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Happy Boardsies

November 28, 2008 in Technology & Science

I saw on John Breslin’s blog that the winners of the SIOC data competition have been announced.

The competition ran from September to October 2008, and the brief was to produce an interesting creation based on a data set of discussion posts reflecting ten years of Irish online life from boards.ie

There were some really cool entries, and I’d definitely recommend checking them out. My favourite use of all the boards.ie information came from “Visualizing the boards.ie community culture with charts“:

So it looks like on the whole we’re a happy nation! (well, those of us that use boards!)

A few other heartening graphs:

Check out the rest of the winners here

The Means are Not the Ends

November 24, 2008 in Economics, Essays, Evolution, Marketing

The thoughts behind this post have been inspired by reading the comments and reactions to Damien Mulley‘s blog post about the Pat the Baker Bebo campaign. Most of the intial reaction to Damien’s post seems to all be based on a logical flaw, (and one that I notice frequently in arguments), that when a certain “means to an end” becomes quite successful or popular, we tend to glorify or pursue the means as if it were the end. We forget that it’s value lies in what it delivers and not what it is.

Derived Demand
In economics, we used the term derived demand to explain this concept of means and ends. The demand I have for a brick is a derived demand. I don’t want a brick; I don’t get satisfaction or happiness from having it. But I do want a wall, or a house, or a new BBQ in my back garden. These are things I value; they provide me with satisfaction (economic utility). With the rare exception of Fr. Jack, I don’t think anyone would want a brick just to have, and would only go out and by one (or many) if they had some building to do.

Free Market Capitalism
I read a brilliant blog post in a similar vein to this by Alonzo Fyfe over at Atheist Ethicist, but can’t for the life of me find it to link to. He argued that many Republicans in America make a similar logical flaw in their adoration of “The Free Market“. Capitalism has created more wealth and lifted more people from poverty than any other economic system in human history. However, Mr. Fyfe is quick to remind us that we should be supporters of the free market because of the value it creates and not because of the system itself. Although it is the best system we have come up with it so far, the value it produces, it’s “ends” are far from perfect.

Without getting too deep into this topic here, in many regards I would see free market capitalism as almost perfect. It is immensely efficient and is flawed, in my opinion, only because humans are not always rational, we are an emotional animal. The caveat here is that I’m praising the means as a beautiful system, and not the ends that it produces. In fact, it is so effective at encouraging survial of the fittest, innovation and wealth creation through economic incentive, that it will almost certainly always create a huge wealth gap between the rich and the poor. When we idolise the means, raise “the free market” on a pedestal, and treat is as something of worth rather than the tool it is….. well I guess one look at any of today’s newspaper headlines will show you the result of that loss of perspective.

Evolution by Natural Selection
Although evolution doesn’t fit this template 100%, I feel it’s still worth a mention in this context. That humans are “the most evolved” animal is a statement that I often hear, and one which is borne out of misunderstanding. We, like all life that exists today, are the best adapted to our current environments. We come from descendants who were each the best adapted to their environments at the time. We are not something that evolution tried to make, evolution doesn’t have forethought. For the most part, we have been fine tuned by evolution and are better off as a result. But there are many ways in which natural selection works against us, fine tuning viruses that infect us, other humans that can take advantage of us, or animals that can kill us. Evolution by natural selection and the free market are wonderful and elegant systems, but neither are working entirely “for” us. Richard Dawkins explains this to us wonderfully in The Extended Phenotype, and we must always remember to be aware that our love of them should be a derived demand. Just as all things natural are not always the best for us (and so we get vaccines, use contraceptives etc.) , so too the free market must be regulated to ensure it’s in the best interest of all people (e.g. regulating the banks!)

Customer Engagement
And so, after a bit of a meander, we return to the original point. To paraphrase the question I took from Damien’s post “What is the NPV/ROI of the Bebo campaign to Pat the Baker?” The NPV, the profit, the extra customer, the revenue, the extra loafs of bread sold. These are all the ends in this equation. And Damien is right to point out that this is the value, this is the deliverable any company should be seeking. But the responses are all classic examples of “means worship“:

Philip MaCartney from Bebo wrote:

200 poems written about Pat The Baker in two weeks. That is brilliant engagement in any ones book. I have quoted these figures to a number of marketing professionals and all have been impressed so I fail to see how these figures should be considered a failure?

and

If the brand thinks it is a success and the Bebo audience obviously love it, how can it be a failure??

Another commenter said

Having all those people singing your theme tune [……], writing poems, wearing the tee-shitrs [….] is bound to be worth a lot in subliminal or secondary advertising too.

