Trends I'm Watching

Can eBook Readers Rescue Newspapers and Magazines?

Trend: eBook readers like the Amazon Kindle have the potential to rescue the widely read newspapers and magazines that provide great content.

Getting newspapers and magazines via download to an eBook reader is convenient and green (no transportation emissions, no paper). Reading a newspaper or magazine is faster with search and browsing options.

As of April 16, 2009, you can subscribe to 35 newspapers with Amazon's Kindle, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA TODAY, The Washington Post, and the Financial Times. There are 26 managines, including The New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, and Reader's Digest, available for the Kindle.

Instead of having to go get your morning newspaper, you just pick up the eBook reader. The newspaper has been downloaded wirelessly, without any attention required.

The advantages are many: no delay in receiving the latest issue, no transportation/mailing costs for the publication, no stack of newspapers and magazines to recycle (you do recycle, don't you?).

The disadvantage: reading a newspaper or magazine on a small screen is different and takes some adjustment.

Currently, Amazon is the market leader with the Kindle. Amazon's stock price may have been boosted by the publicity and warm reviews for the recent, improved upgrade – Kindle 2. Here's the chart for AMZN.

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Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Valley Insider estimates that it costs the New York Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead (Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle).

Mike Elgan had been using a Kindle now for a few days, and reading his subscription to The New York Times. He says reading a Kindle-based newspaper is superior -- far superior, actually -- to reading a paper newspaper. So even if you don't care about saving the newspaper industry -- even if you hate the environment -- buy a Kindle anyway for purely selfish reasons. HERE'S WHY THE KINDLE IS BETTER THAN A NEWSPAPER.

I bought an eBook reader (Astek EZ Reader from Fry's) for the hundreds of PDFs I have on my PC. I don't like reading long eBooks on my PC (I spend enough time there already) and I don't like printing out hundreds of pages to be thrown away later. Here's the hard lesson I learned: PDF documents don't flow (PDF is a print medium) and therefore don't work well on a small screen. I sent it back.

I'd like to see a very creative company (like Apple) design an eBook reader with a larger screen to challenge Amazon's Kindle 2.

Subscriptions on Cell Phones to challenge Web Search?

Trend: Subscriptions to web sites and alerts allow cell phone users to track events and receive incremental information immediately.

Rajesh Jain at Emergic.org descrbes why mobile users with subscriptions will be the next big trend on the Web, especially in places where mobiles are the primary means of accessing the web. Excerpts below.

Link: Emergic: May 16, 2007 Archives.

Search engines are the primary way to navigate the Reference Web. We no longer bookmark sites or even try and remember their URLs; we Google everything. This becomes possible because we trust Google to have made a copy of everything that has been created and appropriately ingested it with its algorithms. Search works very well with the PC screen -- most of the space is taken up by the results with some relevant ads thrown around. This works great for us, the search engines and the advertisers.

As the Live Web starts to occupy a greater importance in our lives, Search on a PC will no longer be the dominant form of interaction. Instead, I believe it will be Subscriptions delivered to a mobile screen. Let me explain.

The Live Web is about events and incremental information. There are a number of things we would like to know as soon as they happen. In this context, the best way to be alerted is to set up an alert. So, when we want to track something, we can set up a Subscription to that site.... The mobile is the perfect device to send out an alert to since we can be pretty sure that the user will see the message almost immediately.

In emerging markets like India, access to the PC is still limited, but mobiles (and SMS for now) can reach over 150 million users.... The mobile thus becomes the ideal device to send people information about the Live Web.

Search does not become irrelevant for the Live Web. In fact, we will still use Search for things we cannot Subscribe to in advance. My point is that Subscription will be the dominant way we interact with the Live Web ? just like Search is the primary way we interface with the Reference Web.

With this change in behaviour and device, the business model will also morph.

End of the PC Era?

Trend: High-end handheld computing devices no longer require using a desktop PC to upload and download information.

Astute techology analyst Om Malik notes the significance of Apple Computer changing its name to Apple.

