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Amber Case
Geoloqi.com
#AmberCase
  • Mobile device are larger on the inside: 
    • they have thousands of people and relationship in there. 
    • Printed out number of photos on a computer: massive stack 5 feet height, eight feet long, eight feet wide.
  • Printed out Facebook wall: Took up all the walls in a very large room
    • One other civilization did this: the Egyptians covered their walls with hieroglyphs.
    • But the Egyption stuff did this 3,000 years ago, and it’s still here.
    • But what if your Facebook account is deleted? It’s all gone in a second.
  • Your computer becomes an external brain.
    • You become an archeologist trying to search through a dig site to find the information you want, as more artifacts come in filling up the dig site. 
  • After her TED talk, got 22,000 emails.
    • We’re not just under information assault, but we get information jetlag: if we pay attention to twitter, we lose track of email. If we pay attention to email, we lose track of Facebook.
  • When the landline phone first came out, you go into rooms, have a private conversation with someone else.
    • People thought that everyone was going to go into rooms and never come out. They were concerned that society was going to break down as a result.
  • Steve Mann
    • human cyborg
    • started with 80 pounds of equipment to do augmented reality
      • location aware data
      • remove undesired brands from view in supermarket
      • replace billboards with useful data
      • do facial recognition and prompt with data about person.
    • Then it was 40 pounds, then 20, then 10. Now it’s all in a headset that does a laser projection onto his eye.
  • Mika Satomi
    • Has a vest that is a video game: you are getting a massage while the person doing it is playing a video game.
    • People want to play games more than they want to be farmers. Yet they like to play farmville. What if farmville was a videogame in which you were controlling telebots that were actually farming?
  • Haptic location: wear a belt to know where north was.
    • After weeks of wearing it, you gain a new location sense: knowing where you are, how far you are from things, where are things are from each direction.
  • Location enables invisible buttons:
    • when you get within a block of home, your lights come on.
    • when you come to a given location, you get messages.
    • when you are close to where you are going, the people you are meeting get a message.
    • automated behaviors that don’t require visual/tactile distraction.
  • Geoloqi
    • Gives you automated data when you walk up to a bus stop
    • Automatically displays the wikipedia articles near you
  • The interface disappears
    • Actions are reduced
    • queries are eliminated
  • You don’t have to ask for information.
    • You don’t have to load apps
    • Or discover new stuff
    • or remember to load a website
    • or navigate its interface
  • Layers
    • Don’t Eat That: Warns you if you are too close to an establish that receives a low rating
    • Pinball layer: tells you how many pinball machines in establishments.
  • Downsides
    • Battery Drain (most people have used location aware apps, and then had to disable them because of battery use.)
    • Lots of technical challenges: no network connectivity, lack of GPS signal, etc.
  • So the next generation: Geoloqi
    • Solves some of these core problems
    • An ecosystem where you don’t have to solve these problems
    • A turnkey geolocation solution
  • Partnering with three companies: 
    • appcelerator
    • factual: has database of sixty million datapoints
    • locaid: has access to 350M devices in their network