All in all, while the success of the campaign is still being debated, I felt that some of the responses, especially from the Bebo representative, are good examples of means worshiping, and I think it’s something that all of us, especially people who work in marketing (like me!) , need to be aware of. A brick can be as cool, or as shiny or as engaging as you want, but if it can’t be used to build a wall it’s not worth a damn to me. As I commented myself in response to Mr. MaCartney: Poems don’t put bread on the table!

So next time I hear a civil servant explain the purpose of a terrible process as “because that’s the way it’s done”, or when the success of a product is measured/presented only in customer engagement, all I’m going to hear is….

“I love my brick!”

The Journey of a Facebook Application

November 20, 2008 in The Journey of a Facebook Application

I’ve decided to make a Facebook Application. I’ve also decided that it might be fun to document the journey of a Facebook Application, from the idea popping into my head right the way through to launch and beyond!

I’ll blog about it every step of the way, so anyone who wants to read along should hopefully get a good insight into what a facebook application is, what’s involved in making one, what to expect if you decide to make one yourself, how I go about marketing it, how it spreads virally and a whole host of other questions that I have and hope to answer!

This won’t be the first Facebook application that I’ve made. I made one last year, mostly to test my abilities, (check it out here if you’re on facebook) so I’ll be employing some of the learnings I have from that in this project.

Right so, now I’m off to the drawing board. I have a few ideas floating around in my skull but I have to pick one. I’ll post again with a rough outline of the plan when I think it through.

Don’t forget to subscribe to follow along and get each post in your ibox or RSS reader… and wish me luck!

Obama names Tom Daschle as his Secretary of Health and Human Services

November 20, 2008 in links, Videos

It was announced earlier today that former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle will be Health and Human Services secretary in Obama’s cabinet. The news is pretty widespread on the internet, and all of the big news sites have write ups on the story, so I won’t try echo here what they’ve already said.

However, if you are interested in the people that the American’s new President-elect is selecting for his cabinet (as I am) you should have a look at some/all of the interviews below which are good introductions to Tom Daschle. Charlie Rose interviews are always quite good, each one is about 20 mins.

December 2, 2003

May 14, 2002

July 25, 1996

November 29, 1994

Leave a comment and let me know what you think of Mr. Daschle.

How Laptops Could Soon Be Free

October 30, 2008 in Technology & Science

Like many people out there I’ve been pretty interested in finding out more about Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Operating System that they announced this week – Microsoft Azure. I won’t go into too much detail on what it is here, firstly because it was only the inspiration for this post not it’s subject, and secondly because there’s much better analysis elsewhere (here and  here). 
What I want to talk about here is a potential business model for Personal Cloud Computing, how it could earn the big players great revenue streams, could create a thriving ecosystem for smaller companies, and most importantly give the rest of us consumers free (or at least cheaper) laptops!
Cloud Computing – an overview
Google Apps is a great example of cloud computing. When we refer to something being in “the cloud”, what we really mean is stored on the internet. Traditionally, if I wanted to write a novel, a script, an essay for college or a letter, I might start by opening Microsoft Word. I would type a few paragraphs and then save it to my My Documents. This is the old paradigm, where information is kept locally. It has it’s advantages, that as long as I have my laptop I have my data. But it has it’s disadvantages – if I lose my laptop, bye bye essay! 

This is where cloud computing comes in. If  I log onto www.google.com/docs I am presented with an internet based word processor. I can write documents in my browser just like in word. I can save just like my regular documents. The only difference here is that this time the essay is stored in Google docs and not on my laptop. As you can imagine, this has many cons and pros. The upside being that I can access it from any machine, I don’t lose it if I play frisbee with my laptop, it doesn’t take up space on my hard disk etc.
Physically, this document is stored on a Google server somewhere in the world, maybe in California, the UK, Germany or god know’s where, and that’s the point – it’s not saved on my machine… it’s in the cloud.

Powering the cloud
So that was an example of an application on the cloud. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is! The idea has been around for a while. E-mail used to be something that was in our Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook or Eudora, and then hotmail came along and gave us email on the web. Apple’s Mobile Me lets us store contacts on calendars in the cloud and access them on multiple devices. Facebook lets us store our contacts, our pictures and our conversation in the cloud. Salesforce let’s businesses conduct their CRM activities in the cloud.
Note: Generally what is called a program on a computer, is called an application on the internet.
Recently Amazon, Google and others have taken this one layer deeper. Instead of offering cloud based applications to end users, they have launched services offering application providers the scalability of the cloud. So if I develop a small photo editing application (for example) that I want to provide to customers, instead of investing in my own servers to host it, I can use the Google Apps Engine or Amazon S3. This pooling of resources let’s Google and Amazon build huge server farms and rent out space to small players like me for much cheaper than it would cost to host the application myself. As my photo editing application gets more popular and needs more server bandwidth and storage space I can just scale up my Apps or S3 account – a big increase in usage for my little application will be a drop in the ocean for Google’s servers.
The IBM mainframe and terminal

