Month: September 2010

Musing about stewardship and software and noninvasiveness

My thanks to Franz St for the photograph of Melk Abbey in Wachau, Austria

The National Geographic Society regularly reviews historic sites all over the world, seeking to recognise those that sustain their heritage, history and sheer ethos despite the passage of time and tourists.

When I think of the word “stewardship”, I think of very similar values. The very word summons a sense of not owning something, of being given the responsibility of looking after something on someone else’s behalf. Of being given the responsibility of looking after that something (or someone) for generations to come, making sure that there continues to be something to look after.

Parenting is a classic act of stewardship, one I keep trying to get better at. And, one day, I hope to learn about grandparenting as well.

Much of what we understand about ecology movements is also related to stewardship. Looking after the earth and all around it is an act of stewardship. Making sure that we do things that are sustainable is an act of stewardship.

Stewardship matters.

Even building software can be an act of stewardship. Recently a colleague of mine tweeted that he was maintaining code written before he was born, code that was performing valuable service today. When I think about the role of software in stewardship, I start thinking about landlords and lessees.

Why? I’ve rented property for many years, I haven’t always been able to afford to buy. Whenever you rent a place, there’s usually a clause that says something like “you should leave this place just as you found it. All expenses to do with restoring the place to what it was like before you got here are payable by you”…. or words to that effect.

I think that principle is at the heart of stewardship. Which is what I was thinking of when I viewed some links tweeted to me by a colleague, Brendan Lee (thank you Brendan! ).

The links were about graffiti, and are well worth reading and watching. They were about Evan Roth and the Graffiti Research Lab. Go take a look, you won’t regret it. There’s a link to a related post here, about turning graffiti into code.

Turning graffiti into code. Now that starting sending me on all kinds of enjoyable wild-goose chases.

What if we could make graffiti non-invasive, no longer persistent while still “permanent”? What if we could could switch graffiti on and off at the touch of a button? Some of the things that Evan Roth demonstrates and talks about suggest this is already happening.

It’s no suggestion, it’s happening now. Augmented reality layers as put forward, for example, by Layar, one of my favourite companies, are classic examples of noninvasive overlays. Now, suddenly, I can see the possibility of walking around historical sites untainted, uncorrupted by modern signage and explanation. The descriptive information is retrieved by smartphone or tablet connected wirelessly to the cloud, and can be designed to enfranchise everyone, without any reliance on sight or hearing or reading ability or even economic power.

It’s happening in many ways now. The ability to become a Retronaut is also designed on this noninvasive basis. Chris Wild’s brilliant invention, the Retroscope, allows us to revel in our nostalgia, steep ourselves in our history, wallow in our culture and geography, all without the need for any “street furniture”.

There is a lot we can learn from Evan, from the people at Graffiti Research; there is a lot we can learn from Maarten and Claire, from the people at Layar; there is a lot we can learn from Chris and from Retroscope. Designing software so that it is neither intrusive nor invasive. No “client installs”. Nothing that ties what you do to a specific device or location or capacity or spend minimum. Software that leaves the environment around you untouched, software that can be undone at the touch of a button, software that lets you behave like a steward in the environment.

Software “estates” today exist in a heterogeneous world, built up over generations; every company has an environment that has evolved like Topsy growing up in the Galapagos. Many of these estates are no longer sustainable or even maintainable, and they will collapse over time. Which is why moving to the cloud is not a nice-to-have option but an imperative.

Noninvasive computing is here to stay. Even in the enterprise. Especially in the enterprise. Because tomorrow’s CEOs will demand it. Which is why I’m here to learn from graffiti and augmented reality and the Retroscope. They show me why the cloud matters.

Appocalypse Now

[Ok, admit it. You were about to tell me that I’d misspelt apocalypse. Perhaps I should have said app-ocalypse instead, but then I’d have had an unsightly hyphen floating around the headline. And then you may not have read this far.]

A few days ago, the Pew Internet & American Life Project published an interesting report, titled The Rise of Apps Culture. You can read the entire report here, or look at the survey questions here.