Link: GigaOM » iPhone and the End of PC Era

From Steve Jobs iPhone announcement:

“From this day forward we’re going to be known as Apple, Inc. We’ve dropped the computer from our name.” And then he quoted ice skating legend Wayne Gretzky. “‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it’s been.’ That’s what we try to do at Apple.”

Om Malik writes in his blog:

That also might be the epitaph of the PC era. And it is sweet irony that the company that sparked off the desktop computing revolution is the one announcing its passing.

Dropping Computer from its name is a sure sign that Apple, from this point forward, is a consumer electronics company, a mobile handset maker - one that also makes computer hardware and software as well.

Like the iPod, the iPhone may feed off the computer, but it can live peacefully without any dependence on a desktop. A Wi-Fi enabled device, it is should ideally be capable enough to do direct downloads from the iTunes store, no desktop necessary. (Time magazine says it is not possible, so who knows!⁸)

Apple is making the phone do all things a computer does – surf, email, browse, iChat, music and watch videos.

Results-only Work Environment

Trend: Work from anywhere anytime may soon gain some momentum if Best Buy's results give it a competitive advantage.

BusinessWeek describes Best Buy's experiment with flexible work hours. Excerpts below.

Link: Smashing The Clock

The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours. Hence workers pulling into the company's amenity-packed headquarters at 2 p.m. aren't considered late. Nor are those pulling out at 2 p.m. seen as leaving early. There are no schedules. No mandatory meetings. No impression-management hustles. Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do. It's O.K. to take conference calls while you hunt, collaborate from your lakeside cabin, or log on after dinner so you can spend the afternoon with your kid.

Best Buy did not invent the post-geographic office. Tech companies have been going bedouin for several years. At IBM (IBM ), 40% of the workforce has no official office; at AT&T, a third of managers are untethered. Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) calculates that it's saved $400 million over six years in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of all employees to work anywhere they want. And this trend seems to have legs. A recent Boston Consulting Group study found that 85% of executives expect a big rise in the number of unleashed workers over the next five years. In fact, at many companies the most innovative new product may be the structure of the workplace itself.

But arguably no big business has smashed the clock quite so resolutely as Best Buy. The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done. "This is like TiVo (TIVO ) for your work," says the program's co-founder, Jody Thompson. By the end of 2007, all 4,000 staffers working at corporate will be on ROWE. Starting in February, the new work environment will become an official part of Best Buy's recruiting pitch as well as its orientation for new hires. And the company plans to take its clockless campaign to its stores--a high-stakes challenge that no company has tried before in a retail environment.

Sprint Commits to Mobile WiMAX

Trend: Fast, inexpensive wireless broadband will available next year, and it will jumpstart mobile networks into the next wave of computing and communications.

Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOM describes Sprint's commitment to mobile WiMax and the implications for partners and competitors. Excerpts below.

Link: GigaOM : » Sprint Details Mobile WiMAX Plans

Sprint confirmed it has chosen mobile WiMAX as the technology for its 4G network and says it will spend between $2.5 billion and $3 billion on capital expenses by 2008. The company says it is working with Intel, Samsung and Motorola, though didn’t specify how much additional money each of those companies is investing in the plan.

Sprint executives said the network will offer between 2 to 4 Mbps, and will be launched in the Q4 2007, with a nationwide rollout in 2008. With that much bandwidth available, Sprint executives referred to a network that will be built to run user-generated content, and enabling subscribers to access “YouTube and MySpace on the fly.”

Sprint detailed some of the reasons for its mobile WiMAX choice, and said the company can create a “mobile WiMAX ecosystem” with 4 times the performance and a tenth of the cost of a technology like EVDO. In a call after the conference Sprint phrased the benefits as providing ten times the combined performance and cost saving over other available networks, but wouldn’t clarify more on this somewhat confusing metric.

All of the cheering on the call was of course at the expense of Qualcomm, which Sprint did not choose for the 4G network, and which builds a business off of owning proprietary IP standards and a closed model. Sprint said Qualcomm’s tech was not chosen for technical differences, among a variety of reasons, and emphasized its interest in mobile WiMAX as a global standard with a business model for building an ecosystem.

