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Voice recognition software has been around for at least 20 years. I first played with the technology in the 1980s but was very unimpressed by its abilities, horrible set up a process, and general applicability as a technology of last resort for the handicapped were truly keyboard allergic.

I’ve tried to use the technology transcribe dictation made during long car commutes, but that never worked either. A combination of too much background noise, a lack of discipline on my part to stick with the process of correcting and training the software to recognize my voice and my peculiar way of dictation, and voice-recognition software joined they heap of otherwise optimistic stuff that science fiction promised would be useful but practice proved otherwise.

This post is being dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 11 running on a ThinkPad T410s and using a phone headset as a microphone. Since my arm surgery on Tuesday, I’ve dictated about 2000 words and so far am pretty impressed.

Dictation is a foreign mode of writing for me. I’ve used a keyboard in one form or another since I was about 10 years old and my atrocious handwriting condemned me to a typewriter. I never learned how to touch type, but over the years got up to what about 100 words per minute using a frantic index finger/thumb method that over the years as developed a sort of muscle memory of the keyboard which permits me to type without looking at the keys. When word processing technology first emerged in the late 1970s, some writers complained that the electronic ease of deletion, cut and paste, and general speed of composition reduced the value of the word put on the page, and led to a certain compositional laziness that had been moderated by the penalties of working with paper, white out, carbon paper, and the other manual vestiges of writing in the early 20th century. One can writers said the same thing about the typewriter in the 19th century, claiming it made writing “too easy” compared to pen and ink on paper.

Voice technology has come a long way in recent years, especially on android phones where Google’s voice-recognition technology in its maps and search tools are excellent. In the pre-android era, if I wanted to set a destination on the cars GPS, I needed to tediously punch in numbers, cities and states before I could put the car in motion. Attempting to set an address while underway was a recipe for a head-on collision. Now, if I want to get to my office, I simply press the microphone icon and say “go to W. 39th St., New York, NY” and Google does the rest. Voice-recognition is a lifesaver, literally, when I need to respond to a text message while driving, yet my son is fond of a pending the word “bitch” to my dictation.

My biggest complaint with voice-recognition is it forces me to enunciate and be choppy and my diction, where as when typing, I am able to pound away with relatively fluid ease and no concern over misunderstandings and goofy transcriptions. That said, I am a terrible typist and spend a huge amount of time on the backspace key correcting typos and mess ups. Another drawback of dictation is lack of privacy. I hate it when someone looks over my shoulder while I’m writing, and now my voice bellows through the house making me very self-conscious of whether or not I could be overheard by my wife or son. If I were in a cubicle in a typical office I would literally be dumbstruck.

I have no choice but to continue dictating for the foreseeable future, until my doctor gives me the all clear to start typing again.

But at least I can blog and work on memos and have some productivity that otherwise would be completely lost due to surgery.

(This entire post was dictated straight through with nothing corrected)

I’ve got about six months to go on my HTC EVO, a Sprint “4G” Android phone that was quite advanced back in the summer of 2010 when I chucked my Blackberry and Lotus Notes shackles and went off on my own.

It’s a nice phone, has a battery life on a par with the life span of some hyperkinetic gnat that hatches, mates and dies before lunch, a big screen, and the occasional ability in the right city to get some fast connectivity via Clearwire’s WiMax technology. I can tether my iPad and Thinkpad to it, thereby sticking it to the paid-WiFi thugs at the hotel and airport, and I can get rid of my digital camera, dashboard GPS, and assorted other electronic bricks in my bag.

The biggest bitch I had with the phone wasn’t with the hardware as much as Sprint’s ass-hatted insistence that I would have their stupid NASCAR app whether I liked it or not. The amount of bloatware junk that was burnt into the phone was staggering, and sure enough, after a couple months, the phone started bleating that it was out of storage space, forcing me to pick away and delete photos, videos, and assorted apps, all the while being unable to kill NASCAR, the NFL, and Blockbuster (aren’t they dead and gone?) from the phone all because Sprint’s CMO paid a big check to sponsor the Redneck Eternal Left Turn known as stock car racing.

So I rooted the sucker. Jailbreak. Got medieval on its ass and followed the handy instructions on how to capture the phone for me and only me (while voiding the warranty). In the process I realized that playing around with Android phones at the command line/super user level is just like those wonderful days of exploration in the early 198os when I got my hands on my first IBM-PC and a copy of Norton Utilities.

I followed the magic step-by-step instructions, mindful that I could “brick” or toast the phone if I messed up. A weird volume-button-power-button-rubber-chicken reboot and I had Root, that exalted state of hack bliss where the hardware and me are one, and not kept apart by the evil carrier.

I installed Cyanogen, the aftermarket Android ROM based on Honeycomb, then overlaid that with ADW Ex, a launcher that let me mess with my icons and other GUI goodness. The result, combined with a minimalist icon set, is a wide open phone that is a lot slicker than the factory model, has tons of room, and still has all the functionality it used to.

Sure, there were moments of debugging — the GPS wouldn’t work until I patched it — but there’s something about getting intimate with one’s hardware to restore my faith in the technical world. Don’t be afraid. Stick it to the man.

After reading John McCarthy’s obituary this morning (by John Markoff), I was prompted to re-read Stewart Brand’s legendary tale of early computer scientists and hackers that was published in Rolling Stone in 1972.

Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.

