Convergence/ notes

1 George Gilder | Three Trends for 2005 (Jan 05)

Big trends have a way of sneaking past us. Consider the Web. In 2005 it may seem like an old story, but let's pause to remember that as a commercial product the World Wide Web is just a mere decade old. (And if you lay claim to having surfed the Web during its beta years of 1990-94, either you're an HTML geek or you're fibbing.) In just ten years the Web has altered the way we grab information, manage our firms and organize our lives. China likely will surpass the U.S. this year in the number of Web surfers, a development few saw in 1995.

This year video Weblogs are sure to be the "it" thing. The shape of the v-blog trend began to emerge late last year during the election campaign. Example: A half-million people watched CNN's Crossfire on an October night when comedian Jon Stewart happened to be a guest. Stewart played it mean and bitter, ripping apart hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson. The segment made its way onto blogs, and there it was clicked by2.5 million unique visitors--five times as many as had watched it on TV. (Earlier this month CNN took Crossfire off the air.)

The Asian tsunami tragedy brought a secondary wave ofv-blogs. Sites such as the Australian Waveofdestruction.org were logging 1 million unique visitors per week at the peak.

Venture capitalist Roger McNamee in his book The New Normal (Portfolio) points out another huge trend underway. It used to be that the coolest products (i.e., the most expensive) were those sold to businesses or to rich people who could afford them.

But now the coolest products are being aimed at the masses from the get-go--iPods, DVDs and gigabyte memory sticks, not to mention terabytes of Google-accessible free content. Even software is following this trend. A generation ago the Sabre airline-seat yield management system, written for a few dozen carriers, was the neatest trick in the travel industry. Now it's Orbitz, aimed at billions of consumers.

To my eye, Google signals a new golden age of disruption and startups. The prime Google lesson is that clever use of cheap technology can trump ordinary use of pricey stuff. This isespecially true if your company has an IQ edge, as Google does, and if you're strategizing from a blank page, as startups do.

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2 George Gilder: The Rise Of The 'Teleputer' (Jan 05)

Human beings tend to get hung up on looks. Whether it's cars, buildings or other people, homo sapiens have a habit of associating form with function. But every now and then, through evolutionary and revolutionary steps, the shape and size of things change.

Some of the most obvious examples of drastic changes are found in the area of electronics. Radios, for example have shrunk over the last 75 years from the size of a small farm animal to a device that can be substantially smaller than a wristwatch. Computers, too, have become tinier. The ENIAC of the 1940s filled an entire room and sucked down massive amounts of electricity while today's desktop and notebook models pack as much punch as their bulky predecessor at a fraction of its size or power consumption. According to George Gilder, editor of the Gilder Technology Report, the personal computer is getting even smaller and more portable--and much more feature-rich.

As more and more people begin to rely on these devices as their primary means of personal computing, Gilder believes there will be a vast realignment among makers of hardware, software and peripheral devices. We recently spoke with Gilder in New York City where he shared his vision and talked about the companies who stand to benefit.

Read the complete article on Forbes.com here

Excerpts:

Cell phones that take pictures and crude video are no longer shocking, nor are handheld e-mail and computing devices like the BlackBerry from Research in Motion (nasdaq: RIMM - news - people ). But tying all of these functions together into one unit with the computing power of your desktop PC is still cutting-edge stuff. But Gilder says all of the components and companies are now in place to make the revolutionary step into the age of the "teleputer," or a handheld device that's a fully functioning personal computer, digital video camera, telephone, MP3 player and video player.

As more and more people begin to rely on these devices as their primary means of personal computing, Gilder believes there will be a vast realignment among makers of hardware, software and peripheral devices. We recently spoke with Gilder in New York City where he shared his vision and talked about the companies who stand to benefit.