This was the way business computing started out. All data would be stored on a huge supercomputer in the basement, and each worker would have a simple, cheap, minimal computer (terminal). These still exist in banks, EPOS stock checking terminals in supermarkets etc. By pooling all the storage needs of 1,000 staff into one big computer, it is much more efficient than buying 1,000 fully equipped PCs. This is still the way my office is set up to a degree. However, this is only generally practical in large organisations – because you need a signifigant amount of staff to justify having a large central server. This also only worked in the enterprise space because the terminals and the server were in the same building connected by a cable, or in the example of the ATM network, each ATM terminal is connected by dedicated line to the Bank’s mainframe server with all the customer’s data. With the rollout of broadband and the increases in speed in recent years this is no longer a limiting factor, the end user and the server can be miles and miles apart, and so cloud computing is beginning to fourish.
And Now For The Consumer
This is working for businesses. When I am at home, I power up my mac and I log into it. When I am in work, I power up my laptop and log into the network. My documents are all stored on a server (in Germany somewhere I believe).
However, in the consumer space, unlike enterprise, this model has only gone as far as cloud applications taking the place of local programs (Google docs vs MS Word) and has yet to extend to the terminal-mainframe/client-server model that exists in the enterprise sector.
This now brings me back to Windows Azure, which Steve Ballmer referred to as a Cloud Based Operating System. What Azure actually is, appears to be a lot like Google Apps Engine and Amazon S3. But that’s not important, what is important is what I assumed Azure was going to be! I jumped to the conclusion that this would be a consumer-facing, subscription based, Personal Computer on the cloud. I think this concept, combined with two others, could be the next revolutionary leap in personal computing. This is the software, and the two other pieces of the puzzle are the hardware (the netbook) and the business model (the mobile phone industry).
The Netbook

The concept of the netbook, as I understand it, is a laptop built to be as lightweight and cheap as possible with the assumption that it’s user will be able to get from the internet that which is missing from the laptop. As a netbook user, I wouldn’t need Microsoft Outlook, because I’d have hotmail, I wouldn’t need a word processor because I’d have Google Docs, I wouldn’t need a media player because I’d have last.fm and youtube, and I wouldn’t need a large amount of storage space because I’d have Apple’s iDisk for regular files and facebook for my photos (uploaded directly from my cameraphone!).
If I’ve misunderstood again, and this isn’t what netbooks are, then – at least for this example – I think it’s what they should be. Since the dawn of the personal computer laptops and home PCs have been packed with more GB of hard drive space and processing power because that has been the most efficient way to deliver digital storage and personal computing to the market, but with the birth of the internet age, with increased bandwidth speeds and ubiquity, that may no longer be the case.
The Mobile Phone Bill
This is how the Mobile Phone industry works in a nutshell: Vodafone has customers. These customers pay bills and give Vodafone a monthly income. These customer’s need handsets (made by Nokia, RIM, Samsung etc.) to make calls, and most of them appreciate nice handsets (with cameras, calendars etc). Vodafone leverage this desire to make a sale and gain/retain a customer. 
Using example figures: Vodafone buy a phone from Nokia for €100. They have two price plans, one for €30 per month and one for €50 per month. Both come with a 12 month contract. If a customer wants that phone, Vodafone would offer them the phone for €20 on the lower price plan or free on the higher price plan. If a customer get’s the phone and choses the higher price plan, here’s what happens:
1. The manufacturer – Nokia – makes a sale and earns €100 and is delighted
2. The customer get’s a €100 phone for free and mobile phone service and is delighted
3. The service provider – Vodafone get’s a revenue of €600 over 12 months for a cost of €100… and is delighted!
And Finally… Our Free Laptops
This next paragraph needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, and is more of a thought experiment than anything else, but please do try imagine with me.
Now let’s put those three ingredients of the Cloud Based personal computer, the netbook and the device subsidy/service contract business model:
I go online to amazon to buy a laptop because I’m starting college, or have got a new job (yes, the recession is over by the time this will happen!) or have some spare cash (see last comment). I can buy a standard laptop for €599, or I can get a very similar one for free! Knowing a thing or two about technology and being an early adopter I go for the netbook option. I sign up to a 12 month Windows Cloud contract for €10 per month.
——
A week later my laptop arrives. It is fully WiFi, WiMax and GPRS enabled. I can get great speeds in my house on  my wifi, in the city on WiMax and on the bus/train with HSDPA from mobile phone networks. I power up my laptop, it connects to the internet and it logs me into my virtual desktop. Everything I’m seeing here, all my songs, my documents and my pictures aren’t actually on my computer, they’re on the cloud. Probably on some Microsoft server somewhere. My netbook has a small amount of memory for storing these things locally while I work on them (i.e. a cache). To be honest, songs are the only things I really keep on my Cloud Drive, because all my photos are on facebook and all my college notes are in Google Docs. That too will change because iTunes are soon to release cloudTunes; I buy a song, they store it on my account and I can listen to anytime I’m logged in. 
——
I no longer install programs, I just add applications. I could get the Microsoft Office add on, which is €2 per month, but I use Google docs for free so I don’t bother. I have the iTunes add on which is a pretty neat browser/music player hybrid. Apple made it once for the Microsoft Cloud OS, and I just added it to my account. It got upgraded last weekend with an added super-genius menu!
——-
It’s now 6 months since I bought my netbook and Microsoft Cloud subscription. I’ve finished college and started work as a freelance photographer. I needed much bigger storage space so I upgraded from 20GB to 100GB on my MS Cloud Disk, which has cost an extra €3 per month. I remember the days when that would have meant I needed to get a new laptop! MS Cloud has been upgraded a few times (it’s now OS V1.4) but I didn’t need to do anything, it was just rolled out accross all user accounts over a weekend. So much nicer than upgrading to Vista 🙂
——
Today I got an app recommendation from the Cloud Application Marketplace. It noticed i have some photo editing software and recommended I add the Adobe Photoshop application to my package. €1.50 extra per month is a bit pricey, but it’s worth trying it for a few months.
——
It’s now a year since I bought the laptop. I upgraded my account from student to professional, and now have a few add ons. I’m looking at moving to Apple’s X-Cloud which has a nicer interface, or maybe gCloud which has more free apps, or maybe even Amazon Cloud which is the cheapest of the lot. Microsoft have offered me an upgrade laptop for €50 which has a much nicer screen, a free mouse and a faster processor.
——
I’ve decided to stick with Microsoft. They now have a steady revenue stream, as do Adobe and some other application providers. I got a cheap laptop and only pay for the computing I need in small monthly increments. Consumer Computing is cheap because these big companies have huge cost efficient clouds and we consumers just take whatever little pieces of it we need. Applications are easy to discover and great developers are being rewarded with huge revenue streams. My Adobe, iTunes et al keep getting upgraded and fine tuned to ensure I maintain my subscription.
The Personal Computer is dead, long live the Personal Cloud!