I highly recommend it. The photo of Alan Kay and the Dynabook is priceless. Keep in mind this is a glimpse of the state of the art in Silicon Valley from 40 years ago. Pre-personal computer. Pre-Steve Jobs. Then take those four decades that intervene and add in the microprocessor, bountiful memory, graphics, the Internet, wireless, cell phones, smartphones, tablets …… No one, not even the most stoned futurist, could have predicted the technical bounty we take for granted today. Brand’s story puts it all in perspective for me. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

I generally avoid editorializing about business. Too many years writing “objectively” about the technology industries has me gun shy about taking an un-reported stand. But since I covered Hewlett Packard closely when I was a tech reporter in the 80s and the company was nearing the pinnacle of its reputation as one of the keystone companies in technology, the news this morning that its board didn’t have the gumption to even interview its latest, and apparently lameduck CEO, Leo Apotheker, feels like the last straw in a decline of Sheenesque proportions and I have to say something.

HP’s former dominance in printers, PCs, workstations, minicomputers, medical diagnostics, even financial calculators was the culmination of a noble heritage that literally started in a modest residential garage when the founders hand built an oscilloscope they sold to Disney for post-production sound work on Snow White. HP was never the hippest company — it wasn’t a place I associate with the bearded sandal wearing characters that made Sun and Silicon Graphics and Apple and Next so colorful — but it was the most solid and mythic, a place that capitalized on smarts and research and innovation and was able, against the laws of Silicon Valley physics, to maintain its edge even as it absorbed companies like Compaq and DEC. While I believe “corporate culture” is an oxymoronic construct, “The HP Way” seems to indeed have been a good thing, one that held the massive organization together for a remarkable record of growth and innovation over five decades.

As the founders retired and faded into the philanthropic background, things became unhinged.  Lew Platt missed the Internet. Carly Fiorina over-acquired. Wire-tapping reporters and board members seemed, at the time, like an aberration (now it doesn’t). Hurd couldn’t keep it in his pants and mortgaged the company’s future by slashing R&D … and now after one remarkably weird year characterized by throwing in the towel over and over, Leo Apotheker — the CEO no one had ever heard of before — is the next to walk the plank.  The question is why was he ever even on the boat? I didn’t even know how to properly pronounce his name until yesterday at lunch when my partner corrected me and put an emphasis on the “e” with an accent (It’s “Lay-O” not “Lee-O”).

So what went well in the last year? Not much. The Palm acquisition yielded an operating system that was a lame darkhorse out of the gate. The company had a great success in tablets — once it discontinued them and slashed the price and alienated the first customers silly enough to pay full price when it launched. And the greatest bumble of all — telling the world that it is considering getting out of the vicious PC business before it had a buyer for that business —  effectively killing, in a single utterance, all corporate/enterprise demand for fleets of its PCs and future demand by whatever greater fool buys the business off of them.

The headhunters and the board that was too divisive and busy to interview its last round of CEO candidates is drawing up yet another short list of possible leaders. Whoever gets tapped, they have a major mess to muck out. The situation as I see it without looking at the balance sheet:

1. The PC is dead. It has another decade in the corporate world, but game over in PCs. Apple won and tablets are the new form factor. HP made its bid and failed there.
2. The Wintel standard is irrelevant. Microsoft and Intel no longer call the tune. Operating systems are irrelevant in the cloud. WebOS was nice looking, but too late in the Apple, Android, Windows race.
3. HP dictates few standards, has no APIs, has no developer community.
4. Printers. Printers are the last mechanical appendage. Think about it. Once hard disks stopped spinning and went solid state, the last thing with a motor is the printer.  Printers are a means to an end, not a future.
5. Crisis communications. Beginning with the CNET wiretapping, the Hurd scandal and this summer’s string of can’t-shoot-straight missteps, the once golden credibility of the company is very tarnished and tattered.
6. Marketing. Once Lenovo snagged David Roman — the marketing rock star that gave HP its awesome “The PC is Personal Again” campaign — the air went out of HP’s creative consumer balloon.
7. China and emerging markets: no where near as nimble or familiar as Lenovo and Acer.

I’m sure Malcolm Gladwell or Forrester Research has some nifty term for that type of person who discovers stuff first. You know who I am talking about; the girl in college who bought the first Talking Heads album while the rest of us were still stuck in a rut of disco or bad rock. The guy who saw The King’s Speech three months before you did. The type of person who moves on from Bikram yoga just as you’re discovering the Down Dog position. Everybody wants to be first, but why are some of us better at living on the leading edge than others?

How do trendspotters find the avant garde before it becomes mainstream? Is it intuitive or is it part of their psyche? Someone more willing to buck the norm and have the courage go out on a limb and tell their skeptical roommates, “Trust me, some day these guys are going to be huge”?

I used to have impeccable music spotting abilities, but was always the weird guy in the dorm, defending stuff like Lou Reed, The Ramones while the rest of the world was stuck on the Stones, Beatles, Allman Bros. etc.. I wasn’t super-gluing my hair into a purple mohawk or acting particularly hip — I just could, and still can, listen to very obscure music and intuitively know what’s going to be cool or not. How did I find it in the first place? By paying attention to college radio, especially late night, by reading the Village Voice, and by flipping through the milk crates of some of my more out-there acquaintances. Someone has to start playing it. My only knack was hearing it once and deciding it was worth hearing again.

Case in point. Late 90s I started listening to lots of electronica/techno because the beat rate syncopated nicely with rowing ergometer workouts. I start buying the Chemical Brothers and my teen children pick up the habit and instantly become cool in their own way. Fiction: I still press a copy of Barry Hannah’s “Geronimo Rex” into anybody’s hands who will listen. I found him in the early 70s out of complete luck and chance. Misses? The horrible Little River Band is one album I was ashamed to own.

One rainy day recently my youngest son wanted to go to a movie. Instead of relying on some direct recommendation from a pal, he just pulls out Rotten Tomatoes and looks at the score. Anything under an 80% he won’t waste his money on. Same goes for video games — he has his bible, Game Informer, and follows their recommendations slavishly. I suppose the only difference between him and me using Rolling Stone in the 1970s is media and nothing else.

