. Entries #2 and #8 are the best of the bunch, in my opinion.

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That’s a lot of reading, I know, but what else are you going to do with your time — watch football?

Q: Your smartphone has just been stolen. What should happen next? A: Your phone should get the cops on the horn and lead them to the thief.

Here’s the truth of your life: Your so-called smartphone is pretty damned dumb. For one thing, it’s always interrupting your work with phone calls, wiping out whatever screen you happen to be working on. It does this because Steve Jobs, genius though he was, never quite wrapped his head around the idea of the cell-phone function as just another arrow in the quiver of your smartphone’s capabilities. What you actually want, when your phone rings while you are working at something else, is notice that you can drop everything to take the call — or not — without the phone making that decision for you.

I can do more: There is no reason for caller ID to be as stupid as it is. I want Heidi, of course, a full-blown database look-up when a new caller shows up on my phone. But lacking that, a truly smart smartphone would at least Google the number and display whatever information that search suggests about the caller.

But once we’ve gone that far, we get to an important question: Why is your smartphone shipping phone calls to you as phone calls? Data is data, and there is no longer any hardware or software reason to transmit phone calls by Ma Bell’s antiquated protocols. There may be cost or efficiency reasons, but it remains that a file-server-based “switchboard” could be a whole lot smarter than present-day cell-phone vendors seem to be. A lot of the Constance the Connector ideas would be best implemented on a truly smart phone system — one that pre-manages your calls before anything in your pocket sets off a racket.

But here is an entirely new way of thinking about smartphones, one that lets me solve a problem Jim Klein threw my way way back in the last century: Your phone can manage your online security better than any other means devised so far. With the right hardware and software, your phone, together with Sarah and Constance, can manage all of your financial transactions with perfect security and impenetrable encryption. Your phone can identify you — by way of your Constance profile — to Read more

How to solve the video multiplexing problem you didn’t know you had.

I love this news story, an exposition of the Supreme Court exposing its irrelevance:

In an entertaining hour-long episode, Supreme Court justices on Tuesday considered the government’s power to regulate expletives and nudity on the airwaves.

Why is this amusing to me? Because along with many other twentieth-century electromagnetic phenomena, broadcast television is dead.

Every word in that claim is important. “Television” — meaning audio/visual content primarily intended to entertain — is still with us, although it is likely to merge with other forms of on-line content.

But “broadcast television” — TV transmitted over the airwaves, one sender, many recipients — is a dead-letter today, and it will be progressively less important — and progressively less profitable — with every passing year.

The reason is simple: The future of entertainment is iPad-style video:

The iPad is the ultimate perfect television. On-demand. Stop and start at will. Goes with you when mom says you have to go to soccer practice. The iPad is the perfect entertainment-consumption device: Personal, portable, programmable — and infinitely extensible.

You may watch this video content on a device as small as your phone or your wrist-watch or on one as big as your living room wall, but this is the future of video in your life.

Broadcast — one-size-fits-all, limited-choices, isolated in a frozen time-schedule, can’t stop it, can’t rewind it, no easy way to research or cross-reference it, stuck on one very stupid device, hag-ridden with commercials — all of that is dead. It was a kludgey business model when it was the best we could do. By now, it’s a dinosaur — so we should expect it to endure a loud but inescapable death.

Note, too, that your cable company’s very-stupid on-demand service is also headed for the morgue, as are slightly better on-demand services like Netflix. The future of entertainment video is your friendly neighborhood search engine — augmented by the kinds of software services I have been describing lately.

The reality of your life is that you are going to watch what you want, when you want, on whatever device you choose — and you are going to have many more devices to Read more

iPad observation #2: Find a bigger dead-pool: The iPad eats everything.