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Discoverability and the New World of Book PR
#SXSW 
#NewWorld
Moderator: 
Cal Reid @CalReid
Senior News Editor
Publishers Weekly
Panelists
Barbara Henricks
@Barbara Henricks
President, Cave Henricks Communications
Hollis Heimbouch
@HarperBusiness
Vp, Publisher, Harper Business
Rusty Shelton
@RustyShelton
President Shelton Interactive
  • There are at least 300,000 new titles. It’s not possible to promote or even report on books in the same way.
    • Anything with a screen is a now a chance to read a book
    • Seemingly inexhaustible supply of book content.
  • We’re inundated with opportunities to discover new talent. 
    • The effect of finding authors much earlier in their career, means there is much more work to develop the author. It’s the same work, just more emphasis.
  • In the age of digital retail, are there clear strategies for helping readers find their books
    • Many journalists get 100 books a day, 800 emails a day.
    • Challenge: cutting through the noise.
    • Where once you sent out hundreds of books, now…
    • Really dig in and find an audience of 50 people that are really relevant, and send them really customized pitches.
  • Most exciting time to be an author.
    • At intersection of three industries that are all rapidly transforming: book publishing, journalists, and PR.
    • In 2008, 1 in 4 media jobs evaporated.
    • And that was before the recession. Now maybe it’s 1 in 2.
    • So journalists have far less time to cover anything.
    • Journalists: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
    • When a journalist is looking for someone in your speciality area, making sure that you can be found when they are looking for an expert. Google is your friend. Instead of pushing info out to journalists, be interesting enough online that you’re the obvious answer when the journalist is going out.
  • Really use online reviews and interviews to build the swell and momentum. 
  • Authors must have this relationship with journalists long before they submit their final manuscript.
  • An author should start building their audience the minute they conceive of their book
  • Instead of going directly to a huge audience, go to the influencers who already have that audience, and build relationships with them. 
  • We’re in a bookstore 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
    • Several years ago: 59% of people who went into a bookstore knew exactly what book they were going to buy before they went in.
    • But now we’re in a bookstore all the time. 
    • And there is infinite supply
  • There are 11,000 business books published each year.
    • The NYT is cutting their number of reviews of business books from 24 a year to 12 a year.
    • It’s not a viable strategy to pursue a NYT review.
    • You have to pursue non-traditional media, and you need to create as many opportunities as possible.
  • Start the viral effort on your own.
    • If people ask how they can help: a review on Amazon, a blog post, here’s five questions I could answer for you.
  • Good PR helps bad books fail faster.
    • Ten years ago it took a long time for people to discover when a book was bad.
  • Give people an action item, an interactive campaign, that encourages people to extend the campaign: You want something more than just “it’s a great book” (although that is good).
    • A Thousand Gifts: great book in which author talks about a thousand gifts in her life. It naturally encouraged readers to do the same, which meant that it wasn’t just a single mention of the book (“it’s great”), but a thousand mentions of the book, as readers publicly articulated a 1,000 gifts for themselves. 
    • You want to build a movement
      • (Note to self: Is there a movement around artificial intelligence and robots?)
  • As authors, it’s particularly important, especially for 1st and 2nd book: there’s a real finite time when there will be publicity around the book. it’s the first 60 to 90s.
    • if you go on the air to give an interview: you want to mention the book, but you also want to encourage people to connect with you online.
    • Not just “go to my website”, but some kind of offer:
      • an assessment
      • an online test
      • free material online
    • When you think about website and social media presence, you want to grow an audience in your topic area, even if they aren’t ready to buy a book today.
  • If you don’t take social media presence seriously, you will need to rebuild from scratch for each book that comes out, because you’ll have lost interest in between.
  • How does the rise of reading on mobile devices help or hinder?
  • Questions
    • Q: How about a limited budget for online advertisements?
      • Rusty Shelton: Facebook advertising. You can get people to like the page, creating long term relationship. You can target very specific interests.
      • Hollis: Facebook. On a limited budget, it’s not possible to establish enough impressions with traditional media.
    • Q: Are book videos helpful?
      • Most effective is an interview that’s been broadcast somewhere. It’s short, it shows people.
      • For a very compelling author, a book trailer. It can lead to national exposure.
      • Not helpful: long speeches. The media doesn’t have the attention span for something more than 3 minutes.
    • Q: What about social networks besides Facebook and Twitter?
      • Pinterest: coming up with creative ways to reach your audience: young females is a great reader audience. Pinterest is like a visual twitter. If you give people a way to extend the book with quotes or action items.
      • Many people using Pinterest toolbar, which pulls the images to the front: As author, you need to examine what happens, what the images are, if they are helpful.
      • Google Plus: Have authorship attached to your profile. Google’s search pulling in Plus profile data to display next to articles in search results. Read up on the code needed to ensure that this happens.
    • Q: What about authors that don’t want to do all this work?
      • Most authors that don’t have social media presence come in with bias against it. But within a couple of weeks, these people are striking up relationships.
      • Don’t pull people kicking and screaming to it. 
      • “Will you commit to give an hour a week?”
      • Then work to make that as valuable an hour as possible.
      • If they won’t do any social media, do things that feel traditional:
        • podcasts
        • webinars
    • Q: I use Pinterest for wedding pictures and parties. 
      • That’s hard to connect a book readership to.
      • But you can do: quotes that inspire them. more text based.
    • Q: What would drive, someone who didn’t create a book, to promote that book? What truly inspired them to promote a book?
      • It’s passion: When you are inspired by a book, then you want to promote that book.
    • Q: ? (something around what’s coming and how to prepare)
      • Publishers who are signing up for books now, don’t even know what capabilities they will have in 12 months when that book comes out.
      • Perhaps in the future: it will be more like a subscription to someone’s knowledge: that they’ll keep updating and providing more/newer information.
    • Q: If I’ve got an interview with an author, how should I best use that time?
      • It’s rare to have an interviewer who read the book, and very rare to have 15 minutes.
      • It’s tough to get into the plot, because most people will not be familiar with the plot.
      • People want to know what the author is like.
      • They want to know how the book relates to current news.
      • The more opportunities there are out there, the more it stands out that someone like you is taking the time to read the book. They will make them very
    • Q: As an editor, we used to cut lots of stuff from the book during development. Now we save that content to use, as supplemental content.
    • Q: DRM limits discoverability – with a paper book I can lend it to a friend. 
      • I think there are other ways to accomplish what you’re talking about without tackling DRM. Sampling and content syndication. Give people free chapters online. Give people a chance to read for free. That’s easier than trying to tackle DRM.
    • Q: Why should we expect authors to be great marketers?
      • We don’t expect them to be great marketers. We do expect them to be great storytellers and to create really interesting, smart content. And the publisher and marketing team can figure out the best way to get those stories out there.
      • We expect an author to not only write a book, but to continue to create awesome related content to build the communication.
      • People write books because they want to have an audience, they want to be heard and to be seen as an artist/idea person. If you want to call that marketing, you can.