My oldest son, the auteur, is a total creature of New York’s East Village, NYU film school, and now West Hollywood. His radar is set at max detection for two things: way way out there art film from the likes of Bela Tarr and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (aka “Joe”) ((stuff that will NEVER go mainstream since no one on earth wants to watch a seven hour epic about the decline of a Hungarian farm collective after the fall of the iron curtain)) and electronica which comes in a dizzying number of subcategories from dubstep to intelligent dance music (IDM) to breakcore. His discovery models are interesting – Last.fm in particular allows him to tag music and discover related stuff tagged by other listeners, and I just need to follow his play list history to discover the same.

He was also a fan of a site called Metacritic — which compiled professional reviews and ranked music, games, TV and movies on a 1-to-1o0 score. Then he gave up after one Scandinavian techno band, The Field, inexplicably dominated the rankings.  The point of Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes is they aggregate professional critics — not amateurs like you and me — and give a modicum of authority to the rankings and recommendations.

The power of recommendation engines is very significant in the Web 2.0/Social media set of features. While a lot of pundits opine that user reviews are the most powerful factor in a purchase decision (I trust her taste, therefore I will buy the same kind of car she drives), I think the “like-this” functionality that was  pioneered by Patti Maes at the MIT Media Lab and led to the ecommerce recommendations on Amazon (“People who bought this also bought this …” is very very influential in helping us discover new opportunities in media. The risk, as some critics have said, is that recommendation engines can put us into a self-referential echo chamber where the old phenomenon of a “Top Story Today” function on a news website continues to drive traffic to the same top headline, which keeps it on top ad infinitum.  How often does a recommendation engine push us to the extreme? Exposing liberals to conservative points of view and vice versa?

The notion of using tags and a “genome” approach to music and art to push the “like-this” function we’ve seen in the last decade to a more random, surprising discovery model is what is making the discovery of new art easier and more rewarding.

Anyway, as I sit here listening to the IDM tagged station on Last.fm I find myself “loving” specific songs by hitting the heart icon. Every time I do so, the algorithm looks for tagged matches and further refines my taste for me, all the while taking me deeper and deeper into the avant garde by the hand.

With my music in the cloud and freed from the tyrannical clutches of iTunes, I next turned to the question of how to make it truly portable, especially how to get it on the boat. I juiced the memory on my HTC EVO smartphone to 32 gb with a miniSD card and find that I’m running either the Amazon Cloud Player when on the household wifi, downloading stuff locally for playback on the phone when I’m in the middle of Nantucket Sound and too far away from the cell towers, or streaming from Last.fm when I’m too lazy to deal with setlists of my own stuff.

When I was a iPod person I had one of those iPod dock things — an expensive Bose thing that required a wall socket. Battery powered portable speakers are generally terrible, but the New York Times recently reviewed a bunch of wireless Bluetooth speakers and I went with David Pogue’s recommendation for the Soundmatters FoxL unit. It’s not cheap — I paid close to $200 on Amazon — but it uses a rechargeable Li-Ion battery and cranks very loud volumes when needed. Oh, and did I say it’s wireless? This means no proprietary slot connector for the iPod/iPhone, just a discoverable Bluetooth connection that I can hit with my Thinkpad, iPad, the wife and kid’s iPhones or my Android EVO. The range is decent, but anything beyond 15 feet gives it some issues.

My favorite application for the unit is to tether it to my iPad while I’m watching Red Sox games when I’m on the road in NYC. I am tired of having ear buds jammed into my ears for hours and love the freedom to prop the iPad up and just watch it like the tiny television it was meant to be.

Three weeks and I am very happy with this portable sound solution. The unit is solid, small, and very easy to set up and use. The sound is excellent. This toy is definitely moving into the category of favorite things. Now to figure out cloud music in the car and life will be complete.

For some reason Microsoft Office 2010 has decided I need to select a “profile” every hour on the hour. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make it happy and go away forever. Not being an Exchange guy, I know it’s Outlook related, and since I am consulting to Edelman I am on their Exchange web client so I can gain access to their internal mail and directory. I suspect it may be related to Google Calendar sync or something, but I do wish it would go away.

Suggestions so appreciated.

It would appear that the International Olympic Committee bestirred itself from its antediluvian luddite position on online media and demanded that the bidders for broadcast rights cease the ass-hatted pre-Tivo practice of taping and delaying coverage for prime-time American audiences and make available the athletic events in realtime AND online.

Online was a misery of DMA takedowns during Beijing (which I lived firsthand thanks to the paranoia of the IOC that any manifestation of YouTube video would undercut the value of its crown jewel broadcast rights).

While details are sparse from the New York Times coverage today, the second paragraph of Richard Sandomir’s article stands out: “…Comcast responded with a knockout bid and a promise that it would show every event live, on television or online, a recognition of the immediacy of technology and a drastic reversal of NBC’s policy of taping sports to show them to the largest possible audience in prime time.”

If you’ve ever watched Olympic coverage in Europe on EuroSport you’re accustomed to getting complete coverage of every event,  , no matter how long-tailed, in realtime. Think hours of men skiing with rifles and you get the European viewing experience, versus the usual NBC saccharine around some perky pre-pube gymnast who overcame Demeaning Plebney while ardent fans of the 50 meter air pistol get bupkus and have to scrounge around online in hopes someone, somewhere encoded a feed of their passion.