Kicking this back to the top. This is me, writing just after the introduction of the iPad — two very short years ago. At the time I wrote these essays, every so-called “expert” on the nets was insisting that the iPad was an unforced error. I was right, they were wrong. But I’ve been right about a lot more than I’ve seen in the marketplace so far. Note this, for example: “I hate the remote controls for electronic devices, and one thing we should insist on, going forward, is that every wired device in our lives should be IP-addressable and fully-controllable by internet connection.” It’s interesting to revisit these ideas now, to see where we’ve gotten — and to see how far we still have to come. –GSS

 

Real life at my house: We actually like to watch television, if watching TV means watching DVDs (lately almost entirely Netflix DVDs) or watching selected cable shows. This usually happens very late in the evening, usually when we’re pretty much exhausted.

But: TV at home used to be TV with laptops. Now it’s TV with iPhone. In six months, it will be TV with iPads — or just iPads on the sofa.

Take careful note:

Broadcast television is dead, as is broadcast radio. Let’s free up the bandwidth now. The iPad is the ultimate perfect television. On-demand. Stop and start at will. Goes with you when mom says you have to go to soccer practice. The iPad is the perfect entertainment-consumption device: Personal, portable, programmable — and infinitely extensible.

As was inferable from my first observation in this series of posts, the annual Christmastime frenzy of cheap-shit electronic children’s “educational” toys is dead. Anything that anyone in your home does while laying stomach-down on the carpet will be done on the iPad.

As I pointed out the other day, Microsoft, Amazon and many, many other hi-tech vendors are dead. (I have a quality/integrity argument to make about this, as well, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.)

Despite the iBook store, books are dead. I love literature and I love the drama, but you don’t have to spend seventy-five bucks Read more

Google discovers what computing is actually for: “In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.”

Across all products is important. Across all devices is vital.

Drudge and the privacy geeks are going typically apeshit, but Google is playing my tune:

“If you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services,” Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering wrote in a blog post.

How might that work?

For instance, a user who has watched YouTube videos of the Washington Wizards might suddenly see basketball ticket ads appear in his or her Gmail accounts.

That person may also be reminded of a business trip to Washington on Google Calendar and asked whether he or she wants to notify friends who live in the area, information Google would cull from online contacts or its social network Google+.

Hell, yeah! Those are the kinds of jobs I want from Sarah, your software secretary, but I can show you a very cool Constance the Connector connection here, as well.

How about I start a music service that seeks to sell you music that you will probably like and don’t already own. “Don’t already own” is an easy database from iTunes or whatever. But “will probably like” requires analysis — algorithm as art — and that’s what makes my business model work. To you-as-end-user, it feels like I know you, like we’re high-school buddies whose friendship is built around grooving to the same tunes.

How could I do that? Let me see your YouTube history, not just what you picked but how many times your replayed particular songs. Let me see your Amazon.com shopping history — especially the things you come back to again and again but don’t buy. I don’t need to know you. You already know you better than anyone else ever could.

That’s what we’re actually talking about, you collecting facts about yourself for future reference. Like a bad comic, Google can make anything sound dirty, but there is nothing wrong with you getting more of what you want — better, faster and cheaper.

Do you understand? Your fears, assuming they are real, are misplaced. The U.S. Government now has the lawful authority to assassinate you at will in Read more

Product idea: Constance the Connector.

It’s been a few weeks since I started talking about Constance, and since then I’ve come up with a completely different way of thinking about operating systems. There are three players who could profit from my thinking — Apple, Google and Amazon — and I would be more than happy to share my thoughts to the first one of those three who salutes.

Meanwhile, I give you Constance, which is in some ways the logical counterpart to Heidi, the self-maintaining CRM system I started talking about last August. Constance the Connector is a server-based service that maintains your handle — a topic we have discussed before.

So: Here are ways you can know of me:

  • By name
  • By street address
  • By phone number
  • By email address
  • By Twitter handle
  • By social media profile
  • etc.

For now, if you want to address me by one of those means, you have to know the specific proper noun to be used — my actual name or my current email address. You are responsible for maintaining that information, and everyone who wants to make contact with me must do the same redundant and error-prone maintenance.

A Heidi-like CRM can do some of the maintenance by means of assiduous, arduous data-base mining. But if I don’t make my new street address public somewhere, your of-course-I-haven’t-forgotten-about-you greeting card is going to bounce.

