All posts by Jim Muttram

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The Long Nose of Innovation

30th December 2009 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

I came across a very insightful article by Bill Buxton in Business Week called The Long Nose of Innovation which basically argued that innovations which make a difference are in fact based on technologies which have been around for a while. Buxton argues that innovation is really about the application of things already in existence as much as it is about inventing entirely new things.

This resonated with me as I thought about something Ray Kurzweil, the futurologist, said in a recent lecture (which I can’t now find!). He argued that since technology is growing exponentially, if you are building something (in his case computer translation software) you should design for what computers will be able to do by the time you are ready, now what they can do now.

It seems to me you could distill some good advice from these two: look for technologies and capabilities that are around now, but which have failed to reach their potential because computers or mobiles aren’t powerful enough – then design something which will be truly impressive once the power catches up – which it will.

Augmented reality – likely to be all the rage in 2010 – falls into this category. The technologies have been around for ages (camera, compass, GPS), but it wasn’t until they were combined into relatively cheap, powerful phones like the iPhone and Android that they could take off.

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Is bootstrapping killing innovation?

9th December 2009 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

A lot has been made of the game-changing way new start ups can now test their ideas with very little money using free, online tools and pay-as-you-go computing like Amazon’s EC2 and S3. But now Clive Thompson, writing the latest issue of Wired, has challenged that idea, suggesting that this bootstrapping fashion is limiting the vision of new start-ups.

These days, Valley entrepreneurs tend to pick a cool (but niche) idea; bootstrap it with minimal staff, open source code, and rented server space; and then build a user base until some lumbering technosaur buys them up……This system is more fiscally responsible than the con-job IPOs of the dotcom boom — but it favors entrepreneurs with modest ambitions.

However, says Thompson, maybe it’s just that truly revolutionary ideas are just plain hard to spot.

People sniffed at Google because they thought AltaVista and Infoseek had already “solved” search. Microsoft, too, was seen as a joke: Real men built hardware, not software. And as for eBay — dude, who’s gonna buy someone else’s cast-off Weebles?

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Testing the Zemanta recommendation engine

7th December 2009 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

Image representing Zemanta as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

I read a post today about Zemanta on Techcrunch and I thought I would try it out. I’ve downloaded the Firefox extension and I’m curious to see just how good the recommendations will turn out to be. The in-text links seem to be limited to proper nouns, which is a pity as Wikipedia definitions would certainly be of real use. The related articles are easy to preview and select and the related images are very easy to use, but I’m not sure how relevant they will turn out to be (the Zemanta logo may turn out to be the exception).

I’ve tried to customise the selection with my own Flickr account and blog RSS feed but so far I’m not seeing anything recommended from these sourced – maybe because my session is half way through. So far, I must say, so good…

Battlestar Galactica and the art of the future

28th November 2009 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

I’m a little late to the Battlestar Galactica craze having only in the past few weeks got around to getting series one of Battlestar Galactica Reimagined. And I must say we are all hooked. I love the way that the 70s series has been re-worked in the mid-noughties.

The ships and the space special effects are updated to appeal to an audience used to high-quality fabrication. But I love the way the essentials of the social fabric and the more mundane technology – writing implements, telephones, food and drink etc – have been frozen as they were imagined in the 70s. (The one thing that seems to have changed out of all recognition, for some inexplicable reason, is the playing cards.)

As a consequence they say as much about the 70s as they do about the future – more actually. So, smoking is a common pastime, drinks are served in glass and people are contacted by being called across to old-fashioned telephone handsets (mobile phones were nowhere to be seen in the 70s). And paper and pencils are still very much state of the art.

I was reminded of the presentation at d.construct this year by Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel which argued that design in Sci-Fi was absolutely conditioned by the norms of the time it was written. If they ever wanted proof of their theory – this is it.

Of course, not everybody believes even the star ship version of the future – consider this for a well-reasoned argument against the Battlestar Galactica premise.

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Changing Broadband Providers

28th November 2009 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I changed my broadband provider to Virgin from BT, with whom I had been for the past 10 years. And I didn’t just switch broadband – I changed my landline and my TV package at the same time.

The catalyst for this move?

I’ve actually been quite happy with BT for quite a few years but a few months ago I noticed that the speed I was getting on my supposedly 8mb broadband line was very low – around 1.5mb quite often. I reported it (through BT’s very efficient Indian call centre). After a few days of tinkering around the speed did seem to improve. But then the line started dropping – sometimes four or five times a day, and the line was down for quite long periods of time.

I reported this and they looked into this problem too. Again, the Indian support centre looked into it. This time, though, they said they found the problem. The FUP (Fair Use Policy) had been invoked – apparently we had been using too much bandwidth so our connection had been artificially slowed down and that was causing the instability. I was told that if I contacted the FUP team they would lift the restriction as it was causing technical problems.

So I called. There was a very polite woman on the phone who explained that our usage was quite a bit above average and asked if there was anything particular we were doing with the connection. I explained there were five of us in the house using the connection, two of us playing online games, but nothing special. Then she asked if we had an Xbox. Yes, I said. That explained it, she said. Xbox Live uses a lot of bandwidth sending information back and forth.

So it seems, that if you have an Xbox you need another provider – BT wants the kind of users who use the internet for email and browsing – maybe so that the usage patterns don’t interfere with their plans for interactive BT Vision – interactive TV.

Anyway, I’m happy with my move and with my 50mb broadband – as are the hard-core gamers in my family.

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The mouse that roared?

15th November 2009 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

Jeff Jarvis has a go at teasing out the facts behind this weekend’s kerfuffle over the thought that Rupert Murdoch might pull out of the Google index. Murdoch said in an interview with Sky News Australia that he would pull his sites out of Google index once they went paid-for.

Jarvis points to research done by German consults The Reach Group (TRG) which tried to quantify what impact the threatened withdrawal of 148 German publishers in the so-call Hamburg Declaration would have on Google. Their conclusion: barely any. Jarvis believes the same would be true for Murdoch.

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Google Wave

24th October 2009 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

It’s been about a week since I first started playing with the preview of Google Wave. The first problem you encounter when you receive your coveted email invitation is finding anyone else who’s got an account that you want to communicate with. In my case, I found that were quite a few of my colleagues with accounts and we quickly hooked up in an experimental wave.

The interface is reasonable, if a little complicated, until you get used to it, and the way it incorporates real-time chat into “email” is really impressive at first – until you realise that everyone in the wave can see your appalling typing and corrections as they happens. That can be painful.

The biggest problem, though, is maintaining the momentum. Most of our communication takes place in email or Twitter or Facebook (sometimes through Twitter) and the challenge Google will have to overcome – and it’s a big one – is inertia. How to get large swathes of people to transfer their time and attention to Wave when they already have to check email, Twitter, Yammer etc.

Obviously, it’s early days and very few people are allowed to use the system. The acid test will be when it is open to all. When Google launched Gmail the product took off very rapidly because it was a superior email client, and crucially because it was interoperable with what had gone before.

Wave however is not interoperable with email. Can Google change the habits of the populace at large? I’m not so sure.

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The power of Twitter

18th October 2009 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

I returned to my computer this afternoon and noticed Google Wave saying “you’re offline – connect now” – which I couldn’t as clicking the button did nothing. What I did next is likely to become my natural next step in situations like this – I searched Twitter for “Google Wave Offline” and it seems the problem is widespread. Mystery solved.

This is the “real time web” in action – and as has often been noted this is a very significant development. The new web is mobile, people-powered and instant.