If the Games make it truly online — and they sort of have to now that the world is 100% obsessed with video the way they want it, when they want it — then London ought to be a delight for longtail sports fans. Let’s just hope NBC gets its online act together in time, doesn’t strike a Devil’s deal with Microsoft Silverlight, and delivers a multiplatform stream (iPad, droid, PC) that kicks ass and finally delivers on the promise of a truly interactive Olympics. If I were at NBC interactive I’d be on the phone to the MLB.com guys and looking for some technical ninja help.

The online rights and pay-per-view revenue should, in theory, kick the stuffing out of the old broadcast rights that typified the Dick Ebersol era when there were three networks, no Tivo, and no Interweb. My fingers are crossed.

Amazon’s brilliant decision to knock some cost off of the top of its Kindle by selling an ad-enabled “special offer” version for $25 less than a regular “ad-free” model is a good indication of where things are headed in the consumer electronic space — but not necessarily the best business model. That, I believe, lies in the original Kindle’s provision of free wireless connectivity through the Whispernet service, a necessity to enable the seamless delivery of books from Amazon’s catalogue: easing the sale of the proverbial razor blades onto Amazon’s “razor.”

There are now two hardware subsidy models available to consumers.  The first is the classic mobile/wireless carrier subsidy.  Sign up for two years with AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, etc. and get about half of the price knocked off your new iPhone, Droid, netbook, or Android tablet.   Device makers depend on this carrier subsidy to get the high cost of their device’s bill of materials absorbed and hidden from the consumer. Take a $500 device and use carrier subsidies to drop the price the consumer sees to $200. Not bad and smart business given the average consumer has no clue how to calculate the true cost of the device over the course of the two-year enslavement to the carrier for basically the right to connect to their network. According to Notesbooks.com, an iPhone 4 costs $1,674 over the course of a two year AT&T contract.

Amazon’s brilliance lies not only in its decision to enable a wireless connection to the Kindle with no carrier relationship (Whispernet consists of a lot of cheap Sprint 3G EVDO capacity) — who wants to sign their life away for a two-year handcuffing to a device you know you’ll want to upgrade in at least 18 months? — but now in its insight that the platform is an awesome way to deliver advertising. Given that Amazon is Google’s top customer of paid search, it makes eminent sense for the ecommerce giant to leverage its own delivery platform for its own ads.

It’s surprising Google isn’t all over advertising subsidized wireless connectivity. Afterall, this is the company that pledged to cover San Francisco with free WiFi a few years back, the company that gave travelers free airport WiFi a couple Christmases ago.  If Google, or any hardware company were to bulk purchase network capacity and enable their devices as “start-and-connect” capable, with no carrier contract, the impact on consumers would be huge. So what if I get a little advertising intrusion in my browsing experience. Sparing me the ordeal of signing that $40 monthly minimum with the carrier would be worth every irritation.

This will mean the utter defeat of the carrier’s efforts to keep themselves from becoming dumb pipes. But when you think about it, what value are they delivering beyond their connections? White-label the connections, subsidize the link through ads, and be done with them. And the resulting explosion in connect-anywhere-anytime devices will be more than significant in terms of consumer effects. If I were Google I’d be pushing Chrome netbooks with ad supported connections in a very big way. I pushed for this in a previous life while working on business development for a smartbook, citing the Whispernet model as the way to go, but I guess I was ahead of my time. Amazon gave me some satisfaction that I was right with their “special offer” model.

I sucked it up this week and hit the road with only my iPad, leaving the four-pound ThinkPad (T410s) on my desk for the first time. I resolved to be productive using my HTC EVO as a 4G (Sprint/Clear) hotspot and work out of the cloud via Google Docs and Gmail. The cloud part is easy – I’ve been there for two years. The hardware failed.

So I’d grade the experiment a C -

What worked:

• My briefcase was lighter and I didn’t have the usual worries about cracking a screen. Lighter is good as years of backpacking and shoulder strapping a laptop around has trashed my right shoulder.
• I generally had decent access to my files
• The Sprint/Clear 4G is decent as long as I’m in a major airport or urban center
• It was much easier to roam around an office with an iPad, with instant on and off and constant connectivity as long as the phone was in my pocket

What failed:

• The iPad is horrible for typing — on screen keyboards are an ergonomic disaster. I was tempted — for a few minutes — to seek out a local Apple Store and invest in an external $69 keyboard, but thought  better of it.
• Note taking on an iPad is a miserable experience and I suspect one looks like a douchebag when one tries to. See Mark Cahill’s comment regarding a wave of iPads in meetings that have reverted to good old laptops.
• Google Docs are barely usable on an iPad (see previous post on why my next tablet will be Android-based). The Google app for iPad presents a mobile, stripped down version, with none of the essential tools such as the ability to download documents to the device and then send them as attachments via Gmail, or share them through the usual Google Docs collaboration capabilities
• I was able to “free” docs and share them by resorting to the QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite, using that to access Google Docs, and then mailing stuff to people from within QuickOffice. It felt very kludgey.

Bottom line: I’m going to buy a ThinkPad X120e for $500 and go ultraportable. The first ThinkPad “netbook” — the X100 — was terribly under powered with some weak AMD Atom-like wannabe processor knock-off. I’m banking (need to check the reviews) that the processor refresh in the newly introduced X120e will make it a half-way decent cloud PC for road work. I’ll park the T410s on the home office desk, continue to love its classic ThinkPad keyboard, but use the X120e as my grab-and-go and save a pound of weight in the bag. Yes, I am tempted to go with a new MacAir — but the price tag stinks at $999 for 64 gb and I am not ready to completely bail out to the goofy but-oh-so-chic world of the Apple OS.

I love my iPad, truly I do.

But this is my last one.