Related Reading:
Pondering the Paradigm: 2005
Excerpted from the December 2004 issue of the Gilder Technology Report:

Signs multiply of a turning point in view. Internet traffic continues nearly to double annually in the U.S. and multiply at a far faster pace in Asia. In Japan, NTT (DCM) has committed to a plan to spend some $48 billion to reach 30 million households by 2010 with Gigabit Ethernet passive optical networks (ePONs). That’s $48 billion, mostly for the optical industry. Softbank’s Yahoo Broadband responds: “So what? We have 300 thousand ePON homes reached already.” UTStarcom (UTSI) is deploying thousands of ePONs in China for about $300 per home. The Koreans are rushing ahead with VDSL (very fast digital subscriber line) at up to 52 megabits per second, but are contemplating PONs for the future. Verizon (VZ) and SBC (SBC) are launching a different line of PONs from Alcatel (ALA)—even faster ones called gPONs that run at 2.5 gigabits per second. Divide that by 64 households and it yields around 40 megabits per household. With new MP-4 and Microsoft (MSFT) Media 9 compression schemes, 40 megabits is enough to accommodate six high definition video streams plus WiFi backhaul and a chorus of voices over IP. While the Asians host PONs by the millions, hundreds of thousands of Americans will soon be served. –George Gilder

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Intel Vs. Qualcomm: Clash Of Tech Titans
forbes.com | George Gilder, Gilder Technology Report, 09.28.04, 1:10 PM ET

Led by Intel, Microsoft and Cisco Systems, the personal computer industry has become a byzantine establishment afflicted everywhere with overshoot products such as huge software-operating suites, gigahertz microprocessor chipsets, motherboard mazes, proliferating network interfaces and communications protocols too complex to integrate into smoothly performing systems.

Consisting of a sprawling standards committee of committees, the industry has designed a gigantic camel that cannot thread the needle's eye of cheap, robust and secure mobile services needed by billions of new customers around the globe. Meanwhile, a new "teleputer" industry, led by Qualcomm (nasdaq: QCOM - news - people ), is emerging to challenge the incumbent players.

Epitomized by the multipurpose cell phone handset or personal digital assistant, the teleputer is optimized for ubiquitous connectivity. As I described it years ago, it will be as portable as a watch and as personal as your wallet. It takes pictures or videos and projects them onto a wall or screen or onto your retina and transmits them to any other digital device or storage facility. It just may not do Windows--certainly not in the conventional form.

The teleputer is, in fact, introducing a new software paradigm based on adaptable applets that are small and agile enough to download to a handset. As early as 1990, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) called for such a software model: "As we add more and more of these features to older systems," he said, "the complexity gets multiplicative.... I get this feature and that feature, but the combinations don't work. What I'd really like to see is a system where the complexity goes up in a linear way, but the power goes up exponentially."

(...)


Pitting computer chip titan Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) against wireless pioneer Qualcomm, this clash of telecom and technology offers a business and political drama. Intel was the world's best technology company in the '80s and '90s because it designed and manufactured the best computing products. Now Qualcomm is the world's best technology company because it designs, in the form of its proprietary code division multiple access (CDMA) wireless standard and chips, the best communications products. As PC sales growth slows, mobile phones and wireless devices have become the driving force of the semiconductor and software industries, both in sales and the pace of technological advance.

Responding to this juggernaut, Intel is increasingly turning to politics. To evangelize about the new wireless technology called WiMax (short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access), Intel recruited to its board of directors former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, who now canvasses the halls of Washington in search of spectrum for WiMax rollouts. The pot of gold is the 700-megahertz band, also known as UHF television channels 52-69. Though almost entirely unused, except as bargaining chips by the powerful broadcasters, these channels are perfect spectrum for propagating wireless signals over long distances. Although the 700 band has been scheduled for auction and release for many years, as the broadcasters make their never-ending and futile transition to digital over-the-air TV, the channels remain in spectrum purgatory. Caught in a lobbying net of telecom carriers, equipment manufacturers, smart techno-leftist intellectuals, broadcasters, octogenarian senators and "public interest" watchdog groups, the FCC is paralyzed.

