Dana Blankenhorn

Where Computing Happens

I met my first computer in 1976, in the basement of Herman Brown Hall, on the campus of Rice University in Houston.

The computing happened in a big room, separated from me by a window. I passed a stack of punch cards, tied with a rubber band, through the window. They came back along with my output. Which usually said the program had died on Line 3.

By the time I got out of journalism school, two years later, computing was moving to desktops. A neighbor bought a $20,000 Cromemco machine that could run 3 terminals. She hired friends to work at the terminals, transcribing court records. I think they got 50 cents a page. Computing had come home.

Tech, Change and the Fed

Even 50 years on, we don’t understand Moore’s Law. 

Moore’s Law accelerates the pace of change in every direction. It’s not just about silicon. It’s not just about technology. It’s about what is enabled.

Two things that are enabled by technology are deflation and change. The first is a subset of the second. Technology lets consumers and businesses adjust to change rapidly. This is true not just because technology is improving, but because its adoption keeps increasing.

Moving technology from a desktop to a smartphone is a step change in its adoption. Smartphones let us compare prices inside a store. They let us route around traffic jams. They bring the office to the job site. You can find whatever you need to know, from anywhere, using a smartphone.

A world of instant answers means a world of instant adjustment. Demand can adjust faster than supply, but supply can adjust too. We all went into lockdown together, we all came out of it together, we all demanded products together, then we demanded services together. There was a lag, but by and large the economy has kept up.

Some changes are permanent. We don’t need offices the way we did. You can appear on TV from your living room, kitchen, or bedroom. What I’ve seen, as a business reporter, is that the economy can now react ahead of policymakers. Even the Federal Reserve, which can adjust policy every month or even within a month, can no longer keep up.

Days of Apps

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 28 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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In 2012 the software industry is like an iceberg. Most of it is under the water.

Not underwater, mind you. Under the water.

That's because the world of “applications” is over. It's all about the apps now, brutha. And no one in the app business has yet gone public. The smart VC guys and private equity people are putting tons of money into the space, so there's no need to go public, no need to give the public investor a taste.

It's like the social boom. You'll know the bust has started when one of these outfits starts looking for suckers on NASDAQ.

Doesn't mean there's no there, there. There is. I found that out Monday when I went to a “MeetUp” for Techcrunch.com at the Sweetwater Brewery, a few miles from my home.

The place was packed. Cars were parked around the corner and down the next street. (They could do it because this is a warehouse district where everyone else goes home around 5 PM.) There were well over 3,000 people there. Mostly male, mostly young, mostly white. But not exclusively. I was also pleased to find two people who rode bikes there. A guy my own age who admitted he'd taken the train to a nearby transit stop, and a younger guy who'd ridden 8 miles in rush-hour traffic. 

The 2010s: Your Daily Life is About to be Transformed

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 46 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Since 2003 I've been writing here about something I called “the world of always-on.”

It's a world where everything has intelligence in it. Your lawn and your bird feeder. Your TV and your microwave. The yogurt in your refrigerator and the water in your bathroom. More important, your heart and your kidneys.

Sensors and motes, single-chip computers, will live everywhere around you, under your control. They will let you know what you have, find what you lost, monitor your health, keep you entertained and alive.

The basic technology for all this existed way back then but, like the flying car in The Jetsons and the robotic babysitter in I, Robot, you wonder why it's not here already.

Two reasons. Intelligence and power.

Intelligence in this case means a user interface that will let you control your environment in a way that's natural to you, that will cause you to want to add computing power to the devices around you. A lot of work has been done on the lower levels of all this, but very little has been done on the user interface, and what has been done hasn't worked well.

Enter Apple. Specifically enter Siri, the voice interface on the latest iPhone. Not much at first, but as you train it the software adapts to the sound of its master's voice and gets better at giving you what you want. It's a user interface to what's in the phone, and what's behind the phone.

Eventually, it can become a user interface to everything else.

