Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution.
As a user of both I Phone and I Pad, I need to reject these conclusions. I use Apps on my I phone simply because the way type is rendered in the New York Times I Phone app is more readable for my 63 year old eyes. However on the I Pad, I almost never use the apps except Netflix and I Tunes. I stay in the web browser, because none of the content delivered from individual news sites is hyperlinked. They are all in silos and it defeats the whole web metaphor. Yes you can download the whole new issue of Wired Magazine on your I Pad, but it’s no different than reading the paper magazine.
I’m thrilled to announce that this morning the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab opens for business. We have some generous corporate and university support and an amazing team of scholars that Roberto Suro and I have convinced to join us on a journey of exploration for the next few years. Our mission will be to to research and prototype the way media and entertainment will be delivered in the next decade. We also want to work on the public policy and business model innovations that will sustain the artistic and creative engines of our knowledge economy.
We realize its a big task, but somehow we have managed to cut through the silos of an amazing university and engage the Viterbi School of Engineering, the School of Cinematic Arts and the Marshall School of Business to help us in this work. With wonderful mentors on our board like Ernest Wilson, John Seeley Brown, Irving Wladawsky-Berger and Kryztina Holly, we think we are up to the task.
There has been a lot of sound and fury over the Net Neutrality battle over the last week since Verizon and Google announced a detente on the issue. As usual, both sides miss the forest from the trees. The most important part of their announcement was over the issue of wireless data (especially video). As the chart above shows we are just at the beginning of a wireless IP video explosion as devices like the I Pad and the Google Android based tablets become a preferred video on demand technology platform. Without some way to prioritize video packets over email traffic or Facebook status updates, this is going to be a mess and a very unsatisfying customer experience.
The big four broadband providers (A T&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner) spent about $42 Billion last year on Capital expenditures and have total debt of about $143 Billion. The big four users of their service Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo spent less than $4 Billion on Capex and have about $135 Billion of cash on their balance sheets. Everytime Apple dings you $1.20 for a music download from I Tunes, Comcast doesn’t get a penny. In the wireless world this is going to get even more problematic as the video explosion grows. Who is going to pay for all the increasingly expensive broadband mobile infrastructure?
The obvious solution is usage based pricing. If you download or stream 30 Gigabits of data a month, you should pay a lot more than my aunt that uses the net to check her email four times a week. Taken farther this evolves into a “you can pay me now, or you can pay me later” matrix. You can pay for the bandwidth you use now, or you can pay later through the increased use of intrusive commercial spying on your buying habits in order to inundate your wireless device with targeted commercial messages.
Whatever happened to the massive productivity boost which much (surely?) have been the result of the internet?
Because (surely?) the internet must have led to an unequalled, world historical boost in productivity?
A decade ago people all over the place were saying confidently that the economic effect of the internet would outstrip the effects seen by the invention of railways and telecommunications, and that new synergies from fast and universal communication would generate a society of massive capability (a huge step-up like the effect of the population concentration of the first cities, or the nation state).
Science and technology would be accelerated qualitatively by the speed of access to the scholarly literature, rapid and universal sharing of methods, critique and results, international collaborations…
That was the theory.
Yet economic growth since the internet came has been, well – ahem! – very modest…
Indeed, the current ‘credit crunch’ recession revealed that much of what economists had thought was internet-produced growth in productivity, was in fact a progressive increase in borrowing. Continue reading ‘What Internet Productivity?’
At the Annenberg Innovation Lab we are working with IBM on some new visualization tools for big data sets. Here is a fascinating look at the Nation’s mood during a 48 hour period using twitter feeds as the data set. Interesting how the West Coast never gets as angry as the Mid West or the East. Why?
As Chris Matthews reports tonight, Andrew Breitbart totally manufactured, by horrendously deceptive editing the Shirley Sherrod racism story. The real story is one of racial reconciliation and understanding from an event that happened 25 years ago. Breitbart is worse than Goebbels in creating The Big Lie. He owes this woman a huge apology and then he owes the country an apology.
He thinks he’s a BSD, but he just a liar with a big megaphone.
As for Tom Vilsack, the Ag Secretary who threw this honest woman under the bus without asking her side of the story. Shame on you. Hire her back.
Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.
Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the co-author of a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers.
“We found a negative effect on academic achievement,” he said. “I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren’t surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children.”
The most astonishing thing for me in my trip last week to Iceland was the extreme contrast symbolized by these three photos. The first is the wild and stark beauty of the land where you can come across a small herd of horses still shedding their winter coats.
Fifty kilometers west you can encounter a lagoon filled with icebergs that is as surreal as anything you will ever experience.
And then you can travel into the volcanic interior where the state of the art Geothermal power plants are providing a society with carbon neutral energy and hot water heating for most of the country.
It’s an amazing country. It is leading the way on reconciling our need for energy with preserving an astonishing environment. Once you really understand the genius of geothermal power, it makes you wonder whether places like Hot Springs, Arkansas couldn’t be sources of power for our country. I’d love to hear from our community’s scientists as to whether this is possible.
I have to confess I’m an I Pad fanboy. I’ve played with it for three days now and it hasn’t dissapointed. First off the processor is lightning fast. On apps like the New York Times that were designed just for the I Pad, the time between when you touch an article to read it and it is ready is literally a second or less. Videos from Netflix load very quickly and I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest last night and the quality was great. I would say I used my laptop about 50% less over the weekend.
The only drawback is the lack of Flash integration. Steve Jobs says that Flash is too buggy to put in yet and he’s not the only one. The CIA does not allow Flash inside the firewall at Langley. However, I would suggest that this may be also an attempt by Jobs to muscle the mobile video standard. You Tube runs beautifully on the I Pad and already the New York Times has converted much of their flash video to work on the device. Continue reading ‘Apple I Pad-A Review’
Our correspondent, T-Bone Burnett, added that comment to the New Yorker cartoon I posted which has generated so much traffic in the last couple of days. This comment is echoed in a magnificent essay in this morning’s New York Times by Michiko Kakutani, entitled Texts Without Context.
Other challenges to the autonomy of the artist come from new interactive media and from constant polls on television and the Web, which ask audience members for feedback on television shows, movies and music; and from fan bulletin boards, which often function like giant focus groups…As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”
From the day I started this blog, I have tried to resist this urge to write what the search engines tell me would be popular. For reasons that are lost on me, posts with the word “Torture” in them are very popular on Google. This 19 month old post is still regularly on of the most searched out ones on this site. And of course there is always this favorite, which must be an immense disappointment to the thousands of web surfers who have landed there searching for porn. If I wanted to really get a lot of hits, I’d combine these two “focus group” hints and just call the site “Torture Porn”. I’m sure it would be very popular. Continue reading ‘The Internet is a Focus Group’