Other than a few iPods over the years, it’s been my first true Apple product — at least one I purchased and wasn’t handed to evaluate — and the experience has been nothing short of excellent since I lucked into one late last April at an Apple store in North Carolina. The anticipation leading up to the launch of the iPad made it a foregone event — at least within the walls of Lenovo — but no one anticipated the excellent responsiveness, elegant user interface, and impeccable integration with iTunes and the iTunes app store. The product was far more than an upsized version of the iPhone, and came as a sharp rebuke to the stylus-based tablet computing model pushed by the PC makers and Microsoft.

Nearly a year later I spend as many hours with the iPad as I do with my classic laptop. I’m purchasing and reading an average of three Amazon Kindle books per week on it, do nearly all of my television/movie consumption through the Netflix app, and use a mixture of browser, Google Earth, and other reference tools as I read and research various non-fiction topics. I hate typing on it

In short, I’m a satisfied customer and am glad I winced and bought the $500 device when I did. I think it represents the most significant shift in computing devices in over twenty years, and has shown a way forward for a completely new model of information/entertainment delivery and consumption.

Now with the next version allegedly already in manufacturing, I  can also say this iPad is probably my last Apple tablet. My next one will most likely be an Android Honeycomb version, not purchased with a 3G/4G contract from a carrier, but most likely a WiFi enabled device.

I shared a table on the Acela to NYC this week with Forrester’s tablet analyst, Sara Rotman Epps. Like any good analyst she took the time to survey me, the average man on the train, on my purchase intentions. I told her — this time next year I’ll probably spend as much as $350 for an Android tablet and expected it would be much lower in build quality than an Apple — plastic instead of brushed aluminum. The real question is what, other than god forbid breakage or loss, will induce me to move to a new tablet. Camera? I don’t think so. Video calling is the most overhyped technology since speech to text recognition.

Why will I leave Apple?

In order of importance:

1. Monopoly: I’m alarmed by Apple’s monopolistic moves towards publishers — and book sellers — that essentially forces them to sell content — books, movies, magazine subscriptions, through Apple’s commerce infrastructure. This tollbooth will jack content prices up, with the impact inevitably being handed down to me, the buyer. I am sick and tired of Apple’s proprietary/walled garden approach to their platform from the lack of Flash support to sticking guns into the sides of the third parties that have coalesced around the platform to make it so successful.
2. Google integration. I am a Google person. From Gmail to Google Docs, Google Voice to Google Earth, Chrome to ….. the Google mobile app on the iPad is weak. I am also an Android phone owner, so I want better sync capabilities between devices. Google’s stuff works ok on the iPad, but not great.
3. Cost: I want to pay way less than $500 for basically half of a laptop. I hated netbooks although I inflicted one on my daughter, but regard the $250-$350 price point to be just right for the form factor. Sure, my next tablet will be made out of cheesy plastic, but slide it into a nice cover/case and who cares? It’s all about the screen and the processor.

There has been much buzz building over the past year about moving television away from a satellite/cable delivery model to an IP solution where the viewer pulls down programming from a pay-as-you-go or all-you-can-eat store such as iTunes or Netflix.  Pushing the DVR out of the rack and replacing it with an IP delivery solution such as AppleTV, Google TV, Roku, or even an XBox requires a leap of faith I suspect many won’t take for another few years. But confront a monthly DirectTV bill approaching $200, do some math on one’s digital content expenses (fodder for a future post) and the economics of moving to a new model is compelling except for a couple big stumbling blocks.

First off, as the insightful interactive TV blogger Uncle Fester pointed out recently, while the world is moving to a time-shifted model where programming is recorded and then viewed at one’s convenience, sports will remain a real-time event and as such — given the expensive scale of the broadcast rights — is not likely soon to migrate from Fox or ESPN to MLB.com or a sports-specific streaming provider.

Second is the spotty distribution of high bandwidth to the home — America’s shameful data networks continue to lag other countries (Korea for example) — and without a dependable high speed connection IPTV fails for the masses.

Uncle Fester provided me with a first generation AppleTV unit a couple years ago and it sort of languished in the closet — being connected and pressed into service on a couple of occasions, especially by my offspring who are far more comfortable with consuming their shows on a PC. For them it is fairly natural to decide to watch something then go find it on iTunes or Hulu or even YouTube.  That first generation AppleTV was a challenge to embrace because of the meager DSL rates I was experiencing on Cape Cod (350 to 400 kbits per second) and because my home network was primarily Windows XP machines with an unstable iTunes machine because of my need to switch PCs every few months in my former role at a PC company.

This all changed last week when I killed off Verizon DSL and replaced with with a much speedier Comcast connection and then ordered the second generation AppleTV device — for a mere $99 — and plugged it’s very straightforward HDMI out into the flat panel over the fireplace. Two things drove me to the new device — first was AirPlay, the ability to push video from an iPhone or iPad onto the television with amazing ease, and second was the integration of Netflix.  At this point I’d declare that AppleTV is providing at least half of the content consumed, especially spur of the moment video on demand via iTunes, or “channel surfing” through Netflix’s instant offerings.

The ability to stream movies stored on my ThinkPad into the unit and onto the screen via the home Wifi and the Home Share capability in iTunes is more than convenient and holds big possibilities for sharing home digital video, etc. Installing Apple’s remote control app on my iPad makes text entry into search boxes a hundred times easier than moving a cursor around with the AppleTV’s little remote (itself a nice example of Apple design engineering). All in all, I can’t recommend the new AppleTV highly enough.

For more on the cord-cutting phenomenon I recommend the New York Times‘ series on the topic.

From Google’s ChromeOS team:

Video-teleconferencing may have finally found s reason to exist.

Poker.

