Technology & Science

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!”

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!

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…

How To Put A Comment Button On Your Blogspot Blog

September 11, 2008 in Blogging

I read another great post by Darragh Doyle today about adding nicer looking comment buttons to your post. It was pretty helpful, but I didn’t feel I needed to have comment buttons mid way through my posts so I decided I would take inspiration from him but tackle it in a slightly different way.

As you can see at the end of all my posts I now have a nice shiny new comment button. I did this with a once off edit and I thought it might be useful to explain how I did it here for others who want to do the same.

Before we start, there is two main differences to note between this and Darragh’s method
This is a lot quicker and easier, but that comes at a price:
The button is at the end of every post automatically, so you can’t have it mid way through a post. If you wanted to do that you could use Darragh’s method for an individual post
Because it’s the same button on every post automatically, that means you can’t have different colours/styles for different posts

So here’s what you need to do…

Go into your blogger dashboard. Click layout. Then click edit HTML

You then need to click the “Expand Widget Templates” box like so.

You then need to find “data:post body” like this (this is internet explorer, other browsers will look different)

Clear a bit of space below it to put in your new code (hit enter a few times)

Copy this code here:


<p>

<span class='post-comment-link'>

 <a class='comment-link' expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl' expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'>

<img src='http://xxxxxxxxxxxxx'/>

</a>
</span>

</p>

Paste it into the space in your template after “data:post.body”:

You’ll notice that the image location (img src) is just a load of Xs. You’ll need to replace this with the image location of your comment button. For my blog, I just copied Darragh’s! This is how I did it.

Open a new tab/window. Find the image you want to use. In internet explorer, right click on the image and press properties

Highlight and copy the image address. Then paste it into the template in place of the http://xxxxxxxx.

You should now have something like this (click to enlarge):
Click save template et voila!

Apple’s Big “Let’s Rock” Announcement

September 9, 2008 in Technology & Science

Here’s the main info from the press conference that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) held today (info from the live updates here here here and here). This is a summary of the main announcements with my thoughts on a few.

iTunes
Itunes 8 is being launched. This new version comes with a few new features:
Browse the store in cover flow – You’ll be able to browse the Itunes store in coverflow look, i.e. browse music by album cover, just like being down in HMV flicking through the records on the shelves!
HD TV shows. You can buy them for $1.99 in SD, HD will be $2.99
NBC is coming back, with all it’s best shows (the office, 30 rock etc), but that doesn’t really matter to us in Ireland!

Genius
An interesting concept that has been done before quite successfully by websites such as last fm. What it does is us a social algorithm for recommendations. What this means is that iTunes collects data (anonymously) from all it’s users and pools it together on their servers (in the cloud). They can then gain insights into different music tastes and patterns. For example, they can see that most people who like to listen to Green Day, also like to listen to U2. This allows them to do some pretty neat things:
Generate smart playlists based on “songs that go together”. So if I have a playlist with a few Jack Johnson songs, and I hit the Genius button, iTunes would automatically fill it out some Damien Rice, Fionn Regan etc., because it “knows” that they go well together. This could be great for iTunes picking up on the mood i’m in. So i pick a certain song or artist off the top of my head because that’s the kind of music I want to listen to now, and iTunes keeps playing more like it.
The use demoed was for finding music in the iTunes store to go with a song you have. Nothing new or groundbreaking here. Last.fm, pandora, imeem and many others have been doing this for years, but I guess not on the scale of iTunes. This may give them better accuracy if they have a larger pool of data to draw insights from. This was predicted/the case was made for it in a great readwriteweb post a few weeks back. Well worth a read and very applicable to today’s events.

iPod
A new iPod nano was announced. Looks very nice – a very thin, curved look. You can use Genius on it too (and all the other ipods) to create a clever recommended playlist “on the go”.
It has an accelerometer like the touch and iphone, with the cooles feature being “Shake to shuffle.” Everything else is pretty standard; some slick new colours, 8GB and 16GB models, environmentally friendly – “highly recyclable.”

An updated ipod touch with some welcome new features. Volume control (+/-) on the side like most modern phones. Built in speakers – great for parties! Genius playlist creation just like the nano. Built in support for nike+ – I don’t ever see myself using this, but it got a pretty good reception from the crowd and media in general. €369.99 for a 32GB Touch, not bad at all.

Gaming
This was one of the first things that I thought when I got my iPod Touch and played a few of the games in the app store, that it has the potential to be a neat little gaming device. Steve Jobs seems to have some pretty big hopes for it, saying “It’s the best portable device for playing games…” Wow, I guess Nintendo better be ready for the next round. It beat off Gamegear, PSP and now this. Although I have to admit, I do enjoy playing the odd game on my iPod touch, it combines the brilliance of the DS touch and the wii motion sensing that immerses you in a game. And it has that added advantage of always being in my pocket, unlike my DS.
At the conference they demoed a football game and spore. I’ll let this pic do the talking, looks pretty sweet, and is a great example of how the touch screen lends itself so well to gaming, as the DS has clearly shown:

That’s about it for today. If you’d like to keep up to date with all the newest commentary and reviews like this, you can subscribe to this blog so you don’t have to keep coming back to check for updates!