It doesn't have to be voice, of course. Maybe it will be motion. Maybe you can become the orchestra leader of your own life with something like Microsoft Kinect. Whichever it is, Google is just waiting to build that capability into its Android system.

These interfaces, between you and Internet-connected devices, are the start of something big. They're the top layer that connects human desire to what devices can already do, and they create demand for those capabilities. Some of what you own you'll retrofit, because you'll suddenly decide you want that in what you have. Other things will have them added at the factory, cheap chips built-in and connected, through the user interface and brand name (Now with iOS! Now for Kinect!) to the market.

There remains a problem. Power.

I try to stay on top of stuff but one trend I missed is a standard called Power over Ethenet (PoE). I didn't really notice until a patent troll filed a lawsuit against the companies which created this standard, using technology they say came from a company they later bought, which had been mentioned in the standards-setting discussions.

No matter. Power over Ethernet makes data lines just like the old phone lines. They let you extend both intelligence and power across long distances. With both power and intelligence extended you can run your own WiFi network over a mile and (eventually) reach a fiber POP that liberates you from the phone network.

That's not all.

Because while that takes care of your server, what about the client? What about all those little sensors and motes on your yogurt and your bird feeder and living inside of you? They can get their own power. It's called zero power wireless sensors, wireless ICs that harvest the small amounts of energy they need from motion, from light, from the heat around them, and thus don't need batteries.

WSN lets all the devices being installed all around you, single chips assigned simple functions, to be networked . They're the bottom layer of the always-on world.

The chip on your yogurt can be pretty simple. It might calculate the level of yogurt in the container and the age of that yogurt, reporting that as a number to a network on demand. It's little more than an RFID chip. Same with the chip on your bird feeder. The chip on your grass just wants to know when the grass needs watering and, when the network becomes aware, it might turn on the sprinkler for you, if the water is connected to the network.

The chip inside your head, the one by your heart, the one in your toilet might be different. It might be measuring heart rate, sugar levels, whatever a doctor might want to know at that moment to tell whether that pain in your side is random or the sign of an incipient heart attack. And when those devices are connected for a wireless sensor network to the Internet, the ambulance might come before you call it.

All the elements needed to transform your life now exist, in other words. All the various layers of software, all the technical barriers, to a world of always-on connectivity have been systematically blown away.

Time for the market dance to start.

Diminishing Patent Returns in Age of Software

Florian Mueller feels like he's in his glory.

Lawyers from Apple have been on a global winning streak against Samsung's Galaxy tablet. The latest win came in Australia, where a judge stopped the product's import over a patent personally filed by the late Steve Jobs. 

To Florian this is a really big deal.

After today's decision, I believe no company in the industry be able to launch any new Android-based touchscreen product in Australia anytime soon without incurring a high risk of another interim injunction. The two patents on which today's ruling is based aren't Galaxy Tab 10.1-specific at all. They will affect all Android-based smartphones and tablet computers, across all vendors.

If Apple wins the Australian case at the end of the main proceeding, all Android-based products will effectively be shut out of the Australian market forever, unless Google or its device maker partners settle with Apple.

Bunk.

The Open Source Issue is (really) China

Having used Google's Android to become a solid second-place player in mobile devices, Samsung is hedging its bets.

Even its open source bets.

The first hedge is an IP deal with Microsoft covering Android, which Samsung previously licensed from Google.

Terms are not disclosed, so while many open source analysts are angry, like Brian Proffitt, it was hard for me to see exactly what they were angry about.

“Samsung screws Linux over,” Proffitt wrote after reading about the deal at ZDNet. When I pointed out the lack of disclosure, and the possibility this may be little money for nothing in the way of real protection, he returned my Tweet. “The Microsoft FUD that's sure to come will make great hay out of this. Actual dollar amount does not matter.”

Google is All-In

 

A year ago, at ZDNet, I was railing against Google crapware.