According to a friend who is deep into a business plan than leverages video teleconferencing as an enabling technology, one vendor tells him that online poker is pushing the popularity of video calls; not team meetings, not holiday calls to the in-laws, not porn, but a new form of online poker where the players agree to use their webcams to come closer to the smoke-filled backrooms of poker lore. You’ve doubtlessly seen online poker players on ESPN playing against the old-school guys like Doyle Brunson. The online players are so unaccustomed to showing their faces and playing behind the anonymity of a virtual poker table that they resort to sunglasses and hoodies to mask the tells that a classic player use to read whether or not an opponent is bluffing. Now, in so-called “live dealer games,” a sub-culture of video teleconferencing poker players is emerging, a trend predicted last year  in Poker News, when player Barry Greenstein said:

“You’ll use “video conferencing” situations where when you play online. People will be able to look at you, they will be able to see that you’re playing it. They will be able to see that you’re not in a conference with someone else and that it’s the same guy playing the whole time. As least maybe as we get to the final table or the final few tables, and you will not only, onscreen, be able to see your eight other opponents as you get to the final table, but so will everyone else have kind of this video room of people playing online, and it will look like live poker that will be played online.”

Having spent the past two months in discussions with a video teleconferencing company about a possible position (they passed on me), I’ve spent some time getting more familiar with the landscape, having last dug in on video teleconferencing in the early 90s when I was still reporting on technology for Forbes and the first PC based solutions were beginning to emerge thanks to the H.234 video standard, and some early efforts by Intel to move videoconferencing onto the PC and out of the dedicated ISDN systems such as PictureTels.

The results were less than satisfactory, and for most of the past 20 years anyone with a  PC and the will to buy a web cam could experience video calling thanks to CUSeeMe, iChat, and eventually any two-bit chat client worth its salt from Microsoft NetMeeting to MSN to Yahoo and Google Talk.

As a kid the phone book had a picture of the first AT&T Picturephone — rolled out for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. This struck me, a six year-old, as very interesting and in synch with what George Jetson was concurrently using on his cartoon and Dick Tracy on his wrist in the Sunday funnies. A few years later Stanley Kubrick revived the concept in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and by the time I was a young adult when the first video-teleconferencing systems made their commercial debut, I was primed to be a user. The future of the phone was TV.

The reality, after two decades of video telephony, is a lot less compelling. Video calls are intrusive, contrived, and an imposition where everyone loses the ability to multitask, have to worry about whether or not the sun is shining too brightly over my shoulder or my hair is combed. Once a call is arranged — and they seem to always need to be arranged ( impromptu calls are not appreciated in my personal experience) the dread begins and because the action is taking place down here, on the screen, where the caller’s face appears, not up on top of the laptop’s bezel where the camera is, eye contact is rarely ever made. In the end, seeing the person I am speaking to has never substantially enhanced the conversation — in fact it usually impedes it due to pixellation, dropped audio, and the host of other technical glitches associated with a VOIP connection over tenuous bandwidth. I’ve seen efforts to promote the technology internally at businesses, but in my experience a great deal of the in-room systems — the expensive stuff sold by Tandberg, etc. — gathers dust in the long term or is turned on for  board meetings and the like

PC to PC or device-based videotelephony is having a bit of a renaissance after a choppy decade. First, Skype’s IPO filing has put the market back on the radar — but I would hazard that most of Skype’s traffic is audio only, with video initiated in only a rare few circumstances. Then there is the iPhone 4G with a forward facing camera and Apple’s Facetime application, followed a few months later by the HTC EVO which comes preloaded with Qik, another app that takes advantage of the device’s dual cameras. Two months on the EVO and I have yet to make or receive a Qik video call and I highly doubt I ever will.

Last night two developments changed mobile teleconferencing from a dedicated/wi-fi, same-phone-to-asame-phone model to a cross platform paradigm that could finally see mobile video take off.

Tango, a Palo Alto start-up featured at GigaOm’s Mobilize conference, unveiled its iPhone and Android app which permits decent anywhere video calls over 3G and 4G as well as wifi. I downloaded it onto my Evo, asked my son to put it on his iPhone, our names and numbers were matched from our existing contact lists by Tango, and we were having a video call twenty feet from each other. “Come here Mr. Watson, I need you,” was not the historic first words, but after two months we both were using the front-facing cameras of our app phones for the first time.

Today (Oct. 5), Skype finally rolled out its Android app, but it carries some restrictions and is very underwhelming. First, it’s wifi only on Android for everyone except Verizon Wireless customers; and two: it doesn’t support video. WTF Skype? Getting a VOIP app onto a carrier network has been very taboo in the carriers eyes, who have declared full Skype on their network a “toxic” application that threatens their network security, capacity (and business model.) Eventually, as the carriers wean themselves from the landline-voice cash cow and begin to embrace the “internet of things,” Skype and other video teleconferencing players will have an easier time enabling any devices across any network. For now — don’t hold your breath.

Mobile video has much more potential, particularly in the more dynamic youth/netgen market, than desktop video teleconferencing has had for the past twenty years. Maybe Tweens will climb all over it the way they did with the Blackberry Messenger service. On the desk top and enterprise front there will be a lot of disruption, especially for the dedicated room system vendors as a host of desktop solutions ranging from the browser based TokBox, to Skype and ooVoo move upstream seeking the SMB market (see GigaOm’s case for a Skype-Cisco partnership).

For all of this movement and maneuvering, video telephony seems to be a technology in search of an application. Here are some obvious ones:

1. Executive Search and recruiter interviews. I’ve done a few of these the past two months, both desktop, and in one case, at a local business center where I sat in a room by myself and spoke to a recruiter for an hour. The recruiter who did it via a PC told me he rarely used his dedicated system any longer and was pushing his entire firm to the desktop solution.
2. The deaf. Sign language. Need I say more?
3. Therapy. Think about it. You need to talk to a therapist about your eating disorder or post-partum depression or attention deficit disorder. Why do it in person when you could do it from the privacy of your PC (disclosure: I am an advisor to Abilto, a startup that delivers therapy services via video).

