Understanding the Digital Natives

July 25, 2010 – 8:30 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

They see life as a game. They enjoy nothing more than outsmarting the system. They don’t trust politicians, medias, nor brands. They see corporations as inefficient and plagued by an outmoded hierarchy. Even if they harbor little hope of doing better than their parents, they don’t see themselves as unhappy. They belong to a group — several, actually — they trust and rely upon.

“They”, are the Digital Natives.

The French polling institute BVA published an enlightening survey of this generation: between 18-24 years of age, born with a mouse and a keyboard, and now permanently tied to their smartphone. All of it shaping their vision of an unstable world. The study is titled GENE-TIC for Generation and Technology of Information and Communication. Between November 2009 and February 2010, BVA studied hundred young people in order to understand their digital habits. Various techniques where used: spyware in PCs , subjective glasses to “see what they see”, and hours of video recording. (The 500 pages survey is for sale but abstracts, in French, are here ; BVA is considering a similar study for the US market). Here are the key findings:

The constant gamer. The way a Digital Native see his (or, once for all “her“) environment is deeply shaped by computer games. “When he is buying something”, says Edouard Le Marechal who engineered the survey, “finding the best bargain is a process as important as acquiring the good. The Digital Native enjoys using all tools available in his arsenal to outsmart the merchant system and to find the best deal. He doesn’t trust the brand. Like in a game, the brand is the enemy to defeat”.

According to the study, brands face a serious challenge from the Digital Native. Not only does he gets a kick out of triumphing over the brand, but he is not deceived by the marketing pitch. To make things worse, he’ll become an expert, he’ll achieve more knowledge than the merchant trying to lure him. That’s part of the game. Reading the GENE-TIC survey, brands and their vector (advertising), appear under siege in multiple ways. They look increasingly disconnected and outpaced by their target. In addition, advertising is reduced to its utilitarian dimension: if an ad message does not carry an explicit promotion, it is unlikely to lead to a good bargain.

Weirdly enough, when I asked Edouard Le Marechal if big ad agencies were flocking to subscribe to his survey, he replied they were not. Instead, GENE-TIC is massively subscribed to by clients such as high tech or telecommunications companies. (That also reinforces the idea that the brand – whether it is a manufacturer or a service – is willing to (re)connect more directly with its customer base at the expense of the advertising intermediary which appears to have lost its power). Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized, social networks | Comments (13)

iPhone 4 Antennas: The Fun Side

July 25, 2010 – 8:30 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

We’ll leave serious industry matters aside this week. (If you must, you can wade into Apple’s Q3 numbers here, or luxuriate in the impending ouster of Nokia CEO OPK and consider the list of possible replacements.)

Instead, we’ll look into the fun side of Apple’s antenna, or antennas (not antennae, a solecism from last week. A reader reminded me that antennae is reserved for actual bugs, as in insects.)

As they always do, savvy entrepreneurs immediately saw how to convert a problem into an opportunity, how to spin an unintended “feature” into $$.

Tongue-in-cheekiest of them all, we have Antenn-aid:

Nothing more need be said.

Etsy’s offering is a bit less subtle:

(and the pricetag is $4, not the $29 shown in the picture.) The label is a intentionally contradicatory: Placing the sticker over the gap will prevent involuntarily dropped calls, but the humor (and the product) works.

Let’s talk bumpers.

I like the sleek industrial design of the iPhone 4 but because the bumper and the charging dock are mutually exclusive, I’ve remained defiantly “unprotected.” I should have known better. One small slip of the hand, one bounce off the concrete and… Read More »

Posted in design, hardware | Comments (13)

Zero tolerance for latency

July 18, 2010 – 6:47 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

The big battle of the coming years will be a battle for time. For media related software or for web design, the fight will be for customers’ or readers’ attention, the challenge will be to prevent them from fleeing elsewhere and to give them more in less time.

More than ever, we are in the business where speed is key.

Look at how critical the speed factor has been in recent tech successes. To be sure, Google has been able to dominate search thanks to the quality of its algorithm. But Google’s win also came from its ability to deliver results faster than anyone else. This speed comes from the combined performance of three pieces of software:  Map Reduce slices the request in multiple chunks and assigns the work to multiple CPUs, the Google File System at the core of Google’s distributed architecture and the main database, BigTable, all supported by an unprecedented hardware deployment of several million servers. (A Cornell University paper by a Google Fellow gives a comprehensive description of the company’s architecture, PDF here). All three components are dedicated to speed of service, one of Google’s edges and a must to conquer cloud computing, where waiting for a file update or data transfer is not an option.