To implement fully its WiMax vision, Intel would need some 60 MHz or more of this 700-MHz band. If Intel could use its heft to break the Potomac logjam in favor of unlicensed designation of the spectrum, we would applaud and the U.S. economy would be the victor. The problem for WiMax is that it is intrinsically a high-power technology that runs between 25 and 50 watts and is entirely unsuited for unlicensed operation. The danger is that the FCC could designate 700 MHz an official WiMax band, nominally "unlicensed" but without the restrictions on power (below one watt) that render these bands usable without heavy regulation.

True, unfettered use would mean major advances in smart radio and smart antenna technology. Today it is Qualcomm--not Intel--that makes the smartest radios around. Making the smartest antennas is Arraycomm, with its WiMax-busting "iBurst" system proving robust in Australia and South Africa. But Qualcomm is full of experts on antenna technology as well. Qualcomm, moreover, already "owns" channel 55 (716 to 722 MHz) in five-sixths of the country, though it cannot yet use the spectrum because of the digital TV limbo. Perhaps Qualcomm could master and lead in a new, smarter, low-power WiMax if circumstances required.

For more than 15 years, Qualcomm has mastered--or broken--as needed the complex codes of chips, standards and intercontinental politics, integrating the information of business just as it mastered the theory of information. In the real, wireless new world, Qualcomm remains at the epicenter, reaching out to revitalize all contiguous technologies.

Excerpted from the August 2004 issue of The Gilder Technology Report.

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The coming age of teleputers
redif.com | Rajesh Jain | April 15, 2005

George Gilder, a technology evangelist and author of the book "Telecosm: The World After Bandwidth Abundance," coined the word "teleputer" many years ago.

He thinks of it as "a handheld device that's a fully functioning personal computer, digital video camera, telephone, MP3 player and video player.

Epitomised by the multi-purpose cell phone handset or personal digital assistant, the teleputer is optimised for ubiquitous connectivity...[It] will be as portable as a watch and as personal as your wallet. It takes pictures or videos and projects them onto a wall or screen or onto your retina and transmits them to any other digital device or storage facility."

While the complete functionality of the teleputer as described by Gilder is still some time away, there is little doubt about the direction we are headed in.

This is very important from the point of view of users in the emerging markets. For many, it is the mobile phone, rather than the computer, which will provide the first glimpse of the Internet and the Web.

This is what Jonathan Schwartz of "Sun" said after his visit to 3GSM: "The majority of the world will first experience the internet through its mobile phones. We sometimes forget that 10 times as many people bought handsets last year as PCs. Round numbers, there were a BILLION wireless devices sold last year, and around 100 million PCs.

To that end, the odds are much higher you'll watch broadcast broadband content on your phone than on your PC -- and now that Nokia (and their peers) are the world's largest camera manufacturers (just think about that for a moment), the odds are far higher you'll even create broadband content on your handset.

Another interesting meeting was with the CEO of Oberthur, who predicts we'll see 1 Gigabyte SIM cards by year-end -- that's right, a Gig on an interchangeable SIM card. For extra credit, what happens when a significant portion of that memory is executable? That's a mighty small computer."

Mobile phones are also being hailed as the key to development. The Economist wrote recently (March 10 issue): "Plenty of evidence suggests that the mobile phone is the technology with the greatest impact on development. A new paper finds that mobile phones raise long-term growth rates, that their impact is twice as big in developing nations as in developed ones, and that an extra 10 phones per 100 people in a typical developing country increases GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points…And when it comes to mobile phones, there is no need for intervention or funding from the UN: even the world's poorest people are already rushing to embrace mobile phones, because their economic benefits are so apparent. Mobile phones do not rely on a permanent electricity supply and can be used by people who cannot read or write."

The Economist got one-third of the story right. There are two more points to be considered:

Multimedia-enabled thin clients: Think of them as phones with bigger input/output capabilities and options to connect multiple peripherals. These thin clients will have the same internal specifications as the phones.

Grid services: There is a need for centralised applications and data storage. Because of the wireless connection, a cellphone can connect to the network. All the heavyweight lifting is done on servers.

Thin clients and mobile phones will complement each other -- what is needed between them is seamless mobility. This is where the "virtual desktop" comes in -- one can start reading a book on a mobile phone and continue reading it on one's thin client, and then perhaps back on the phone. All of this is possible if the state (what the user is doing) is stored on the server.