The headline findings may not be particularly surprising to many of you, but are still worth noting:

  • 35% of adults have cell phones with apps, but only two-thirds of those who have apps actually use them
  • Apps users are younger, more educated, and more affluent than other cell phone users
  • App use still ranks relatively low when compared with other uses of cell phones
  • 29% of adult cell phone users have downloaded an app to their phone
  • One in ten adult cell phone users (10%) had downloaded an app in the past week; 20% of cell phone users under age 30 download apps this frequently
  • One in eight adult cell phone users (13%) has padi to download an app
  • Among cell phone users with apps, the average adult has 18 apps on his or her phone

The findings above were based on a US-wide probability sample of 2,252 adults; the report also contains findings from The Neilsen Company’s Apps Playbook, which was based on a survey carried out in December 2009. It is also worth reading those findings.

I’ve been observing how people use apps on smartphones for some time now, learning by watching. And my initial reactions were somewhat sceptical; people seemed to use apps in faddish waves, then discard them and move on. The core group of apps used seemed to be somewhat smaller and stabler than it seemed. At least that was what I observed. A cynic might have said that the whole app scene was a bit like the Nigerian money transfer letter scam: you only needed a very small percentage of the target audience to be gullible enough to part with their money and you could be very happy indeed.

There also seemed to be some patterns in the nature of apps used; apps that were fundamentally executed solely on the device, which elicited few complaints; apps that needed to interact with servers, which had a higher likelihood of freezing the device, usually as a result of variable signal strength and the problems of state-knowledge. Although games transcended both types of apps, the more popular apps (news, maps, social networking, music and interactive games) all needed to move information between devices and servers, with the concomitant challenges.

Some time ago, I was very taken with an article written by Andrew Savikas averring that “content is a service business”. The views in that article influenced my perspective when I looked at the world of apps, leading me to believe that convenience, not content, was the driving factor in all things app.

So when I looked at the Pew study, I tried to test this theory.

The first place I looked at was the billing relationship, one of the big battlegrounds in the telcosphere. What could we learn from the study in this context? It transpires that downloaders prefer to pay for their apps via:

  • Billing from their cellphone provider (34%)
  • Credit card (29%)
  • PayPal (18%)
  • iTunes (12%)

Interesting. Score one for the convenience argument?

Having tested the billing arena, I then wanted to look at actual usage. How do apps do in the league tables for non-voice cell phone activities? Surprisingly poorly. In 9th place, after all the world and his wife: taking pictures, sending/receiving text messages, web access, games, email, video, music and IM all rank ahead. Which suggests again that the driving force is simplicity and convenience.

I’ve been aware for a while about the arguments to do with the “balkanisation” of the web via Rich Internet Applications, accusations piled against Flash initially, later Silverlight as well. You could argue that they are filling voids until HTML5 comes along. But you cannot argue that they have made impacts. The same accusations have been made against the app world, with suggestions that AOL-like walled gardens are emerging again in the guise of apps. But as long as people can belong to all the key social networks, as long as they can take, send and receive photos, videos, mail and text, as long as they can associate the data with location and presence where relevant and when they choose to, balkanisation is actually quite hard.

It all goes back to convenience. Findings related to the practice of culling unused apps bear this out; people guard the real estate on their phone screens jealously.

Data on the percentage of people actually paying for apps, along with the prices they tend to pay, are also very useful. I’ll leave you to read it in the report for yourself.

Incidentally, there was a second, similarly interesting report published by Pew recently, on cell phones and American adults. I was pleased to see confirmation that heavy adult texters also tend to be heavy users of voice.

As the iPad and similar devices permeate the space hitherto held by the smartphone, we’re bound to see significant change. Video will become more important, at least partly as a result of the form factor, both in the interactive sense as well as in the download sense. Every publisher worth the salt will attempt to create app-based walled gardens around their “content”, in the belief that there is a premium to be extracted there. Over time they will learn that the keyword is convenience, not content. Those with a broadcast mindset will enjoy the illusion of control for a while, only to be flattened in the path of the emergent interactives.

The first thing about app stores is they make it simpler for you to find something. Then they make it simpler for you to use the something, usually interactively, and to pay for the something. Period. Of course people will try and fragment the content, but that’s a losing strategy over time, one that has already been proven as flawed in every publishing sector so far.

Once Upon A Time Time

Yes, it’s once upon a time time. Time for you to become part of Byte Night Bedtime Story, the world’s biggest bedtime stor, and help raise funds for the wonderful work done by Action For Children. Watch the bedtime story unfold via twitter, just follow @BNBedtimeStory. Share it with your children. Share it with your parents. Share it with someone. Everyone. But share it.