And of course, poker.

I hate my iPod — dumb device (the Nano) with a singular function — playing music. This Sony device, once given a camera, will completely realize the dream of a Dick Tracy wrist watch with incredible multi-functionality. It’s been said that the smart phone killed the wrist watch; that may be the case. I don’t wear a watch. But I also don’t want a portable music player that only does music and lives on its own island. I don’t want to use my EVO as a music player — far too bulky for the rower.  The fact this sony device can be paired with any Android phone is simple genius. I may need to get one.

Stephen O’Grady nails down and confirms what Esteban Panzeri and I saw in the winter of 2009 when we were in discussions with Amazon Web Services to built a cloud application for a hardware project in a former life. Amazon is  much, much more than a store these days, and up on the hill above Seattle, in the old Veteran’s Hospital, looms a revolution in cloud computing that is going to cause a train wreck among traditional enterprise software companies.

When I learned from Pooj Preena that Dropbox was using AWS to host its excellent cloud storage service; and after reading J.D. Lasica’s seminal white paper on identity in the age of cloud computing, I began to grok the implications of Amazon’s servers-in-the-skies. But add on that some higher level services in the stack and things start to get very very very interesting. Here’s O’Grady’s piece:

“Maybe it’s the lingering perception that they’re just a retailer, but the lack of a healthy fear of Amazon is still curious. Even as players large and small acknowledge the dominance of AWS within the public cloud computing market, the lack of an immune response to its continued expansion defies simple explanation.

“If Amazon restricted itself to basic public cloud computing services, that would be one thing. Most of the large systems players have turned their attention to the burgeoning market for quote unquote private cloud services. Whether these same cloud players appreciate the fact that a large portion of their interest in the private cloud is a function of the public cloud economic realities established by Amazon is unclear, but unimportant. Amazon is singularly responsible for the framing that is the public cloud today, a framing which generally relegates those with traditional enterprise margins in mind to private cloud settings.”

via Hiding in Plain Sight: The Rise of Amazon Web Services – tecosystems.

The photographs of  Chinese iPad clones running Android are filtering their way west and indeed, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to port the operating system onto anything from a flat screen television to a cheap large screen smartphone.  Android seems destined to become the mass market OS for mobile internet devices, and as hardware manufacturers figure out how to junk it up with their own skins, you can be sure to see a plethora of 10″ screens sometime soon. After a month in the Android world on my HTC EVO smartphone, and several months on the genuine iPad, I have to wonder what the mass market appeal of an Android tablet will be once they start shipping in volume later this year.

The significant application for the tablet — the so-called “content consumption” device (consumption is so tubercular in my mind) — is e-readers in my opinion. Sure, you can watch a nice movie or video courtesy of iTunes on the iPad, and doubtlessly Amazon, Netflix, and Doubletwist will be pushing moving picture content onto Android tablets with ease. But in my experience the big application is reading, be it the Kindle app on the iPad or the new magazine formats such as Flipboard and the traditional magazine publishers. So far the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have the lead in iPad formats, and I tend to make a point of refreshing them before hopping onto a plane. Flipboard is a nice enough user experience, integrating links from my Facebook and Twitter network, and it is a good platform for prolific publishers like AllThingsD and others with a need to push their content.

The point of this post is to wonder outloud how publishers will port from the iPad to Android tablets and if the experience will be as compelling as the early iterations on the Apple platform. If I were leading the platform decision at a Conde Nast or Time Inc. I would be very concerned about the production challenges of supporting the two platforms. While Wired may be declaring the Web to be dead, I have to disagree, seeing Android as an extension of the desktop browser/HTML model we’ve lived with for nearly two decades. iPad as a closed example of “splinternet” — yes, I concede that Apple model is a walled garden for developers and consumers, but a short lived one as Android gathers momentum and steam this summer and into the holiday season.

Prediction: next year the dominant launch-first platform will be Android.

A true test of a consumer electronics brand’s strength and fidelity to the customer and not pure profit is their ability to withstand the siren call of junking up their products with crapware/bloatware. For some devices the bounties paid by second tier software providers is the difference between turning a PC or a phone from a loss leader to a profit engine. Does Apple do that? Or Google? Nope. But HTC and Sprint did with my EVO, junking it up with a foolish NASCAR and NFL widget more pernicious and tenacious than a toenail fungus. It is amazing how any app or widget on the phone associated with the handset maker (HTC) or the network provider (Sprint) is invariably a P.O.S.

“But bloatware isn’t a feature in all smartphones. AT&T hasn’t piled extraneous software onto Apple’s iPhone. Motorola’s Droid phone ships with just the core applications. Google and T-Mobile resisted the bloatware impulse with the Nexus One.”

But not the rest of the gang. Put the user first and at least make this stuff easy to remove. Forever. Please

via Bloatware Creeps Into Android Phones | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

In the 1990s (when exactly I cannot say because the their archive has no search function) Suck.com declared that the American cure for depression was the consumption of consumer electronics. Feel blue? Buy a Palm Pilot. Feeling stupid? Buy the folding external keyboard and the wireless data modem for that Palm Pilot. 3D televisions, gaming consoles, the latest Call of Duty, handheld weather stations, binnacle mounted GPS-Nav Chart Plotters with integrated radar and XM Satellite radio …. Then there is the whole Apple addiction, with something from Cupertino to pine for at least every six months. Add in all those iTunes downloads, Kindle books, Netflix, paid apps, online subscriptions to get through costwalls: I need to do a digital audit of my finances. Off the top of my head — from DSL to DirectTV to cell phone subscriptions, the big ticket recurring items, I’m spending $500 a month on digital services and easily $1000 a year family wide on new devices. I guess all those days picking through Garry Ray’s discards in the PC Week lab infected me with the need to try new stuff.