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Jared Spool
The Lives of Links
#linklives
  • trigger words:
    • the things that cause users to click
    • we need words to describe our tools
    • trigger words is an example of that.
  • we’ve been studying how people use the web since 1995
  • we had this theory in 1995: that people who know how to use the web would be better at doing things on the web.
    • we got people with different levels of experience
    • we set them down in front of web sites and had them do things
    • it turn out that people’s experience didn’t matter, but what did matter was design of the web site.
    • (will: this is different than something like using a tool like a circular saw, in which experience is important.)
  • Predicting Failures of Scent
    • Use of the Back Button
    • Pogo-sticking
    • Using search
  • We have thousands of clickstreams
    • we look for patterns.
    • we have two piles: those for people who succeeded, and those who failed.
  • Backbuttons predict failure:
    • For the clickstreams where people use the backbutton once: only 18% are successful.
    • For the clickstreams where people use the backbutton twice: less than 2% are successful.
  • Pogo-sticking also predicts failure
    • Jumping up and down through the site hierarchy
    • People who pogo-stick are only 11% successful
  • Search predicts failure
    • (except on Amazon)
    • When people do search, they type in trigger words
  • Search Pro tip:
    • Your search logs are filled with trigger words
    • Ideally you want the logs to include the page the user was searching from
    • So put the trigger words as links on the page that users were searching from
  • 7-Eleven Milk Experiment
  • Compelled Shopping: Buying Apparel
    • Give the prospective customer $1,000 to buy the clothes they want.
    • “Ideal site”: the customer should spend $1,000
    • Gap: $660
    • Lands’ End: $465
    • Macy’s: $156
    • Newport News: $63
  • Number of clicks to get to final purchase
    • The Gap: 11.9
    • Lands’ End: 15.7
    • Macy’s: 51
    • Newport News: 51
  • Examples of shopping sites: some sites force you to click through to the individual products to get details. No way to compare, no way to see data on individual products. It forces pogo-sticking.
    • Good example: Crutchfield. Shows more data. It’s exactly the differentiated data you want.
    • Bad examples: No data.
    • More bad examples: Meaningless data “technology you trust”
    • More bad examples: Showing the same bullet points for everything: “No annual fee.” “0% interest”. Also useless in comparison.
  • Most useless words in web design:
    • click here
    • learn more
    • click here to learn more
  • Good Design is Invisible
    • It’s like air-conditioning in a room: you don’t notice it, unless it’s bad or it’s not working well.
  • Links secretly live to look good.
    • But they still have to look like links.
  • We used to think that links are supposed to be blue and underlined. Thankfully, we’ve moved back this.
  • In some cases, we can find it out. The page has a clear visual language.
  • In other cases, we can’t tell without waving our mouse all over.
  • Look Good: You have to establish a consistent visual language.
  • Links have to do what you expect.
  • Example of dictionary.com: it’s hard to find the content.
    • The page is full of links and advertisements. You want the user to stay.
  • Other examples: in the middle of articles, there are links to go elsewhere.
    • to related articles
    • to unrelated articles
    • but why?
    • let the person finish the article
  • Taco Bell Advertising Lawsuit example:
    • good article, but…
    • link to everything the tribune has ever written about alabama in the middle of the text
    • link to crossword puzzle and sudoku in the middle of the page
    • advertisements to sue people or to advertise on the page
  • It’s all junk: it’s not really relevant or related.
  • Flyouts:
    • Other sites hide the links
    • you have to put the cursor over stuff to find the links.
    • People want to see the links. That’s why they are using the web.
    • Flyouts are fun to code, but they aren’t fun for the user.
  • Do What The User Expects
    • Deliver users to their desired objective
    • Emit the right scent
    • Look good, while still looking like a link
    • Do what the user expects