There’s more: The way things work now, I have no control over who addresses me or how. I’m not just bitching about spam. I want cold-calling salespeople to go straight to voicemail — and when I have determined that I don’t want to hear from a particular caller again, I want never to hear from that person ever again.

So think of me this way, instead: @gswann. That’s my handle: @gswann. Sending em an email? Send it to @gswann. Want to try to get me on the phone? Dial @gswann. Snailmail? Send it to @gswann, you dinosaur. Want to pull my LinkedIn profile? It’s @gswann.

That much is just the handle idea — but with a twist. What we’re doing with the handle @gswann is sending a request to the Constance server for the current mission-critical contact information associated Read more

Search is Dead, Long live Search

John Battelle has some interesting thoughts on search. Google’s 2004 message to investors was:

Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.

Google has abandoned that commitment. Just look at the screen real estate on Google that now is committed to paid content – AdWords now accounts for one-third of the space on your screen.

And now Google is including social results with the putatively objective results it used to provide. So if your potential clients are searching the web while logged into a Google account, their first-page results will include items endorsed by people in their Google circles.

And whether you get it or don’t, or like it or don’t, a lot of content is being created on Twitter and Facebook that isn’t systematically reflected in Google Search results, either because Google doesn’t prioritize it or because Google doesn’t have the rights to crawl it.

For me, as a Raleigh criminal lawyer, figuring out how to make my presence more social is difficult. Even if people get good results with me, they tend not to want to praise me, unless pseudo-anonymously. They may quietly confide in friends who ask that I’m a good lawyer.

But they’re unlikely to announce on Facebook or on their Google Plus pages that I got them a “not guilty” on their DWI.

I haven’t figured out how to solve that problem.

But as realtors (and mortgage brokers, etc.) you ignore the social aspect of search at your peril. If you’re banging away trying to raise your Google PageRank, then welcome to 2005. And you’re working your way to dominate your search results for your locality, then welcome to 2007.

You may be missing what your competitors have realized: being endorsed by past clients, friends, etc. can push your placement above competitors, and those endorsements may in fact be the added juice that gets someone to choose one service over another.

Does this mean search is dead? Not by a long shot.

Many Read more

Paging Sarah: “If there is a lesson in this story, it is to make sure your cell phone is off when attending a concert.”

Suppressing your phone’s ringer at the symphony is a Sarah job.

If we start with the presumption that a smartphone/tablet/laptop/desktop operating system, ideally, exists in a sort of client/server symbiosis with servers in the cloud — and hence with all servers in the cloud, by concatenation (that is, by XMLation) — then your phone should be aware of appropriate phone protocol wherever and whenever it might find itself. You should not ever have to tell it not to ring in a concert hall.

I’ll get to Constance when I can, but I don’t think anyone here is all that interested. How do I know? Because the paragraph just above this one describes a revolutionary computing paradigm, one that exists nowhere right now. More fool I. It’s raining soup and not one of us has a spoon.

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Product (category) idea: Antoinette the anticipator.

I first thought of the idea of an anticipator as hardware, I kid you not. The early 1980s? Software was dear in those days, but early computer-on-a-chip chips were cheap and abundant. There still would have been a software component to an anticipator, of course, but not much.

Here’s what I thought about then: Anything that could be monitored by signal processing — as, for example, the communication between a micro-computer and its peripheral devices — could have an anticipator in-line, monitoring all the signal traffic back and fourth. By maintaining a probabilistic database of past events, the anticipator could, over time, evolve strategies for anticipating resources likely to be called for in the near future, and, using otherwise dead time on the computer’s data bus, cache that data in advance, eliminating time lost on fetch requests made in real time.

Wow! How kludgey our world used to be! In the bad old days, there were pre-fetch routines built into operating systems, but they were a brute-force solution to a vast array of very small, fussy problems. An anticipator would strive to be optimally efficient and mission critical by dealing only with the specific data most likely to be requested.