This is how commPuting (communications and computing) in emerging markets will look like in the future. Both multimedia-enabled thin clients and tomorrow's mobile phones are examples of teleputers.

They have the potential to transform life and work. This is a world where each of us will have a personal device and networks will be ubiquitous. Bringing this world to life is where the next set of opportunities lie.

What is inside today's desktop computer will move to the server and what is inside a cell phone will power tomorrow's network computer. The networks will be Internet protocol-based. Voice will become yet another service over these digital networks. The mobile phone will be our constant companion, and will be complemented by the availability of network computers with large screens.

Services will occupy centrestage. From commPuting to computainment to communicontent, it will be a world that will converge at the back-end (server-side) but will diverge at the front-end (multiple devices).

While there will be no convergence across these screens, the convergence will happen at the back-end with respect to the data store. We will have different views of the same set of data across these devices -- along with seamless mobility. Welcome to the age of teleputers and service-based computing.
Rajesh Jain is managing director of Netcore Solutions Pvt Ltd

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3 George Gilder: On Dramatic Innovation (Dec 04)

Excerpted from a post by GEORGE GILDER on the Gilder Technology Report subscriber-only message board, December 12, 2004.

George Gilder: The assumption of my report is that companies with technologies on the critical path to all-optical telecommunications both in fiber networks and in wireless links (where optics is used broadly to refer to the electromagnetic spectrum) will outperform the market over time. Governing the evolution of information technology is information theory, which provides the key concept of "entropy" (unexpected information or "news") as the measure of the capacity of communications systems.

A key proposition of information theory is that it takes a low-entropy carrier (without unexpected news or noise) to bear high-entropy content and innovation. The lowest entropy carriers are the predictable undulations of the electromagnetic spectrum to which all communications are migrating. We are on the road to "life after television," where the old top down high-powered models of communication and advertising give way to bottom up, edge-based access to a "wide and weak" fibersphere of all-optical systems linked to cell phone teleputers, a global ganglion of fiber and frequencies, "a worldwide web of glass and light" as I put it in 1992.

Information theory was the foundation of Qualcomm (QCOM), with both Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi devoted students of Claude Shannon at MIT. Based on Shannon's counter-intuitive concepts (you can send more info at low power than high power), Qualcomm's CDMA was regarded as impossible by most of the industry and thus became a near monopoly. Similarly wide and weak is the all-optical fiber network, a relatively –low-power system with almost infinite channel capacity.

What puts a company on my list is alignment with this paradigm: the direct coupling of fibersphere (optics) to atmosphere (wireless), with the "copper cage" of electronic networks dissolved and electronics restricted chiefly to computational functions: The "hollowing out" of computers and networks as they dissolve into worldwide webs of glass and light and air.

Thus Broadwing’s (BWNG) all-optical backbone is a pure play in the paradigm; Essex (KEYW) extends the power of optics though dramatic all-optical innovations useful to the military and demonstrates that single fibers can carry as many as 14,000 different colors of light at low power with ever-greater performance. Agilent (A), Xan3D and its many imitators from Infinera to Simon Cao's new Aracor bring optical communications to the chip and board levels and are direct paradigm plays. A part owner of imager innovator Foveon, Synaptics (SYNA) creates a stream of haptic (touch-based) devices that enhance the usefulness and accessibility of teleputers such as the iPod or multi-purpose cell phone … In general, you will find me discussing such companies on the [GTR subscriber-only message] board more than in the newsletter.

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4 The New Normal : Great Opportunities in a Time of Great Risk (Hardcover)
by Roger McNamee, David Diamond (Contributor)| Portfolio Hardcover (November 18, 2004)

Book Description
Back in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, it was fairly easy to plan for a secure future. People picked a career, a spouse, and a place to live, and those basic decisions put them on a predictable course for the rest of their lives. Especially if they were lucky enough to land at a big corporation with great benefits and smart enough to buy stocks.