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When IT Says No: Creating Fast Feature Flow
Gene Kim
@RealGeneKim
  • How many of you had the problem where you had a great idea, something that can help the business, only to have IT say, “well, maybe you can have it in 2016, when the planning calendar opens up?” (Lots of hands go up.)
  • Where Did the High Performers Come From?
    • Non-commissioned officers.
    • Chemical engineers
    • Auditors
  • What do they have in common?
    • Rigor and discipline!
  • When we wrote Visible Ops, we saw a downward spiral
    • Fragile applications are prone to failure
    • A long time required to figure out what went wrong
    • Detection comes from a salesperson who said “why are the banner ads being shown upside down”?
    • Too much firefighting and unplanned
    • Planned work cannot get done
    • Frustrated customers leave
    • Market share goes down.
    • Business misses Wall Street commitments
  • The key aha: This isn’t an IT ops problem, this is a business risk.
  • Mission: Figure out how to break the IT core chronic conflict
    • Every IT organization is pressured 
  • Tribes needed:
    • Ops
    • Dev
    • Op Security
    • Design
  • Velocity talk in 2009 at Flickr: 10 deploys per day
    • Dev and ops working together
    • Ops who think like devs
    • Devs who think like ops
  • In 2011, Amazon doing a maximum of 1,079 deployments per HOUR.
    • That’s 11 seconds per deployment.
  • If your company can deploy at most once a month, how can you compete against someone who can deploy daily or hourly?
  • DevOps is a real movement
    • I would never do another startup without employing devops principles
    • It’s happening in enterprises, government, and non-profits.
  • The Three Ways
  • The First Way
    • Systems Thinking: Left to Right
    • Never Pass defects to downstream work centers
    • Never allow local optimization to create global degradation
    • Eradicate blockages in the flow
    • Outcomes
      • Faster cycle times
  • The Second Way
    • Amplify feedback loops (right to left)
      • Expose visual data everyone can see how their decisions affect the entire system.
    • Outcomes
  • The Third Way
    • Culture of Continual Experimentation and Learning
      • Foster a culture that rewards
        • Experimentation (taking risks) and learning from failure
          • Jared Spool story of Intuit, where the CEO, in a monthly ceremony, gives a lifepreserver to the person who took the biggest risk, and they share their knowledge of what they learned.
        • Repetition is the prerequisite to mastery
      • Outcomes
        • 15 minutes
  • Prescriptive
    • Meeting the DevOps Leadership Team
      • Typically led by Dev, QA, IT Ops, and Product Management/Design
    • Agile Sprints
      • typically one week to one month
      • at the end of each sprint, team should have potentially deliverable product
      • But where this breaks down, is that typically dev uses up all the time in the project, leaving none operations or testing
    • Help Dev and Ops Build Code and Environments
      • Dev and Ops work together in Sprint 0 and 1 to create code and environments
        • Create environment that Dev deployed into
      • Security must integrate security testing into continuous testing through automation. If it takes 2 to 3 weeks to perform a security check, it won’t fit into the agile process, and it will be marginalized.
    • Keep Shrinking Batch Sizes
      • Waterfall projects often have cycle time of one year
      • Sprints have cycle time of 1 or 2 weeks
      • When IT Operations work is sufficiently fast and capable (e.g. it’s a < 1 hr process) we may decide to decouple from sprint boundaries. 
        • Now we don’t have to wait two weeks for a feature to go out.
        • And the deployments get real small: we push out a single feature. 
          • This is lower risk than pushing out hundreds of features together.
    • IT Operations Increases Process Rigor
  • Letters To Stakeholders
    • Development:
      • Be aware of the downstream effects of your actions
        • Unplanned work comes at the expense of planned work (features)
        • When we take shortcuts at the front of the line, it has an amplified effect downstream.
        • Technical debt retards feature throughput
        • Environment matters as much as code
    • QA
      • Ensure test plans cover not only code functionality, but also:
        • suitability of the environment the code runs in
        • The end-to-end deployment process
      • Help find variance
        • functionality, performance, configuration
        • duration, wait time, errors
    • Operations
      • Expect and tolerate failure (use Chaos Monkey)
      • See: “5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS”
      • “The best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly”
      • Harden the production environment
      • Have scheduled drills to “crash the data center”
      • Create your “chaos monkeys”
    • Product Management:
      • Marty Cagan: Led product mgmt organization at eBay
      • He inherited the organization at eBay when they were suffering from chronic outages.
      • “you must take 20% of dev cycles to paying down technical debt.”
    • Designers
      • Help IT Operations codify their work and requirements into great and ever increasing library of user stories
      • Realize that IT processes are likely the largest impediment preventing your great ideas from making it to market
      • By working on the processes of how code gets into production, you can remove the impediments, and get more 

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If you’re going to be at SXSW Interactive next week, I hope you’ll join us at Wall-E or Terminator: Predicting the Future of AI.