Speed is also a key success factor for Amazon and iTunes — the two kings of the friction-free transactions — but also for the video streaming service Hulu, or for business applications such as Salesforce. As for hardware, Apple taught us that speed and fluidity weigh more than a long feature list. Look at the four iterations of the iPhone (leaving aside the antennae issue for once), most of the hardware improvements have been aimed at increasing speed and fluidity of use (OK, battery life as well).

Two of the reasons why the iPad is about to take over the netbook market are its near to zero boot time and its instant application launch. Both are a blow to the PC which remains stuck in its passé architecture despite huge increases in processing power (or perhaps because abundant power facilitates wasteful programming practices). This contributed to the pace of the iPad adoption by the customers: it took 28 days for the iPad to reach a million users, vs. 180 days for the netbook. Consumers love speedy devices.

And, as a final example of speed related services, we can mention classifieds websites derived from the highly successful Blocket in Sweden (Blocket is owned by my former employer Schibsted). The site is so huge that an equivalent about 5.5% of the entire Swedish GNP goes through it!  As for the French version called Le Bon Coin (see Monday Note’s story), it delivers 2000 pages per second while relying on fairly small hardware. But the site is entirely coded in C language that provides lightning-fast data delivery (users see 40 pages per visits on average, eight to ten times more than any news site).

Let’s face it, consumers tolerance to latency is closing down to zero. They want ultra-fast boot time, quick network access, fast pages display or download.

Sadly, this issue that has yet to percolate to the surface of news media industry consciousness. Too many web publishers remain convinced that the quality of their editorial is far more important that the underlying technology that supports it. This is made even more obvious with the inception of the iPad and of its applications. The vast majority of news media publishers have not focused enough on speed and seamlessness. Let me repeat a point I’ve already made here several times: the digital news sector needs more investment in technology and techies. Read More »

Posted in online publishing | Comments (12)

Antennagate: If you can’t fix it, feature it!

July 18, 2010 – 6:46 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

…and don’t diss your customer, or the media!

Rewind the clock to June 7th 2010. Steve’s on stage at the WWDC in San Francisco. He’s introducing the iPhone 4 and proudly shows off the new external antenna design. Antennae actually, there are two of them wrapped around the side. Steve touts the very Apple-like combination of function (better reception), and form (elegant design).

And now we enter another part of the multiverse. Jobs stops…and after a slightly pregnant pause, continues: The improved reception comes at a price. If you hold the iPhone like this, if your hand or finger bridges the lower-left gap between the two antennae, the signal strength indicator will go down by two or even three bars. He proceeds to demo the phenomenon. Indeed, within ten seconds of putting the heel of his left thumb on the gap, the iPhone loses two bars. Just to make sure, he repeats the experiment with his index finger, all the while making a live call to show how the connection isn’t killed.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! It’s a trade-off: Better reception in the vast majority of cases; some degradation, easily remedied, in a smaller set of circumstances.

Actually, it’s a well-known issues with smartphones. Steve demonstrates how a similar thing happens to Apple’s very own 3GS, and to Nokia, HTC/Android, and RIM phones. Within the smartphone species, it’s endemic but not lethal.

Nonetheless, adds Apple’s CEO, we can’t afford even one unhappy customer. Buy in confidence, explore all the new features. If you’re not satisfied, do us the favor of returning the phone within two weeks. At the very least, we want you to say the iPhone didn’t work for you but we treated you well. If you fill out a detailed customer feedback report, we’ll give you an iPod Shuffle in consideration for your time.

One last thing. Knowing the downside of the improved antennae arrangement, we’ve designed a “bumper”, a rubber and plastic accessory that fits snuggly around the iPhone 4’s edges and isolates the antennae from your hands. The bumpers come in six colors—very helpful in multi-iPhone 4 families—and costs a symbolic $2.99.

The antenna “feature” excites curiosity for a few days, early adopters confirm its existence as well as the often improved connections (often but not always—it’s still an AT&T world). The Great Communicator is lauded for his forthright handling of the design trade-off and the matter recedes into the background.

If you can’t fix it, feature it.