In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, technology and global competition transformed the world. An increasingly strong economy masked spiraling instability in the workplace and the world. A rising stock market lulled people into thinking they were in control of their lives.

But now we’ve entered a totally new era, which Roger McNamee calls the New Normal. It’s a time of great uncertainty—about terrorism, corporate scandals, the outsourcing of jobs overseas, and much more. The old safety nets aren’t coming back, even when the economy recovers. But the good news is that the New Normal also offers tremendous opportunities. This book—by one of Silicon Valley’s most insightful and successful investors—explains how to make the most of your life, career, and money by embracing the future.

The New Normal is the era of the individual. In companies large and small, each person now matters more than ever before. The Internet has finally made it easy to launch and grow a real business. For entrepreneurs and managers, the global economy opens previously untapped sources of supply and demand, cost savings and innovation. Individual investors now have access to tools and knowledge that were, until recently, restricted to professionals.

Roger McNamee has written a sweeping book in the tradition of Megatrends that clarifies this new era and gives readers a practical blueprint for success.

Source: Amazon.com here

+ The New Normal blog

Friday, May 06, 2005
The New Normal - Career, Family & Personal Finance

The following is a speech I delivered at the Software 2005 conference in Santa Clara, CA on April 27, 2005

I’m here today to talk about life . . . to talk about making the most of your life in a time I call the New Normal.

The New Normal is a time when there are four unshakable issues that each of has to deal with. First, technology is changing just about everything. Second, globalization is changing the nature of economic opportunity. Third, every individual is on his or her own. We have more power than ever before, but no safety nets. And fourth, none of us has enough time to deal with life.

Technology and globalization are the context of the New Normal. The Power of the Individual and Time are the keys to personal success.

(...) But this is the New Normal. New because the 90s transformed forever the role of technology in our lives. Technology is now pervasive in the economy and in our culture. PCs, cell phones, and the Internet are ubiquitous. Think back to 1990 … PC penetration of households was around 15%. Cell phone penetration was in the low single digits. And the Web was still a gleam in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee. Today, many of us value our cell phones, PCs and Internet connection on par with indoor plumbing.

(...) How did we get here? The technology bull market of the 90s didn’t happen by accident. It happened because of two forces: Moore’s Law and the Berlin Wall. You know what Moore’s Law did, but you may not appreciate the importance of the Berlin Wall.

Before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, American companies could only sell technology products in Western Europe, North America and parts of the Pacific Rim . . . roughly 25% of the world’s population. Every other market was inaccessible. Communist countries for political reasons. Third world countries because they had no money.

After the Wall came down, we saw a transformation in the global economy. Gone was the bilateral competition between the US and USSR. Gone were the old political barriers to trade. Gone was foreign aid.

In the early 90s, every country in the world was forced to implement a market economy. Faced with an imperative to attract foreign capital, emerging countries built airports and nice hotels in their capital cities. They installed phone systems. They bought computers. Lots of them.

When the Berlin Wall came down, the addressable market for US technology expanded more or less overnight to something like 80% or 90% of the world’s population. In combination with the economic upswing of the 90s - the longest economic expansion since the Second World War - this huge growth in addressable market propelled the technology industry to its greatest period of success.

Over a decade, there were three monster waves of technology adopted simultaneously by enterprises everywhere: Windows, client/server applications, and Y2K. The industry grew from about 6% of GDP to more than 9%, during a decade when the economy roughly doubled in size.

Now you understand why the bull market of the 90s was so enormous. Throughout the 90s, technology and globalization worked hand-in-hand to transform the world economy

(...) The third trend is the unending demand for new and better forms of communication. We are nowhere near solving the puzzle in wireless, especially wireless data. The same is true in broadband. As with everything else in the New Normal, the gigantic opportunity in communications brings with it many challenges.

(...) The sixth trend is the rise of the consumer. Depending on who you ask, consumers account for somewhere between 25% and 40% of technology spending. The number today isn’t so important. Most of the innovation in technology is in consumer categories, so the number will go higher.

