Author: Nick Hodge

NSW State Library: National Treasures

History is a personal fascination – so I decided to call into the NSW State Library today to have a look at the “National Treasures” exhibition before it closes on 22nd October.

Various historical documents: Captain Cook’s Log book from 1770, Bank’s diary from the same journey; diaries from Australian WW2 POWs; Eddie Mabo’s papers; various pioneer diaries from turn of the century; legal documents from transported convicts.

Documents are important: they are physical evidence of our history. Go have a squiz.

library

The New Nickel-Tube: Google and YouTube

So Google purchased YouTube. US$1.65B in shares, paper-work money or an entry in an SEC filing.

In cold-hard numbers: YouTube has a reported 100 million viewers per day; based on the purchase price, each view equates to US$0.0452 over a year. Or, another way to look at it: as long as Google “earns” US5c for each pair of eyeballs for a few minutes, within a year it is financially ahead.

Considering the current cost of both text-advertising and TV advertising; and the oncoming onslaught from competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo!, US5c per view seems rather attractive.

Opportunity cost of not owning YouTube: a competitor would have purchased it, first. Fox had already purchased the young Myspace eyeballs; and Microsoft is serious about the online world and has all those XBoxen, Vistas, Zunes to capture other eyeballs. YouTube was obviously on the block for sale, and each viewer is valued at US$0.0452. US$1.65B is not too much compared to a competitor getting the brand. YouTube maybe the “text breakout” and single product weakness that dogged Google in recent months. (Robert Scoble has a perspective on this, too)

Looking into my crystal tube: Google’s Video Future: It is all about about the advertising. Potential changes to Google Adsense:

  • Text links inside an ad (transparent text on bottom); through to top+tail video or sound bytes
  • Throw more smart maths at technology to recognise the content inside video and then attach appropriate a like advertisement
  • The original publisher of youtubes (another verb coming on, here?) self-categorises, so advertisements could similarly be targeted.
  • For youtubes posted on blogs or other non-Google web sites; understanding the context would permit smarter targeted Adsense ads

Instead of crawling the internet, Google is becoming the internet. This is rather a scarily thought that crossed my mind when reading this Wired article (The Information Factories) on their new data center in Washington state, US. Ultimately, it may have been cheaper to buy YouTube than create a backing-store to hold indexed video and sound.

So next: watch Apple and Google. Not sale or purchase, just closer ties. Apple needs the content, Google needs the hardware. Microsoft is the common competitor.

PROCEDURE DIVISION. RUN END_OF_WEEK. Stop Run.

Developing systems in COBOL is the next major leap in Agile programming. Or maybe not. Returning to serious programming:.

First topic: Why Microsoft’s Zune scares Apple to the core

“Apple faces the prospect of competing not with the Zune alone, but with a mighty Windows-Soapbox-Xbox-Zune industrial complex.”

Speaking to a new XBox360 user on Friday, he stated that the Media Center-XBox360 interconnect works just like Apple stuff. Seemlessly. The Microsoft Industrial Complex that all competitors fear. Adding the advertising announcements, which also state the platforms, it is going to be an interesting 2007.

“The iPod is the soul of Apple’s entire business. Apple has been relatively successful at winning converts from Windows to Mac OS X, for example, in part because its whole product line basks in the glow of iPod’s success, hipness and ubiquity.”

Microsoft has started to come out the IT geekdom of making things more complex for the sake of making things more complex, and entering the world of coolness by design: XBox360, Zune, Live.com.

And Zune is going to be a range of products. Wireless is the killer technology; whilst initially hobbled by peer-to-peer only; in the future this could really go over the top.

Wireless connectivity, initially peer-to-peer, fortells significant platform innovation:

  • imagine playlist compatibility checking and proximity checking. find your perfect partner, just by the music you like!
  • zunehubs; retails stores where you can go to a safe location, buy more points and get free music
  • last.fm + zunetags automatically uploaded
  • go to a live music gig; a zunehub emits sample/rare music tracks for attendees. Or maybe points for attending.

Would I buy one? Probably not. Firstly, no availability outside the USA. My SCRLTT (the red MINI) has an iPod connection inside; and I have yet to fill my 40Gb Revision 2 iPod. Then again, I am not in the target demographic.