End of science fiction.

In a different part of the multiverse, things don’t go as well.

Jobs makes no mention of the trade-off. Did he know, did Apple engineers, execs, marketeers know about the antenna problem? I don’t know for sure and let’s not draw any conclusions from the way Jobs avoids holding the iPhone 4 by its sides while showing it off to Dmitry Medvedev:

There’s a more telling hint. Apple had never before offered an iPhone case or protector of any kind, leaving it to third parties. But now, for the iPhone 4, a first: We have the bumper…at $29, not $2.99. (And which, by the way, prevents the phone from fitting into the new iPhone 4 dock.)

As usual for an Apple product, the new iPhone gets a thorough examination from enterprising early adopters, and many of them discover the antenna gap “feature”. As one wrote Jobs:

It’s kind of a worry. Is it possible this is a design flaw? Regards – Rory Sinclair

Steve’s reply:

Nope. Just don’t hold it that way.

Steve, No! Don’t diss your beloved customer. No tough love with someone who’s holding your money in his/her pocket. Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized, hardware, mobile internet | Comments (70)

Too many journalists ?

July 11, 2010 – 9:37 am | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

An unpleasant question: Do we have an excess of daily press journalists? And, if so, how does the surfeit vary from country to country?

Two years ago, Earl Wilkinson, the managing director of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association (INMA), produced a chart showing how the growth in the number of journalists employed by US dailies had not prevented a decrease in circulation:

A former journalist himself, Earl is a strong advocate of editorial differentiation; therefore, he is not against large newsrooms. But the fact remains: on the US market, the size of the newsroom isn’t a shield against readership erosion. With the possible exception of India,  the era of big editorial cathedrals is gone. In France for instance, according to a 2009 study conducted by the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the number of journalists almost tripled in two generations, about 50 years. For the same time period, the number of copies sold per 1000 inhabitants shrunk by 66%, from 360 about 120 per 1000 people.

I took the OECD report titled The Evolution of News and the Internet and fed it to Excel. The output shows the following trends:

#1: editorial workforce. If adding journalists has proven unable to reverse the trend in reader depletion, in any given market, the more numerous the journalists are, the better the newspaper industry holds. The chart below covers seven countries, with two superimposed data sets. First, in blue, the number of journalists per 100,000 daily copies sold; second, in red, paid circulation per 1000 inhabitants.

Sweden and Norway show the most favorable ratios: strongest readership and the biggest editorial staff per copies sold. Italy shows the worst numbers: relatively few journalists for the lowest readership. Read More »

Posted in newspapers | Comments (25)

Free Spy Novel

July 11, 2010 – 9:37 am | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

A spy thriller from the DOJ…for free!

Instead of spending your hard-earned dollars loading your Kindle or iPad with fictional potboilers, head over to Scribd and download the Department of Justice Complaint vs. Russian spies (June 2010).

Why submit yourself to the tedium of ponderous DOJ prose? Aren’t such legal documents boring, repetitive, written in an esoteric English argot meant to confuse lay people? Yes, and this one is no exception. But it also contains fascinating and, at times, amusing insights into the people, scope, and technology of the long term embedding of Russian spies into the US.

Deployed by the SVR, Russia’s spook agency and successor to the fabled KGB, the wannabe saboteurs used carefully built American identities and led “unremarkable” lives. Their exact purpose isn’t clear from the DOJ story. They didn’t seem to be engaged in active spying, they appeared to have been planted “just in case”. This could be evidence of Russia’s very long view, of the SVR’s willingness to make investments for a distant future, or of a plan to build a support base for other agents. We won’t know for awhile, and may never know. The agents have pleaded guilty to activities other than spying, such as money laundering and using false identities…and now they’re gone, handed over in a Vienna trade, just like the Good Old Cold War days.

For us geeks, the amusing part is the collection of hackerdom gems contained in the DOJ file. From social engineering to ad-hoc WiFi networking, MAC-address filtering, steganography, and unsecured passwords, these supposedly “highly trained” individuals looked more like Keystone Spooks than Hollywood superspies.

A good example of social engineering is described when one of the culprits experiences unspecified software problems with a laptop. (Sound familiar? We’ll refrain from the easy jabs.) Enter an FBI agent passing as a Russian Consulate employee, “I’m here to help”, who borrows the laptop with a promise to fix the problem. The machine is broken into, fully explored, and yields a rich trove of unprotected files.