The Samsung “Android” phone I'd gotten from my AT&T store was filled with crapware – programs placed there by AT&T and Samsung. Some seemed to want me to pay for things I knew the phone could do for free. And I couldn't get rid of them. Still can't.

This is hurting Google's brand, I wrote. When people get an Android phone they expect that Google is standing somewhere behind it. Even if they got it from a carrier, no matter whose brand name is on it, there are brand expectations here the phone's not meeting. What I found on reading other blogs and investigating things further was that, not only was this the case, but there seemed to be little the company could do about it.

Turned out there was.

Over the last year Google has steadily taken more-and-more control over Android. They updated my software, in the background, and it's better. They imposed new conditions on OEMs and stopped talking so much about the Open Handset Alliance in favor of the Android brand. Now the main differences I note between my phone and my daughter's iPhone are that my GPS is an energy hog, and her music integrates well with her phone.

The news peg here is Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility, the shank half of the Motorola ham, for $10.5 billion, which includes a $2.5 billion “breakup fee,” money that will go to Motorola if for any reason the deal isn't consummated. 

Much of the early talk about the deal was it was about patents. Motorola has thousands of patents. But as Florian Mueller notes at his excellent blog FossPatents, Motorola is in court against Microsoft, Apple and many trolls over other patents, and Motorola's court cases are not going well.

No, this is about control. By having a real Google phone, designed by Motorola and produced under Google's direction, in the marketplace, Google sets a bar for every other Android phone maker (think Samsung and HTC). By having its own name and design out in the market, and its own name on Motorola's lawsuits, Google can also face the legal difficulties of its OEMs squarely, like the sibling whose kid brother is getting beat up and finally comes outside.

“You want a piece of me? You want a piece of The Goog? Well here I am, come and get me.”

Which they will.

Will Law Force a Meego-Android Merger?

At first blush the idea sounds stupid.

Why should Android, the leading phone OS on the planet, merge its code base into Meego, which has shipped a single Nokia phone that will likely disappear faster than Mr. Popper's Penguins?

One word. Law.

As Florian Mueller has pointed out, many times now, Google faces an immense potential liability from Oracle's copyright-and-patent suit. The suit isn't against Android per-se. It's against Dalvik, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) written to run Java-based applications. The Google legal team did not do their homework before letting this semi-proprietary thing into the wild, and Oracle may justify its purchase of Sun with one law suit as a result.

While Google and Oracle are both part of the Open Invention Network, the patent consortium designed to protect Linux, the suit is about Java, not Linux. The OIN has not, and will not, interfere, even though OIN head Keith Bergelt has made noise about wanting to protect Android in the press.

Nokia, The Law and The Lab

When tech companies fall, they fall hard.

Anyone remember Data General? Wang? Silicon Graphics? Sun? They rise quickly to great heights, until they appear to be enormous institutions, then they fall as fast as they rose.

It's modern corporate evolution, one reason why you need to build a career on your own brand, never expect an employer to maintain one for you.

Nokia is now going down that same road. When phones were based on Real Time Operating Systems, Nokia was king of the hill. No one made as much from so-called “feature phones,” because Nokia had all the carriers locked-up, it owned the OS, and costs were outsourced, under control.

The Cloud Backlash will FAIL

The big story of this month is the backlash against the cloud.

It began with Amazon's downtime, and has continued with the revelation that Amazon itself was the source of the hack attack that took down Sony. This has caused nervous nellies like Murray Jennex of San Diego State to suggest cloud computing be ignored by the enterprise.

But the problem here isn't the cloud. The problem is identity. A Bloomberg story describes the Amazon sign-up procedure:

Signing up to the service requires a name, e-mail address, password, phone number, billing address and credit card information. Users get an automated call from Amazon and are asked to dial in a four-digit verification code to complete the registration process.

Note what's missing? Proof that you are who you say you are. A hacker can use a stolen identity. He doesn't have to prove he is who he is.