When will it end? I joke that in my retirement there will be no PCs. But what about cell phones? When my eyesight really goes and I start reading large-font books (thank god for the Kindle’s font sizer), will I own a large font cell phone like a Jitterbug? (note to self, burgeoning market in elderly CE devices).

It didn’t end today. I killed the Blackberry after four years of Lotus Notes/RIM BES mediocrity and embraced my inner Google ecosystem and bought my first real App phone, an HTC Evo running on Sprint’s 4G network. Why no iPhone? I get the iPhone experience and know full well the Apple ecosystem of iTunes, AppleTV, iPods, and now my iPad. Great experience, wonderful design …. but:

• Android is going to pull away in terms of share very quickly.
• I am a Google person: Chrome is my browser. Gmail is how I read my churbuck.com email. I use Gmail’s contact manager. I use Google calendar.  Google Docs. Google News ….pretty much everything except Google Talk and Google Voice. Android loves Google and Google loves Andy Ruben. It all works together, and had I lived on a Mac I’d probably a MobileMe person, or whatever it that Apple calls its cloud suite.
• The iPhone 4 is on AT&T and I want to get off AT&T. AT&T’s Android offerings are weak compared to Verizon (Droid X) and Sprint (EVO)
• Sprint’s 4G sounds cool but it will come to Cape Cod after I adopt a unicorn and teach it to fart glitter. For now, it’s an urban phenomenon.
• Kindle for Android
• No Skype. No ooVo. Guess I’ll wait for Adobe’s new “facetime” video call app.

So, to Best Buy for the EVO. I asked the clerk about the memory, and she said 32 GB. Wrong, it has eight. The porting of my number off of AT&T and onto Sprint was the usual Kafka Samsa Cockroach dive into “wait while I transfer you to technical support” but eventually I was out the door and on my way. The phone is nice, more a handheld mobile internet device than a phone really. Portable Wifi (I am retiring my Verizon MiFi) hot spot so I can tether my ThinkPad and iPad off it; decent camera, and a hardware build about what you would expect. Not Apple level, but not too bad either. If one handset maker would try to hit Apple in the build-quality space they could carve a good segment out of the Android market. HTC is no Apple, but they are going great guns after famously being Google’s hardware partner for the first Android phone, the G1 and then the recently discontinued Nexus One. The Taiwanese company’s rise to the forefront (it helps to be a Tour de France fan as HTC is cosponsoring a pro bike team this summer) in handsets is pretty remarkable and due in large part to their position as Google’s favored nation for building reference platforms.

I configured the following apps on the Evo

• Dropbox because Dropbox is still far and away the best “hard drive in the sky” that there is. I save ALL my files to my Dropbox folder and can get them from the iPad, the EVO, and via any browser on any device.
• Doubletwist for music management. First to free my music from the tyranny of iTunes, second because it has the same slick synch integration that iTunes does, but with any device.
• Evernote for being a packrat and saving notes, voice memos, snapshots, and URLs
• Pandora internet radio because everyone raves about it and I didn’t have it on my Blackberry
• MLB.com “At Bat,” now the third time I have paid the only major league sport that  truly understands digital apps another stack for cash  get scores, watch highlights, and read stats
• And several utilities, widgets, etc.

What else to say? In the end, it just something to deliver a little more noise and as the Fake Steve Jobs would say, a “little more shittiness” in our lives. But what am I complaining about? I dig little computers.

So with all of six hours on Android, let me make the comparisons to Apple  – at least the iPad experience which is needless to say a stupid basis to talk a slate form factor versus an app phone. But nevertheless — there is a lot of similarities and differences that have me persuaded that people will focus their online lives on three devices:  app phone, pad, and clamshell notebook/netbook. The three macro use-cases are obvious. Smartphone for rapid response communications and idle-moment-diversions; pad for consumption of film, book, newspaper, blog, and games; clamshell-keyboard notebook for writing long-winded blog posts and the Powerpoint Forced March. Right now Apple has the wide lead on seamlessly integrating all three. Heck, the non-Apple pad market is totally nascent and no Wintel hardware company has brought a successful tablet/pad to market. Yet. There will be a flood of Android tablets leading up to CES, some total clones of the iPad, others laden with proprietary skins and some with a nod to the commercial/enterprise market. The Linux variants and sideplayers like JoliCloud will fall to wayside as Android integration proceed across increasingly bigger screens, culminating with Chrome OS on netbooks.  If Google can control a seamless experience even with the code projects in the open domain, then every hardware manufacturer can dive in and do the “brown bananas” game of competing on price and driving average margins down to a brutal 1%.

Apple has a beautiful interface with rabid attention to detail that Android lacks. There’s something spare and elegant in Apple’s user interface. Android’s is … not as clean. Clean, and the usual gestures of swipe and pinch work well … but still.

Android is very Volkswagen to Apple’s BMW.

So, enough devices, my depression is lifted, my phone number is the same and … farewell Blackberry and onwards into standing astride the dominant mobile internet architectures, slightly schizo but always enlightened.

I’ve gone fully Google — gmail integration of my churbuck.com email, Google docs, Google Calendar — but when Buzz Bruggeman suggested we talk and I use his Tungle account, I decided, hey, what the heck, sign up for another service.

Anyway — I am on Tungle, syncing my Google calendar to it. If you want to talk and get on my sked, check it out.

http://tungle.me/DavidChurbuck