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The Xybot turns an ordinary iPhone into a mobile avatar. A phone docked into the robot streams video of the person controlling it using an app running on another iPhone.

Xybotyx of Littleton, Colorado, which makes the robot, was founded by two engineers who met while working on NASA’s Phoenix Mars rover. The Xybot will be released in March at a price of $111.11.

Helluva lot cheaper than a presence bot. Another example of the ubiquity of the SmartPhone making computing / networking / etc effectively free.

take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.

What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?

I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.

Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future.

To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

HANDS MANIPULATE THINGS

Excellent points on limitations of our current magical devices. Highly recommend that you read the original rant from Bret Victor. http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

The reality is that there is no more embodied approach for devices extant as yet, with possible exceptions of robotics homebrew/arduino/etc. However these certainly don't have anything like the levels of 'magic' interaction that we're enjoying today with the 'pictures under glass'.

I'm not holding my breath for new approaches any time soon, but longer term ...

What will you build?

Augmented Reality (AR) overlays information, images, 3D objects, audio and video onto your view of the real world around you.

Create your own mobile AR projects easily with no development required & link your content to the real world!

Steps to making a technology ubiquitous and accessible - grow to simplicity & hide the underlying complexity. BuildAR gets it.

Looking forward to seeing more from @buildAR 

TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores.

Ongoing sad times for the local bookstore.

Isn't this part of a larger trend, building 'cloud' / or ubiquitous connectivity and information into all of our lives. The same trend impacting IT across the board. Bringing both disruption of our comfortable ways of doing things, and radical new capabilities?

Fantastic sculpture.

It brings to mind that more and more we are operating on the level of the black-box, of magickal thinking, of objects and processes that 'just work' ... until they don't. That computing was once transparent, but is no longer. Consider most of your mobile phone experiences, hopefully fantastic, but when it stops you must find an expert, or replace the broken, now 'imp free' device.

In many ways, this is the goal of the 'consumer' device.

Living in an age of magic made real is very appealing in many ways, we can ignore the constraints of time and space to communicate with our friends and colleagues all over the world. We live in an age where combinatorial combinations of human capabilities and technologies can solve most any problem, as argued by Matt Ridley in his optimistic TED talk on ideas 'having sex' . But, increasingly it feels like we're losing the ease, much celebrated by earlier generations, of being able to understand the underlying process, of unpacking all the way down to creating that water wheel, etc. Of being able to tune our own car engine, or indeed to fix our TV. Indeed, it seems that we've become so very good at using modules, at sub-processes, at, arguably, code/module re-use. And where, ultimately does this leave us? What constrainst are we building into our lack of understanding?

The reality is that this is not a new thing. It has been going on in computing repeatedly as we create a useful abstraction: adders, CPUs, memory, virtual memory, virtual users, virtual machines, and so on. This has now reached a point where powerful computing is easily and cheaply integrated into other activities - this is the main point of Andreessen's article (also discussed on technoist).  What's new is that we're heading to an age where the outcomes from computing are more and more 'commodity', packaged, wrapped, and protected from meddling. More and more .. part of the world.

This is not a new process. The reuse of modules for factories, for commodities, for food, for almost everything in the modern economy is created in such a way. Leonard Read had a wonderful essay in 1958 showing that no one person nows how to create 'even' a pencil, and that this was a very good thing.

Software is more and more just a component piece for pretty much 'everything'. We can see this in the move from transparency to packaged objects designed to be opaque. This is the transition for software, for computing, to be absorbed, as never before, into the broader economic process; into factory built objects. Into objects of magick.

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

In short, software is eating the world.

More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, "Isn't this just a dangerous new bubble?"

I, along with others, have been arguing the other side of the case. (I am co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, which has invested in Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare, among others. I am also personally an investor in LinkedIn.) We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses.

Nicely argued techno-optimistic view on the future for software from Mark Andreessen.

As it happens, I agree with his view that we're reaching a new plateau of productivity with software. I found it striking that his argument is a point in time illustration of the forecast from "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages" from Carlotta Perez in 2003 about the relatively predictable cycles of adoption and economic shift for major technological innovation and the expectation, as one of her reviewers put it on Amazon that we "are in the last throes of a technological bubble and just preceding the next period of productive improvement and profit from the disruptive technologies in the 1990."

Check it out http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1843763311

Interesting times for the software 'game' ...

Links to this post

  The Lesson of Dropbox: Usage = Value

Word on the street is that Dropbox is about to raise a major round of financing at a $5 billion+ valuation. While some will cry “Bubble!”, I think there's a different lesson we can learn: Usage = Value. Let's face it–Dropbox isn't the ...

Posted by Chris Yeh at 11:55 AM

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Usage + 'Stickiness' = value
Dropbox is a great example, it's baked into too many day to day personal processes to be easily displaced.

The ongoing battle between Android and Apple for mindshare.

I found the news that Microsoft is acquiring Skype interesting. Major acquisitions like this have all sorts of unexpected implications and ripples across many markets.

The blogosphere has been alive with the discussion over whether the acquisition makes sense or not and the sorts of things that Microsoft might do with the Skype technology, much of which is pretty cool, but in general somewhat hopeful. There's also been some discussion over Microsoft 'buying' customers. While the acquisition is certainly multi-faceted, I suspect that buying customers is just about sufficient to justify the deal.