...The first winner is Motorola, who looks to have taken a huge early lead over rivals such as Ericsson and Nokia and is in a good position to stave off the coming threat of AlcateL(ucent). The second winner is Samsung, who is right now the biggest WiMax player from a global perspective and can make the most compelling argument that the are The Leader, when dealing with emerging markets (which is a far bigger play than the US in the long term). The third winner is all the small-time players who have already deployed WiMax (well preWiMax and upgradeable to WiMax really) in the 2.6 GHz band. These guys now have the potential to craft nationwide roaming offerings for their customers. They also get a good outlook for an exit plan, as sooner or later Clearwire or Sprint will look to gobble them up, which means it should be easier for them to raise money to continue to build out their regional networks.

Death of the PC: Intel and Microsoft Part Company

Cringely speculates about the demise of the PC and the clash of Intel and Microsoft.

Microsoft has known for a long time that the PC as a platform is dying. The trends it sees for successor technologies are clear: mobility and gaming. Mobility means some combination of a handheld computer and a mobile phone. Gaming means xBox 360 and all that it can be -- a game system, a home media platform, a more-than-rudimentary Internet device and home PC.

Redmond has chosen IBM as its xBox hardware partner, so Intel must plot its revenge. This is not so much Paul Otellini taking out Bill Gates with an ice pick as it is Intel as an ongoing business trying to survive. The only way Intel can do that is by beating Microsoft on content delivery and networking, and by giving Microsoft something to worry about on the desktop, which was the basis of my original Apple/Intel theory. A theory I continue to believe, by the way.

So where Intel had been Microsoft's lap dog on so many previous technical initiatives, I'm sure we'll see some divergence, like Intel's partnering in the new Apple movie download service, which someone told me this week will be called iVideo.

A year from now, it will be interesting to see whether Microsoft does the obvious and tries to move some version of xBox technology onto business desktops. After a decade of messing around, thin client computing is almost inevitable for businesses. Not only are existing computers too darned hard to service, support, and keep virus-free, but all the new legal requirements for protecting and preserving corporate data (Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, GLBA, FERC and so many others) pretty much demand some central data repository.

Trends in Networks

Ten predictions by Hossein Eslambolchi, CTO and CIO of AT&T

10: Home LANs will proliferate.

9: Knowledge mining will transform the way we do business.

8: Wireless and wired lines will converge -- accelerating virtualization.

7: Broadband will be common -- leading to the death of locality.

6: e-Collaboration will dominate the workplace -- promoting foster next-generation speech recognition.

5: Sensor networks will be everywhere.

4: Wireless Internet will be big -- driving mobility.

3: Convergence of communications and applications will become a reality -- the network will be the computer.

2: Security is critical.

1: IP will eat up everything.

via E M E R G I C . o r g: May 25, 2005 Archives via Jeff Nolan and CRN

Broadband speed increasing

Link: Everybody Is Crazy.

Broadband speed increasing yet again, in a trend that will continue for quite some time, albeit slowly.

Sources are saying that Comcast will announce yet another speed boost for users of its broadband internet service. While no official announcement has been made, it is expected that the company will raise its basic level of service from 3Mbps to 4Mbps for download, and from 256kbps to 384kbps for upload. Pricing will remain the same.

Microsoft Will Not Dominate the Future of Software

The winds of change can undermine even the very powerful.

Link: Joel on Software - How Microsoft Lost the API War.

Every developer has a choice to make when they plan a new software application: they can build it for the web or they can build a "rich client" application that runs on PCs. The basic pros and cons are simple: Web applications are easier to deploy, while rich clients offer faster response time enabling much more interesting user interfaces.

Web Applications are easier to deploy because there's no installation involved. Installing a web application means typing a URL in the address bar.

But there's a price to pay in the smoothness of the user interface. ...things you can't really do well in a web application.

So the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted to develop almost every significant new application as a web application.

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows.

Wireless Impact

Link: Mobile Pipeline | 2004: Mergers,Convergence And Wi-Fi As Sewage.

...Fast access from virtually anywhere is becoming something close to a right in the U.S. That can only bode well for the future of information technology.