Irish Blogger Adds to the List of Palin Scandal

September 3, 2008 in Blogging

Of all the Palin stories coming to light as people start finding out who she is (something the McCain campaign decided not to do it would seem ) this story just takes the biscuit!

Congratulations to Suzy Byrne who (I read at the huffington post no less!) pointed out that Sarah Palin’s claim to have travelled abroad to visit “Germany, Kuwait and Ireland” was a bit of half-truth, as it was just a Shannon stop over!

Even if we can’t vote, we can still make a difference… I love the internet.

Ahhh! No Chrome for Mac!

September 3, 2008 in Technology & Science

So I ran straight over to http://www.google.com/chrome to get some of that sweet Google Browsery goodness, only to find that it’s a windows release only (for now). I’ve signed myself up for updates on the mac version but no word as of yet.

For those of you who haven’t heard about Chrome, it’s google’s new browser. RRW have a good introduction to it here and a good review of it here. The news of Google chrome was first revealed by Philipp Lessen on his blog. He scanned and uploaded a comic book style introduction to Chrome that Google sent him in the mail. It’s worth a look in if you’re interested, but here’s one of the parts that I found most interesting:

The Omnibox

Besides the fact that I can’t decide whether it will be very useful or very annoying (I’m still not sure about the search style suggestions in Firefox 3), it’s important to note that this will put whole new layer of importance on Google Pagerank. If your site/blog/application is popular or ranked well, not only will it come up on the first page of search results, but it may also be suggested to users straight from their browser’s url bar! Think of the traffic!!

Steve Jobs’ Obituary

August 30, 2008 in Technology & Science

Oh my. A simple enough mistake, somebody hit ‘publish’ instead of ‘save’ when updating Steve Jobs’ Obituary at Bloomberg. It’s a bit cringeworthy/spooky that they’re writing an obituary for the yet-to-be-deceased 53 year old, and it certainly won’t help Steve and his family with their worries over his health, but I suppose in the world of media today it’s somewhat understandable that they have to be ready with a researched story for an event that may be likely so that they can be first to press, even if that predicted story is someone’s death.

For those who don’t know, Steve Jobs had pancreatic cancer and his health isn’t the best these days as he’s recovering from some operations. Read the full story here.

Update: Found this video of an SNL sketch from 1996, very apt!

Show Off Your Subscribers

August 29, 2008 in Blogging

Blogger announced yesterday that they have a new feature that will allow you to show off your subscribers (if they choose to be shown) on your blog. I suppose it will look a bit like the “currently reading” widgets that some blogs have.

I think this is great news for small blogs like myself. As Darragh Doyle mentions in his award winning post, commenting on other people’s blog is a great way to get to know other bloggers and also a great way to get known and to encourage visits and comments on your own blog. In the same way, this new “followers” widget should providing a win-win for all involved. By becoming a follower, and electing to appear in the widget as such, one gets the exposure as being seen as a follower, and so people reading that blog may decide to check out your blog as you obviously have common interests. On the flip side, the blog you subscribe too gets one extra follower and looks even more popular!

Just one more great step in enriching the blogging community. Go Google!

ReadWriteWeb also noted that this may open up the process of subscription to people who may not have fully understood RSS, but get the gist of following. Their article is well worth the read.

Blogger end the post with this little teaser “We are also in the process of integrating with Google Friend Connect so you can give your readers more engaging social features.” The mind races with possibilities!

Monitter

August 26, 2008 in Technology & Science

I’m sure plenty of people who are heavier twitter users than I have already heard of this site, but I thought monitter was still worth a mention for others, like me, who hadn’t. For those of you familiar with twitter (which I’m assuming is most people by now!), it shouldn’t require much explanation. You can type a word or a phrase into one of three columns, and watch as it updates in real-time with tweets from the twitter-sphere relating to the word(s) you enter.

Some terms just whizz by with tweet after tweet, try Obama as a good example. Others are slow and steady (try McCain for example 😛 ).

It’s still not perfect, some very old and out of date tweets appear, but it’s pretty cool if you have a website/blog and you’d like to see if people are noticing it and tweeting about it.

Through monitter I also discovered the very handy feature of Twitter itself – being able to subscribe to an RSS feed of certain terms as they’re mentioned on Twitter. (http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=typephrasehere). I’ve already added a few rss subscriptions to my reader (e.g. for my website “zulunotes” being mentioned on twitter), very handy indeed. Now if only my Google Alerts picked up comments on twitter…. then we’d be suckin’ deisel!