An example? If a font required for a document is not stored on your printer, the printer must fetch the outline data from your hard disk. It’s a small job, on its own, but you could maximize your productivity from the printer if those fetch calls in real-time were ameliorated by intelligent pre-fetching. The anticipator could both maintain the most-often used outlines in the printer’s memory as well as anticipating exceptions to the everyday rules — for example, by keeping the boss’s favorite Christmas font on the printer from Thanksgiving through Christmas. That implies real secretarial smarts, but it’s simply probabilistic database mining being perfected over time.

So what about now?

Antoinette the anticipator harkens back to Heidi and Sarah, and to Constance, which I haven’t gotten to yet.

Imagine an anticipator function in Sarah that, when Sarah figures out that you are going to be late for a meeting, sends out all the appropriate notices, all Read more

Product idea: Sarah, Heidi’s helper in the real world.

The big buzz in the mobile computing biz is augmented reality, your phone or tablet takes in a scene and then echoes back to you what it can infer from an image and its GPS coordinates, compass direction, etc. This may be cool, or it may be cool like a QR-code, an idea whose time will never come.

Augmented reality will be that much cooler when it’s like Arnold-the-Terminator’s eyes, but that illustrates the key defects of the idea, as it is currently implemented:

Augmented reality is not done continuously but only on demand, and only in static and affected ways.

And, in consequence, it’s not doing anything terribly useful, except possibly in vertical market applications.

But reflect that an iPad can run continuously for 10 hours without recharging. Next year’s models may double that number. Soon you will get reminders to plug in, or your devices will find ways to provide for themselves while you’re asleep.

So instead of a truly amazing augmented reality presentation on the Black Hills of Dakota, how about a piece of software that watches you and your life all the time, and augments your activities however it can.

This harkens back to an idea I’ve brought up before, a hypothetical self-maintaining CRM called Heidi:

An email comes in over the transom. The spambot says it’s not spam and the sender is not already in your CRM database, so let’s extract as much information as we can from the email. With a name and an email address we can probably get the sender’s full contact information, and possibly a whole lot more.

Make that first contact a phone call instead. Caller ID is lame, but Google is not. From the phone number, can you get back to a name? A location? From those, can we effect the same kind of searches discussed above?

There’s more: Once your CRM knows a name, it should be watching for any changes in publicly-available databases that should be reflected in your private CRM database. That is to say, your CRM should be maintaining itself.

Sarah’s going to monitor every phone call, of course. She or Heidi should be doing all Read more

The Reformed Broker: “Five Reasons Facebook is Over”

It’s probably wrong for me to talk about Facebook at all, since I simply do not get it. I have been trading ideas on the nets since there was only one net, but I have never understood small talk in real life, much less in HTML with loosely-connected strangers.

Even so, I have been convinced all along that Facebook (and all purely-social media, for that matter) is a fad, the Pet Rock of the microsecond. Doesn’t matter to me, either way, since I will never get small talk. But I found this article on Facebook’s forthcoming IPO interesting:

Users lose interest in the faddish social games – The dirty secret of the early days of Web 1.0 is that pornography was the only revenue source that allowed companies to survive until real business models evolved. Social gaming has thus far provided the same service to Web 2.0. We are currently in an Air Pocket of Retardedness where kids and housewives have figured out how to submit their credit card information for utter stupidity like Farmville and Mafia Wars but haven’t yet realized how dumb they are for having done so. It is only a matter of time before the spell wears off and people realize how utterly ridiculous it is to be buying virtual crops and power-ups with money that can otherwise be used in the physical world. Remember ringtones? How about The Sims? Or Garbage Pail Kids or Pogs or Pokemon or Texas Hold’em or Beanie Babies or any of the other “flush your money down the toilet” fads of the past 20 years? These things pass and we eventually laugh at ourselves. That moment is coming soon for social games that require continual charges on our credit cards.

I like this:

The initial appeal of creating a Facebook profile for the average person was that the ability to code or “understand” the web or HTML was completely unnecessary. Which was brilliant, it allowed users to generate a page with next to zero knowledge about the ways of the web. The problem is, as Read more