Secondly, from the sublime to the workoriented. In the now distant past (earlier in 2006), I was a major spreadsheet user: Excel was used as much as Outlook as a means of decision making and communication. Now disconnected from the old job, I still have a need for spreadsheets: but not big old clunky spreadsheets.

Enter Google Spreadsheets and something I only tried yesterday: EditGrid. Save my spreadsheet as .xls from Google, open in EditGrid and I am away.

From Team and Concepts in Hong Kong, it has some extra coolness missing in Google Spreadsheets. Remote data (share prices, exchange rates) NetVibes integration. And it looks better.

Thirdly, as predicted here, Microsoft is releasing the latest “CTP” of Visual Studio code named Orcas as a VirtualPC package.

So, into the 10th month of the year. Hoping for a better month than the last, this end of the blog-posting and wishing well to all readers.

New York Times Reader Trumps Adobe Reader

The recently released New York Times Reader (http://www.nytimes.com/mem/reader_regi.html) is what the Adobe PDF Reader should be today. Small, data-driven, dynamic, interactive and skinable.

Scott Hanselman states this is a precursor to WPF based RSS readers. I am going to go one further and state this is the future of dynamic publishing for large, paper-based publishers. A territory traditionally marked by Adobe as their home soil.

Adobe, the old leader in this space with PDF, has missed the ferry to New York and may be stuck on the island for a while. Even Macromedia (now married to Adobe) has missed this boat.

Small:

Times Reader will requires .Net Framework 3.0. Today this is a hassle. In the future, with Vista and wider deployments the base Framework, the comparative size of the downloads will become very noticeable.

The installer is less than 1Mb, installing an application that is 2.5Mb.

The Adobe Reader is larger (21.5Mb).

Data-driven:

Rather than the content being bound up with the presentation, something that IT professionals constantly consider bad architecture, with the Times Reader these are kept separate.

The display resizes correctly, but within the bounds of the New York Times look-and-feel. Designing for this style of layout is not simple today: it requires the smarts of a developer to generate. I believe there is a market to wire backend services to custom publisher-centricinterfaces in a mechanism non-experienced programming designers can grok.

Maintaining the ownership of the content, even in a creative-commons mantra world, is critical. There is a significant investment in infrastructure to run a publisher, and this must be paid for. Adding value is the only way a large publisher can charge for their premium content. Whilst the Adobe Reader has mechanisms for, cough, DRM, inbuilt – it is another barren wasteland in daily publishing worlds.

Dynamic:

The central dogma/mantra of the Adobe Reader is to retain the original designer’s intent (including fonts) Acrobat does have limited reflow and resizing ability; mainly tacked onto the Reader to permit accessibility. There is an under utilised feature of Acrobat called the Article Tool. Ever used it? It has been in there since the very early versions.

The Times Reader permits resizing of the application and correctly reflows the text; in a composition mechanism that Adobe has living in InDesign, InCopy – even PageMaker. Why can’t these be bolted into an Adobe Reader? InDesign could be turned into the frontend design tool; Coldfusion is at the backend. Maybe this is too old ground for Adobe?

Interactive:

Searching in the Times Reader is a pleasure, and surprises you. With dynamic searching; that is the relevant articles appear under the search box as you type is way excellent. The Topic Explorer is worth the price of entry, alone. It reminds me of Apple’s MCF/Hotsauce/Project X.

Topic Explorer

Skinable:

New York Times owns the interface, lock-stock-and-barrel. The experience is theirs. Being a newspaper of record, this is critical. To change the interface to match their corporate standard is something that the Adobe Reader should permit.

As Scott Hanselman states, the Times Reader is the current poster child for Microsoft’s WPF technologies. The only arrow I can aim at its heart is the Windows XP/Vista only nature of the Reader. Come on Microsoft, release a MacOS version! Having .Net on the Mac platform is probably the friendliest Unix you guys are going to get since Xenix.

It also happens to trump the old king of type and presentation: Adobe. Will Apollo save Adobe’s reputation? Let’s hope its Apollo 11, not Apollo 13.