Daniel H. Wilson (author of Robopocalypse, upcoming AMPED), Chris Robson (chief scientist at Parametric Marketing), and myself will be speaking about whether there’s going to be a singularity, when it would happen, if ever, and whether that’s even a relevant question to be talking about.

Daniel and Chris are absolutely brilliant, and I can promise this will be a fun and informative discussion. If our previous discussions are any indication, I can promise we’ll all bring very unique points of view to the debate, er panel.

You’ll find us here:

Tuesday, March 13, 2012
9:30AM -10:30AM
Hilton Austin Downtown
Salon J

By the way, if you’re there, and want to get a hold of me, twitter is usually the best way. You’ll find me at @hertling. You can find Daniel at @danielwilsonpdx, and Chris at @paramktg.

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Here’s my annual list of tips, updated for 2012.



Before the Trip
That’s one full conference room. Get to your session
early to get a seat. Popular sessions fill up quickly, and
once they do, you aren’t allowed in. One more reason
to plan your schedule in advance.
  1. Power equipment: Get yourself a travel power strip, and/or auxiliary battery for your laptop. Being able to  take notes, follow the twitter stream, or research sessions for 10 hours a day is a stretch for almost any laptop or phone. I own and love the Monster Outlets to Go travel power strip, with built-in USB port. It packs down small, and let’s you walk up and use any outlet, even one already occupied.
  2. Plan out your schedule. There are thousands of sessions you can attend – usually from 40 to 60 during any given timeslot. Which are the ones that are most interesting and applicable to you? Although you should choose primarily based on interest and applicability, all other things being equal it is usually a good bet that speakers in larger rooms are better speakers than speakers in smaller rooms. So get familiar with the map of SXSW, and figure out which rooms are which. Also, it’s not a given that you can make it to any given talk from any other given talk in the allotted time, and still get there with a place to sit. So look at the overall map of all the hotels, and figure out what you can make.
  3. Choose your backup talks: For a given time slot, you might have a favorite talk you want to attend. Maybe it will be awful, or maybe it’ll be full and you can’t get in, or maybe it will be cancelled. With SXSW Interactive spread out across many blocks and different buildings and different floors, it’s not possible to get from any given room to another quickly. So once you know your preferred talk for a given timeslot, pick out a backup talk that is nearby.
  4. Wean yourself off coffee: Depending on just how hardcore you are, you may want to consider weaning yourself off coffee, or at least reducing your dependence on it. That way, when you get to Austin, you can restart your caffeine habit, and enjoy the full stimulating effects of it. (I wean myself down to one cup per day ahead of time, then plan to enjoy 3 or more cups per day there.)
  5. Holy Basil: Like to drink? I’m really fond of Holy Basil, which is a natural hangover remedy. I’ve found it to be highly effective. (I’m not a doctor, this has not been evaluated by the FDA, etc, etc. Be smart.)
  6. Business Cards: It’s surprising for such an online environment, but business cards are still pretty popular. If networking is important to you, bring some. Make them simple. Name, email, phone, twitter handle.

At the Start of Each Day

These are the registration lines. Plan to give yourself
at least an hour to get your badge on the first day.
  1. Food/Coffee: Get your coffee on the way to the conference center, not at the actual conference center. Lines for coffee are 10-20 minutes long. Also, starting in 2010 they started having sessions go through the lunch hour. I think that sucks, but I hate to miss anything, so I go to them all. Since it’s hard to get food quickly, you may want to bring another snack bars that you’ve got food in your backpack to cover you through to dinner. I’m partial to KIND Nut Delight bars, which are relatively low on sugar and high on protein, and the closest bar I can find that is 4 Hour Body (4HB) compatible.
  2. Start charged: Start the day with charged laptop/phone/etc.
  3. Clothes: Bring a light jacket in case you don’t make it back to your hotel room. It’ll cool down at night. Conversely, it will be warm enough at some point during the day for short sleeves.
  4. Reschedule: Learn anything interesting yet? Find some new track that seems interesting? Reevaluate your list of planned talks, and see if you want to make adjustments.
During the Day
Don’t sit in the back. Go ahead, find a seat up front! Make
friends with the person sitting next to you.
  1. Be in the moment: Don’t go to a session and then check out and read email, surf the web, or do work. SXSW is precious. Make the most of your time by being totally immersed in what is going on. 
  2. Recharge: Look for outlets in hallways, restaurants, outside, anywhere, and use them when you find them. 
  3. Conserve power: If you are taking notes on your computer or blogging the sessions, you may want to turn off wifi on your laptop to save power (and to keep your focus on the session, so you don’t start random web surfing.) I usually use my smartphone to follow twitter and email so I’m still connected.
  4. Follow the #SXSWi tag on twitter: You want to follow #SXSWi so that if another session is excellent and your session kind of sucks, then you can make the switch quickly. (or conversely find out if a room is already packed and can’t fit any more.)
  5. Follow the twitter tag for whatever session you are in: There will be a back channel of conversation about the session you are in that is almost as valuable as the primary speakers. SXSW is full of experts, both presenting and in the crowd, and you want to tap into all of that wisdom. This doesn’t violate tip #1, because you are not being distracted by something different, but rather tapping into more of what you are already there for.
  6. Talk to the people around you: SXSWi is a social place. The people around you are likely to be very experienced, smart, interesting people. Start up conversations, make dinner plans with strangers, and keep going until 2am. The wisdom of the crowd is not just an abstract thing at SXSW – it is manifest in the people all around you. Talk to them.
  7. Attend my session: Wall-E or Terminator: Predicting the future of Artificial Intelligence, with author Daniel H. Wilson and scientist Chris Robson – Tuesday at 9:30am. 
Have fun, and enjoy SXSW Interactive!