The seventh trend is time management. The biggest opportunities will be those that leverage people’s time. iPods allow busy people to take their music library with them. Cell phones and wireless data products enable location independence so that people can always communicate with family and business colleagues. Blackberry lets business travelers get more sleep by enabling them to catch up on email from the moment the plane lands until they get to their hotel.

Source: The New Normal bloghere


The Consumer Rules | Friday, February 04, 2005

When you say “technology” to most people, the first thing that comes to mind is an electronic or software product used in business. From 1975 to 2000, enterprises were, indeed, the beneficiary of the vast majority of technology innovations.

No longer. Today, most of the best new technology is directed at consumers. iPods, RAZRs, PSPs, digital cameras, flat panel TVs, TiVOs—you name it --the cool stuff is for consumers. There has been great electronic technology for consumers for more than thirty years, but most of it was based on products originally targeted at the needs of business, the government, or the military. Beginning with mini-computers in the 70s, businesses enjoyed a twenty-five year run as the prime beneficiary of technology innovation. PCs, routers, client/server, and the web were just the high points. But it all came to a halt at the end 1999, when the Y2K spending bubble burst. Businesses had acquired more technology than they could absorb, so they stopped buying new stuff. Right at the stroke of midnight on Y2K.

In the past four years there have been some innovations in the world of enterprise technology, but nothing in comparison to what we have seen in the consumer world. This is no fluke. I believe that consumers will continue to enjoy most of the innovation in the technology world for the next decade and perhaps much longer. There are lots of factors at play. First, technology is now part of the social fabric. After a twenty year struggle to master PCs, VCRs, and cell phones, consumers are comfortable with technology products.

They can distinguish between good and bad ones before they buy. And they are willing to buy lots of goods ones. Second, Moore’s Law has driven the prices of electronic components to levels that enable a wide range of innovative products to launch at mass market prices. Gone are the days when new products had to focus on a tiny group of early adopters.

Today you go for the brass ring on day one. Third, there seem to be an unlimited number of new consumer opportunities. Technologists have figured out the prime directive: time is precious. There is a huge market for gadgets that help people make the most of scarce time, and no end in sight to the innovations around that concept. We’re just getting started.

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Friday, December 17, 2004
Apple iPod. How bright is its future?

(...) I try not to predict the future. But I spend lots of time analyzing the present, and the iPod’s present is amazing. Apple is about to sell the ten millionth iPod—in barely more than three years. I believe the iPod is the first product in history to sell ten million units at $400 each in only three years. In many ways, the iPod is the Xerox machine of consumer electronics. It cost much more than the products it replaced . . . and sold a lot more units.

(...)Now Apple has two new iPods. The Photo iPod is the first with a color display, and it’s very cool, even just in music mode. Loading in photos is straightforward . . . and result is impressive. I started with a dozen photos . . . and immediately realized that the Photo iPod is the world’s largest wallet for photos. The only bummer about the Photo iPod is that it is slightly thicker than older iPods. As a result, there are some peripheral and add-on devices it can’t use.
(...)

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5 iPods Make the World Go Away
DAVID KIRKPATRICK
As technology becomes more pervasive in our lives, we seek out other less obtrusive gadgets to protect us from all the noise.
FORTUNE
Thursday, March 24, 2005
By David Kirkpatrick

We're living in a device-centric age. Technology may not yet fully define us, but it increasingly defines how we behave and spend our time. In New York City, I notice that subway riders are quieter than they once were. More and more, I see little white earphone wires emerging from their hats and hair--the telltale sign that they're listening to iPods. Sometimes I'd estimate that as many as 25% of all the commuters either in the cars or on the platforms are listening to music, an audio book, or a Podcast. And in the Tokyo subway,... Continue (Subscription)