Musical Tesla Coil

October 23, 2008 in Videos

Absolutely brilliant! The music it plays shows they know their audience…. i.e Geeks like me!

I found this video here, check it out, there’s some more pretty cool science related videos.

The Debate

September 27, 2008 in links

So the first debate came and went last night. I tried to write a quick little post after watching it and some of the analysis but at 6am (and after a few beers) coherent sentences were a little hard to come by! I’m sure the web is already flooded with much more detailed and smarter analysis, so I’ll spare you anything more than a few sentences of my own. As a Barack fan, I was a bit disappointed, but maybe that was just because my expextations were high after such a shambles of the week for the McCain campaign. To be fair to McCain, I didn’t think he had it in him to argue his points as well, even if I didn’t agree with him he was able to articulate his policies quite well. I didn’t see a “winner” but, as many people having been saying, this foreign policy debate was supposed to be McCains ‘home turf’, so anything less than a big win for him is a good debate in the Obama books.

Here’s my favourite clip of the night


For those that can’t view the video, a rough transcript:
Obama: “John you like to pretend the war started in 2007 when you talk about the surge… the war started in 2003! At the time when the war started you said it was going to be quick and easy, you said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were, you were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators, you were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shi’ia and Suni, you were wrong….. If the question is ‘who is the best equipped to make good decisions about how we use our military and how we make sure we are prepared and ready for the next confilct’, then I think we can take a look at our judgement”

ZuluNotes Shortlisted for a Web Award!

September 24, 2008 in Projects/Work, Technology & Science

My website, zulunotes.com, has been short listed for and Irish Web Award! The website is the first (and only!) proper website I’ve created. I built it when I was in final year of college, trying to do anything to get out of study. I decided to clean out all my old leaving cert notes, but felt it might be useful to put them on the web for others to make use of. I created a wiki-website so that others could do the same, and so zulunotes was born! I’m delighted that it’s been nominated (in the category of Best Education Website); if only for the fact that it’s a great confidence booster. I may have to try my hand at making another website or two…

The New Bond Theme Song

September 24, 2008 in Music

The theme song to the next Bond movie (Quantum of Solace) has been released. “Another Way to Die” is a duet, written and recorded by Alicia Keys and Jack White (of the White Stripes) and is incidentally the first ever duet in the history of Bond theme songs. I heard it this morning for the first time, and it’s not half bad! Check it out and leave a comment, let me know what you think.