Photo credits: Luc Byhet and John Swords under Creative Commons license.

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A.I. Apocalypse, the sequel to Avogadro Corp, is now available on Amazon!

A.I. Apocalypse
Sequel to Avogadro Corp

A little bit about A.I. Apocalypse:

Leon Tsarev is a high school student set on getting into a great college program, until his uncle, a member of the Russian mob, coerces him into developing a new computer virus for the mob’s botnet – the slave army of computers they used to commit digital crimes.

The evolutionary virus Leon creates, based on biological principles, is successful — a little too successful. All the world’s computers are infected. Everything from cars to payment systems and, of course, computers and smart phones stop functioning, and with them go essential functions including emergency services, transportation, and the food supply. Billions of people may die.

But evolution never stops. The virus continues to change, developing intelligence, communication, and finally an entire civilization of A.I. called the Phage. Some may be friendly to humans, but others most definitely are not.

Leon and his companions must race against time and the bungling military to find a way to either befriend or eliminate the Phage and restore the world’s computer infrastructure.

A.I. Apocalypse is the second book of the Singularity Series. It’s available now for the Kindle, and will be available in print and additional electronic versions in June. Buy it today!

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Jason Grigsby spoke at Hewlett-Packard today on Mobile, in a talk called Casting Off The Desktop Shackles. Here are my notes:
Casting Off The Desktop Shackles
Jason Grigsby
@grigs | cloudfour.com
  • Basics
    • Don’t skip core functionality.
      • Example: there’s no way to add RSS feeds into certain RSS readers
    • URLs should go to content, not mobile home
      • really poor implementations of separate sites
    • Why go to the desktop web?
      • The NYT does this… gives you the mobile site, unless you know to change the url. Even though they have a great mobile site.
  • People will do anything on mobile if they have the need
    • complex tasks
    • write long emails
  • Our vision of mobile context is often wrong
    • We think that all mobile cases are people walking down the street
    • Actual
      • 80% during misc downtime
      • 76% while waiting in lines
      • 62% while watching TV
      • 69% for point of sale research
      • 39% use on the toilet (61% are lying)
    • We can’t know the mobile context
      • We can’t know where they are, or what they are doing.
    • Mobile is the 7th mass media
      • printing press
      • radio
      • recordings
      • tv
      • internet
      • …
      • mobile
  • 8 unique abilities of mobile
    • 1) incredible personal (not shared, even with spouses)
    • 2) always carried (within arms reach, slept with, etc.)
    • 3) always on
    • 4) builtin payment channel (itunes or google wallet, or using carrier billing to buy groceries)
    • 5) available at moment of creative impulse
      • the best camera is the one you have with you
      • the best notetaking app is the one you have with you
    • 6) accurate measurement
      • a phone is likely to be 1 person
      • groundtruth has logs from most carriers, will give you analytics for sites compared to competitors
      • one ID always (as opposed to many different browsers/cookies on desktop browsers)
    • 7) social context
      • your phone knows where you are, who you are supposed to meet, and when. It can do really powerful things with that knowledge: automatically detect you are going to be late to an appointment, txt the person you’re meeting, and pop open directions to the location.
    • 8) augmented reality
      • ability to hold up your phone and see augmented information in real time.
  • mobile is the most borg-like technology we’ve ever seen
    • in 2005, more phones with cameras were sold than all the digital cameras up until that point.
    • garmin ruled the GPS market, and now they are a drop in the bucket.
    • mp3 players went by the wayside
    • lesson: If you are making a product that has some kind of mobile use case and/or sensor, you have to think about what happens if phones adopt that sensor. Where would that leave you?
  • Check out John Allsopp, Dao of Web Design
    • “When a new medium borrows from an existing one, some of what it borrows makes sense, but much of the borrowing is thoughtless, ‘ritual’, and often constrains the new medium. Over time, the new medium develops its own conventions, throwing off…”
  • What are we borrowing from the previous internet – the desktop internet – and what do we need to get rid of?
    • Why do we need to look at phones to get directions? One vibration to turn left, two to turn right.
    • Old saying: Asia is two years ahead of Europe, and Europe is two years ahead of the U.S.