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See further extract plus comment on Microvision blog:

~~~~~~~~~~~~

(...) And in the Tokyo subway, I'm told, silence descends when the doors close. Almost all the commuters in that city pull out cellphones or other electronic devices and peck at their miniature keyboards, sending messages or playing games.

Why do I, and so many others, want to cocoon ourselves off into our little music bubbles, even when we're out and about? I think one reason has to do our exasperation with the other technologies around us: cellphones, PCs, BlackBerries, laptops, etc. With all these devices, we're wired and ready to receive telephone calls, e-mails, IMs, and instant everything all the time.

I'm getting shell-shocked by technology. But now a new technology offers me an antidote: the iPod shuffle. And so my music-enveloped cocoon grows tighter. Music soothes the frazzled beast. My blood pressure drops.

Some people prefer to retreat from the world with games rather than with music. With today's launch of the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP), that will become much easier for gamers. It's too early to say what problems the new game player will create and which ones it will solve. But while the PSP is expected to be a huge success, I doubt if it will have the same cultural impact of the newest iPod. Even though it's portable, the PSP is still too big to unobtrusively slip into our lives like the tiny iPod shuffle can. When I'm walking down the street (or riding on the subway), the shuffle just becomes part of my world.

Sony's Impressive PlayStation Portable

The PSP's 4.3-inch, 480-by-272-pixel TFT LCD screen is absolutely beautiful, with bright, vibrant color on display during both game and movie play. Everyone who peeked at the PSP commented about how good the screen looked, and I have to agree, it's striking.

However, there are several drawbacks to the display's brilliantly shiny surface, chief among them fingerprints. Within minutes of opening the box, I'd covered the device with prints that were so noticeable you wouldn't need a crime scene investigation unit to lift one. I guess that's why Sony ships the special gray chamois cloth with the unit. I predict that the PSP will inspire many gamers to perform a new ritual: wiping fingerprint grease off the screen before playing a game or watching a movie.

A Bit Too Shiny?

Unfortunately, the reflective surface can also impact enjoyment of the device. During my tests with both games and movies, I quickly realized that any ambient light from behind caused distracting reflections. This made watching a movie on the very small screen an interesting experience: I had to find a way to hold the screen close enough to my face to take in all the action, while at the same time fidgeting with the angle I held the PSP at to minimize reflections, which seemed to happen even in the darkest rooms.

~~~~~~~~~


I got an iPod last week and it has really been fantastic. Although I don't like to listen to music on headphones very much, the iPod is great for the car or with the Bose docking station. I had resisted because I'd been pretty underwhelmed with the sound quality of mp3s. But I was delighted by the sound quality of the AAC files that iTunes made from my CD collection when I used the highest encoding rate, 320 kbps. So it has been a lot of fun, and in particular the shuffle feature which just plays all your songs in random order til it gets through all of them. Driving around and having Miles Davis, Rush, The Beach Boys and John Coltrane all back to back is really a delight.

But one of the reasons I wanted to blog this guy's article on the iPod is that he's talking about people kind of disappearing into their personal world of technology, enabled by portable media devices like the iPod and the PSP. This is a trend that has unstoppable momentum and the world will never go back to a time when people aren't enveloped in a cocoon of personal technology. What we will have are incremental as well as transformational improvements in these same types of devices that we're seeing now. iPods are great but you can't make phone calls or surf the web on them or make stock trades. PSPs sound great but you can't see the screen in ambient light and it's too big to slip into your pocket the way you can fit an iPod or a cell phone.

The answer as always is plain as day to me and everybody else who reads this blog. We'll have eyeglass beam scanning displays that are full color and high resolution, connected via Bluetooth or another wireless networking protocol to a cell phone style 'teleputer' that will fit in our pocket, be worn on our wrist, clipped to our belt or whatever. Of course what is crushingly obvious to me may be unfathomable to the rest of the world for reasons that I will never be able to understand.

But I see it all coming, in broad daylight, and that's why I own more shares of MVIS than all but a few financial institutions. They can't take 'risks' or make intuitive leaps. They base their decisions around the past and around forensic financial results. They're not allowed to use foresight and discern where we're headed before we get there. Because if they take that risk and are wrong, there's lawsuits and angry customers. If I'm wrong about MVIS, I'll lose plenty of money and have a pretty disappointed wife -- but that's about the extent of it.

Could you say I'm confident that my vision of the near future is correct? More confident with every day that passes.

posted by BJ # 9:24 AM 1 comments

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