In another case, the Feds, while “inspecting” a home (legally, of course), find a password left in the open, helpfully written down on a plain piece of paper. Read More »

Posted in mobile internet | Comments (13)

The poison of arrogance

July 4, 2010 – 7:07 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Arrogance is the most toxic waste-product of technology companies. Past examples abound: IBM, AT&T, Microsoft… All their hauteur got them were expensive antitrust actions and customer backlash. Last week, we got yet another example of the insufferable behavior still prevailing in the high-tech world — with the to-be-expected response from regulators and markets.

Navx is a €1m a year French company whose business is speed radar location databases. In France, it is illegal to sell or use selling radar detectors, devices that pick the microwave or laser radiation emitted by speed guns and automated cameras. But providing speed trap location data is lawful. In fact, the French Interior Ministry maintains a public database for fixed radars. And companies such as Navx, or various GPS makers supply location information for mobile radars.

To sell its product, Navx relies massively on Google AdWords: the company buys keywords that guarantee a high ranking in search results associated to terms like “avertisseur radar” (radar warning). Over the years, Navx invested a large part of its revenue in keywords purchases, up to €400,000 a year. For Navx, like for millions of other businesses all over the world, the result was a massive dependency on Google systems. For Navx, Google worked very well: in October 2009, 69% of new subscribers revenue came from AdWords. The company was still losing money, but growth was promising. Then, Google pulled the plug, arguing Navx business was illegal. Google’s ukase came at the worst possible time: Navx was about to complete its second round of funding. The company lost most of its new revenue stream, causing investors to get cold feet, in turn causing Navx to lay people off, and so on.  Navx argues the legality argument was a mere pretense: Google had a real, ulterior motive for the ejecting the speed trap location ads from its system. Navx believes its tiny but growing service came to be viewed as competition for Google’s own geolocation services. That’s a possibility.

Such a story is typical of Google’s opaque world. Countless examples are offered in books, in newspaper and magazine stories where businesses went belly up because some  geeks in Mountain View turned the dials of an unseen algorithm, without the slightest regard for the impact on the very businesses that pay their salaries. Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (30)

Drop that -phone!

July 4, 2010 – 7:02 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

I’ll explain the ‘’-’’ in a moment. Today’s piece is about the power of words to shape thought, to distort, to mislead. More specifically, I contend “smartphone” is the wrong word for the new genre of mobile devices.

I’m not completely naïve, however. In the end, I’ll agree there is little chance we’ll settle on another word.

Once upon a time, philosophers held thought preceded words: you thought of something and then struggled to find the right words for that gem. Later, psychologists of the twentieth century persuasion, came to think, no, to say words preceded thought: one could only think of thoughts for which they already possessed words for. As much as I like our dear Lacanians, some of whom hover around the Valley, the word ineffable leaves them… speechless.

Devoid of a clean theory, we can wallow in examples.

The most visible one is the PC, the personal computer. Derivative thought first gave us “microcomputers”, because they were “like” minicomputers, themselves “like” the only serious computers, mainframes — only smaller. Next, because size matters, we’d get nano computers, pico computers, femto computers…

Fortunately, the gestalt, the user experience won: This is my computer, as opposed to the institution’s. The beginnings weren’t always easy: I recall a book called “You bought a personal what?”, published in the late seventies. I also remember our collective indignation at Apple when, in 1981, IBM boldly misappropriated the concept and introduced The Personal Computer and proceeded to win the market, that is until Microsoft gave it to the clones. The P word worked and won.

Decades ago, Motorola was the king of cell phones. Cell was a good word because it pointed to the amazingly powerful innovation of cellular telephony. Previously, mobile phones called a radio station and kept using the same frequency as the user moved around. This severely limited the number of users and forced mobile phones to have powerful radios to stay connected over long distances. With cellular telephony, frequencies  were reusable as users were magically handed over from one lower-powered radio station to another as they drove around, leaving the frequency behind, ready for another user.