  • Digital Divide
    • In Asia and Africa
      • ~20% of ecommerce / mobile banking occuring through the web
      • compared to 2.5% in the U.S.
    • Blacks and Latinos ~60% likely to use phones for internet connectivity, compared to ~40% for whites. For most, it is their only access to the internet.
      • So anything that is going to be done online(applying for jobs, banking, purchasing) must be possible via mobile
    • Used for purposes we wouldn’t imagine here…
      • cellscope: a microscope attached to an old nokia phone used to MMS send bloodwork photos to cities for analysis when working in remote villages.
      • farmers using mobile access to figure out where to get the best prices for their goods.
    • textually.org: stories about people interacting with mobile tech
    • mobileactive.org: supports people doing this kind of stuff
    • StatCounter Global Stats: Mobile vs. Desktop in Nigeria
    • Africa is the Silicon Valley of banking. The future of banking is being defined here…It’s going to change the world.” — Carol Realini, executive chairman of Obopay
    • If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere
    • 25% of internet users in the U.S. access it only via mobile
    • (and it goes way up from there… 70% in Egypt.)
  • Polar Rose. Bought by Apple.
    • Recognizr app: Uses facial recognition and then displays social network information for that person.
    • Google Goggles can do the same thing, but Google has decided not to release it yet for fear of the backlash.
  • Luke Wroblewski’s First Person User Experience Presentation at http://www.likew.com/presos/preso.asp?21
    • Dozens of sensors in a phone. What can be done with them all? We’ve only scratched the surface.
  • Is mobile a new mass media?
    • (Yes)
    • Is mobile web part of that new mass media?
      • Mobile web is a bit of a half-breed – it is part mobile medium and part internet medium so it inherits traits from both. — Tim Kadlec
      • This is discouraging.
      • This would make me hang up my HTML and go learn objective C.
    • Tim Kadlec also said that mobile phones are the closest thing we have to those futurist science fiction always-on-always-there devices that do everything.
  • Mobile Apps Must Die
    • Upcoming zombie apocalypse of devices
      • android is in everything.
      • price of everything is coming down.
    • Lots of just-in-time interactions. Getting a restaurant menu, get bus locations, unlocking a car: You dont want to install an app for every possible thing to do. The only thing that can scale this way is web technology.
  • Questions
    • Security and the lack thereof: enabler or disabler?
      • Every app is at some point jailbroken and cracked and put there out on the web.
      • You can never trust the client, whether it is javascript validation, or a mobile app. Relying on server security.
    • Do you see mobile replacing a lot of print?
      • It’s inevitable that a large percentage of things that are printed won’t be printed in the future.
      • I buy everything on the iPad. I don’t want books anymore.
      • I get the newspaper because I believe in supporting local news coverage. But if I could pay for it electronically, I would.
      • No medium has replaced any other medium. There will always be things that are printed.
      • I’m as mobile as you get, and I still have two printers in my house

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Recently people have been saying nice things about my writing.

First, there was a review of Avogadro Corp on Amazon that was titled “Good, but not Stephenson-good.” My first thought was “Hey, I’m being compared to Neal Stephenson. That’s cool.”
Then there was the Brad Feld post. Brad Feld is a world-renown venture capitalist, one of the founders of Techstars, the managing director of The Foundry Group, and with 100,000 followers on twitter, he’s clearly an influential person.
He had given a talk called Resistance is Futile, and during the talk, he spoke about Avogadro Corp:

But then I mentioned a book I’d just read called Avogadro Corp. While it’s obviously a play on words with Google, it’s a tremendous book that a number of friends had recommended to me. In the vein of Daniel Suarez’s great books Daemon and Freedom (TM), it is science fiction that has a five year aperture – describing issues, in solid technical detail, that we are dealing with today that will impact us by 2015, if not sooner. 

There are very few people who appreciate how quickly this is accelerating. The combination of software, the Internet, and the machines is completely transforming society and the human experience as we know it. As I stood overlooking Park City from the patio of a magnificent hotel, I thought that we really don’t have any idea what things are going to be like in twenty years. And that excites me to no end while simultaneously blowing my mind. 