Tell people about Byte Night. Tell people about Action For Children. See how easy it is to make a difference. Be part of that difference.

At Byte Night, hundreds of us sleep out rough in order to raise awareness for youth homeless, and to raise funds to help them, via Action for Children. I will also be sleeping out on 8th October, this is something I feel passionately about. If you want to donate, here’s the link:

Getting Better

  • I’ve got to admit it’s getting better
  • A little better all the time
  • I have to admit it’s getting better
  • It’s getting better

John Lennon/Paul McCartney, Getting Better (Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)

I listen to a lot of music. Particularly in the evenings and late nights, particularly at weekends, and particularly when I’m travelling. But I used to listen to a lot more music, in my teens and early adulthood. Between 15 and 22 I must have listened to music at least 8 hours a day, sometimes twice that.

As you can imagine, my musical taste was heavily influenced as a result; so even now, most of the time, I listen to music created between 1965 and 1975, give or take a few years on either edge. It’s not that I don’t listen to any other music: I do. But I tend to think that there were so many wonderful albums made during those years, so many talented musicians, that I don’t need to venture out from there. Call it my comfort zone if you must. I just happen to think the music was great.

Now many of the people I listen to are dead, sometimes as a result of personal excess, sometimes as a result of accident and tragedy. So it comes as an incredible privilege to me when I get to see any of my boyhood heroes play live, when I get to see the musicians and bands of my youth in the flesh. Over the years, I’ve been able to see the Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, John Mayall, Queen, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, John Martyn, Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, Donovan, Don McLean, the Moody Blues, just to name a few. And I am so grateful.

In the early 1980s getting tickets used to be very hard; you tended to have to queue up at the venue box office. Sometimes, if you were very lucky, you got them on the phone. And if you couldn’t get them in person or on the phone, you didn’t go. Scalper prices were too high. By the early 1990s phone-based sales became more common, at least for the bands I wanted to watch. And it took till the late 1990s and early 2000s before the web became a potential route. Potential. I use that word advisedly. The early days of web sales were diabolical, even more roulette-ish than the telephone. Sites crashed more often than British Rail cancelled trains. You wouldn’t be able to get through. And when you did get through, the tickets had all gone.

If you really wanted to see someone, and you just couldn’t get through, you still had the touts. But their prices weren’t cheap, so it was not something you could do anytime you liked.

Roll forward to today. I’d been travelling for some time, came home, went through my personal mail, and found an email from the Royal Albert Hall. Offering me the opportunity to buy Eric Clapton tickets for next May before they opened for general sales tomorrow. How convenient. Why was this? I don’t really know. I assume it was because I’d bothered to register some years ago, that I’d listed my preferences, and, over the years, I’d bought a considerable number of tickets. Any of the above. All of the above.

Who was I to complain? So I clicked on the link, hoping against hope that the early release tickets hadn’t sold out. And then I was taken somewhere I’d never been taken before:

A waiting room. How nice. With a little counter that counted down to when it would be my turn. When I clicked on the link, I was something like 1250th in the queue; in about 20 minutes I was through. But I didn’t have to wait there doing nothing while I waited. And I got the tickets I wanted. Restricted view, but I know those seats and they’re good enough for me.

We’ve come a long way in the last 30 years, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Priority booking for registrants. Alerts and offers based on profile and preference. A humane, almost-friendly queueing system, with excellent feedback loops. Keeping the customer informed.

All that, in the month before I get to see Santana for the first time, Winwood for the nth time and Jeff Beck on his own for the second time.

I’ve got to admit it’s getting better…..

Bear necessities

There’s been a lot of commotion on the web about a particular video going viral a few days ago. When I heard about it, my instinct was to do nothing; after all, there was a NSFW warning emblazoned right across it. So I forgot all about it.

Then an old friend of mine, Philippa Davis, pinged me about it via Facebook, all the way from South Africa. And she wasn’t the type to be sending me smut. So I took a look this evening.

And I loved it. Just the kind of thing that lets me see the art of the possible on the web. Over 4.3m views already.

I don’t want to say any more about it. Turn down the volume on your machine, make sure you’re by yourself, and then click here. And let me know what you think.