The Motorola name came to be associated with radios of all kinds, from cars to the Moon. I recall Motorola execs calling their successfully miniaturized cell phones of the late eighties “little radios”. They were rightly proud of their technical prowess, I owned several StarTacs and MicroTacs. But when cell phones gained PDA features, Motorola’s clock got cleaned by the likes of RIM (Blackberry) and Palm (Treo). For a long while, Motorola’s culture remained backward-focused on the phone part of the customer experience. The new phone boss, Sanjay Jha, is now an Android convert: a couple of impressive Droid devices have put Motorola back in the race. Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (13)

Le Monde’s escape velocity

June 27, 2010 – 4:17 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

In rocket scientist parlance, escape velocity is the speed needed to break free from Earth’s gravitational field. Last Friday, by an overwhelming majority, Le Monde’s staff voted to escape the black hole of French politics — or, at least, to give their paper the  best chance to do so.

Disassembling the utterly complex chain of ownership control at Le Monde would take most of this column. Let’s just say the newsroom, which historically controlled 22% of the company, gave a resounding 90% vote for a triumvirate including the head of Lazard France, Matthieu Pigasse (41); the co-founder of Yves-Saint-Laurent, Pierre Bergé (80); and Xavier Niel (43), the founder of Free, France’s largest non state-related telecommunication company. Together, the investment banker, the philanthropist, and the telco maverick are likely to become the main shareholders of the most prestigious French newspaper — one that is facing a severe cash crisis (see last wee Note Le Monde on the Brink). The journalist’s choice was supported by most constituencies in a position to influence the group’s fate. Only one voting body chose the other bid; technically it can trigger a deadlock for the ultimate vote at the board level, scheduled for this Monday; this is a highly unlikely scenario, one that would immediately lead to a bankruptcy filing.

Two years ago, such choice would have ben unthinkable. On paper, the other bid, led by Claude Perdriel — owner of the left-leaning newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur —, supported by the Spanish group Prisa and by France Telecom-Orange, would have got the prize. But their offer got mired in politics, and Le Monde’s staff reacted strongly against it.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s involvement doomed the Perdriel bids. When he summoned Le Monde’s current CEO, Eric Fottorino, to warn him, it felt like George Bush telling the New York Times’CEO: “You have two choices, here is my preference, be careful.” For any journalist, this type of ultimatum is the perfect repellent. Especially when, hoping to influence the decision, the executive branch pushes every lever.

To understand how it works, here, you have to keep in mind how the executive branch keeps the French medias under the tightest possible leash. When a government-friendly columnist is unhappy about his employer, he calls Sarkozy’s chief of staff (nicknamed the vice-president) who, in turn, calls the head of the broadcast network to express his concern. It always works like a dream, especially when the CEO of a network (radio or TV) is a government appointee or, for a private company, when the main shareholder is a FON — Friend Of Nicolas). Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)

Intel’s bold bet against ARM: visionary or myopic?

June 27, 2010 – 3:50 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

Today, Intel’s x86 architecture reigns supreme on PCs (and millions of servers, such as Google’s, that use the PC organ bank). Anywhere else, the ARM processors have won; they’re in billions of devices, regular cell phones, smartphones, entertainment devices, navigation systems and legions of other embedded applications.

Understandably, perhaps, Intel didn’t want to play in the low end of the processor market. But we now see the emergence of RPCs, Really Personal Computers, more commonly called smartphones. Nokia, RIM, Apple and the fast-rising army of Android licensees all use high-end ARM derivatives.

Intel’s answer is a family of low-end x86 devices, Atom processors. So far, Atom processors haven’t been used in smartphones, only in netbooks.

‘Wait’, says Intel, ‘over time, our proven semiconductor design and manufacturing capabilities will allow us to reduce the power consumption and cost of x86 processors. That’s how we’ll win this emerging market, just as we won the PC.’

Easier said than done. The older and more complicated x86 architecture is inherently disadvantaged against the more modern ARM architecture. And, as we’ll see, there is more to this fight than semiconductor design and manufacturing prowess.

For context, let’s go to Mary Meeker’s latest (June 7th, 2010) Internet Trends presentation.

By 2012, she predicts, smartphones shipments will exceed PC unit volumes. Approximately 480 million smartphones versus 430 million PCs, going to 650 million next generation devices by 2013:

Just as important, by next year, smartphones unit volumes will overtake “feature phones”:

Smartphones, feature phones? Without losing ourselves in taxonomy games, let’s turn to the popular Blackberry devices: they are good examples of the smartphone category. Anything less is a feature phone, sometimes called a regular phone, or a “dumb phone”. Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (16)