You can read his full blog post. (Thank you, Brad.)

While I loved the endorsement, what really got me excited is that Brad appreciated the book for exactly the reasons I hoped. Yes, it’s a fun technothriller, but really it’s a tale of how the advent of strong, self-driven, independent artificial intelligence is both very near and will have a very significant impact. Everything from the corporate setting and the technology used should reinforce the fact that this could be happening today.

I first got interested in predicting the path of technology in 1998. That was the year I made a spreadsheet with every computer I had owned over the course of twelve years, tracking the processor speed, the hard drive capacity, the memory size, and the Internet connection speed.

The spreadsheet was darn good at predicting when music sharing would take off (1999, Napster) and video streaming (2005, YouTube). It also tells when the last magnetic platter hard drive will be manufactured (2016), and it predicts when we should expect strong artificial intelligence to emerge.

There’s lots of different ways to talk about artificial intelligence, so let me briefly summarize what I’m concerned about: General-purpose, self-motivated, independently acting intelligence, roughly equal in cognitive capacity to human intelligence.

Lots of other kinds of artificial intelligence are interesting, but they aren’t exactly issues to be worried about. Canine level artificial intelligence might make for great robot helpers for people, similar to guide dogs, but just as we haven’t seen a canine uprising, we’re also not likely to see an A.I. uprising from beings of that level of intelligence.

So how do we predict when we’ll see human-grade A.I.? There’s a range of estimates for how computationally difficult it is to simulate the human brain. One estimate is based on the portion of our brain that we use for image analysis, and comparing that to the amount of computational power it takes to replicate that in software. Here’s the estimates I like to deal with:

Estimate of Complexity Processing Power Needed How Determined
Easy: Ray Kurzweil’s estimate #1 from Singularity Is Near 10^14 instructions/second Extrapolated from the weight of the portion of the brain responsible for image processing to, compared to the computer computation necessary to recreate.
Medium: Ray Kurzweil’s estimate #2 from Singularity Is Near 10^15 instructions/second Based on the human brain containing 10^11 neurons, and it taking 10^4 instructions per neuron.
Hard: My worst case scenario: brute force simulation of every neuron 10^18 instructions/second Brute force simulation of 10^11 neurons, each having 10^4 synapses, firing up to 10^3 times per second.

(Just for the sake of completion, there is yet another estimate that includes glial cells, which may affect cognition, and of which we have ten times as many as neurons. We can guess that this might be about 10^19.)

The growth in computer processing power has been following a very steady curve for a very long time. Since the mid 1980s when I started listening to technology news, scientists have been saying things along the lines of “We’re approaching the fundamental limits of computation. We can’t possibly go any faster or smaller.” Then we find some way around the limitation, whether it’s new materials science, new manufacturing techniques, or parallelism.

So if we take the growth in computing power (47% increase in MIPS per year), and plot that out over time, we get this very nice 3×3 matrix in which we can look at the three estimates of complexity and three ranges for the number of available computers to work with:

Number of Computers Easy Simulation
(10^14 ips)		 Medium Simulation*
(10^16 ips)		 Difficult Simulation
(10^18 ips)
10,000 now 2016 2028
100 2016 2028 2040
1 2028 2040 2052
*Modified from Kurzweil’s 10^15 estimate, only to give us a more middle-of-the-road prediction.
As we can see from this chart, if it was easy to simulate a human brain, we’d already have people who have access to 10,000 computers doing it. So we’re not quite there yet. Although clearly some of the things most suggestive of strong A.I., like IBM’s Watson and Google’s self-driving cars, are happening first in these large organizations where they have access to loads of raw computational power.
But even in the difficult simulation case, by 2040, it will be within the reach of any dedicated person to assemble a hundred computers and start developing strong A.I.
It’s when we reach this hobbyist level that we really need to be concerned. Thousands of hobbyists will  likely advance A.I. development far faster than a few small research labs. We saw this happen in the Netflix Prize, where the community of contestants quickly equaled and then out-paced Netflix’s own recommendation algorithms. 
Strong A.I. is an issue that we should be thinking about in the same way that we discuss other defining issues of our time: peak oil, water shortages, and climate change. It’s going to happen in the near term, and it’s going to affect us all.
We’re entering a period where the probability of strong A.I. emerging is non-zero for the first time. It’s going to increase with each year that passes, and by 2052, it’s going to be an absolute certainty.

By the way: If you find this stuff interesting, researcher Chris Robson, author Daniel H. Wilson, and I will be discussing this very topic at SXSW Interactive on Tuesday, March 13th at 9:30 AM.