First, consider the value of an online customer for various types of business - the chart above gives some ideas - I'd tend to assume that the annual value of a given online user to Microsoft is somewhere between Google and Yahoo, both being advertising driven, let's say $10 annually. Given which, it is well worth spending somewhere well North of $10 for each customer acquisition.

Skype apparently has 107m users who use the service at least once a month, and 663m registered users. Microsoft is paying $8.5b for the privilege of access to these users. Microsoft is paying as little as $8 per active user. However, conversion rates would dictate that only a portion of these users come across to the Microsoft services (if 10%, that's $80 per user!).

However, I think that the conversion rate could be much, much higher. If we consider that one of the major challenges to customer acquisition is the effort involved in setting up a new account on a new service (I've called this friction in my last post).

Imagine if Microsoft were now able to do away with that process for new users. Rather the user, many of whom stay logged into Skype 24x7, is automagically provided access to the Microsoft online properties as a result of their Skype authentication. Indeed, one might modify some elements of Skype to make this an easy and perhaps natural extension of the Skype experience.

Notice that this scenario not only builds the user/customer base for the Microsoft online properties, but it also gives Microsoft a new way to compete with Google in creating data profiles of very large numbers of users.

Does this make sense to you?

Friction free computing

Posted by Michael Harries on May 9, 2011

Does your software reduce friction?

Last week I used the Mac App store to install Citrix receiver for OSX. This is a such a streamlined experience. Start the app store, login with iTunes credentials, and I’m ready to go. Installing the receiver itself was trivial and it worked immediately. It was easy to purchase a bunch of other apps as well (Such as ‘ommwriter‘, another great simplicity app).

That was fun, but at much the same time I was dragged into the morass of reinstalling some other apps off DVD, network drives and the web. Having to find license keys, credit cards, and navigating different installation scripts.

Talk about different worlds.

This is a great example of frictionless computing. It rocks. And it doesn’t sap my energy on an activity that should be simple. Why waste creative focus on mundanities? If there’s any task that should be automated, it’s one that affects so many people, and costs productive time.

So, my question to you. Does your product or startup reduce friction? Are you making it easy for people to use your IT service? How much inertia do your customers need to overcome to get started? How much can you replicate the out of box experience of the Mac app store? This is the age of consumerization; The user is king; and there are any number of alternative distractions to the task of learning to find, install or enroll, sign in, let alone drive your software.

Citrix gets this simplicity. Do you?

If only schools were addictive like Farmville, maybe we could fix our education system.

That’s the thinking behind a partnership announced today between the high-profile charter school network KIPP and test-prep startup Grockit, which applies social gaming principles to studying. Grockit is backed by, among others, Marc Pincus of Zynga, the company responsible for our nation’s mass addiction to breeding virtual cows. Like Farmville, Grockit incorporates social-gaming elements such as badges, points and leaderboards, as well as live chat and rewards for social interaction to draw its users in.

no matter how successful SCVNGR became, it was going to have trouble ensuring that people kept coming back to the local businesses they were checking-in/playing at. So he started a pilot program in Boston and Philadelphia that gives users better and better deals as they continue to come back to a restaurant. Priebatsch doesn't say it explicitly, but it's pretty clear he sees LevelUp/SCVNGR mashup as the company's future. "Pure checking-in isn't going mainstream," he says, "Mainly because it gets boring." LevelUp is a way to get around that.

In terms of manufacturing, the age of tablets is different from the age of netbooks mostly because there is no way to make a cheap tablet. You only have a certain, finite amount of space inside a small tablet case and, more important, tablet PC parts are expensive and often custom-built. Touchscreens are expensive because mother-glass manufacturers see Apple buying up their stock and they hope to make a killing. Flash memory is expensive because, well, Apple bought it all. And the tablets themselves are expensive because Apple set the prices. If Motorola could have gotten the Xoom below $250 I’m sure they would have but, given that there is a more popular alternative out there that costs twice as much, playing a scorched-earth pricing game would leave money on the table.

But manufacturers can’t “beat” the iPad because they’re still playing by netbook rules. As Stephen Elop said, there will soon be “200 tablets” on the market and only one clear winner. But hardware manufacturers are like sharks – they can’t sit still. They need to produce products constantly, no matter the popularity, and as a result, on the aggregate, no one device they produce out of the other 199 can touch the reigning king. It may sound hyperbolic but it’s true. However, they’ve been surprisingly reticent to produce many tablets. I’ve heard it said over and over: “If RIM had released the Playbook a year earlier, they would have owned the space.” Instead they announced early and hemmed and hawed and then released a device that is potentially superior to the iPad but, in practice, little more than a smooshed out Blackberry smartphone.

Nice insight from the supply chain side.

Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It's an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with me.
The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach -- if not the kingdom of Heaven -- the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.
You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.
Naturally, the Catholicism and Protestantism of the two systems have nothing to do with the cultural and religious positions of their users. One may wonder whether, as time goes by, the use of one system rather than another leads to profound inner changes. Can you use DOS and be a Vande supporter? And more: Would Celine have written using Word, WordPerfect, or Wordstar? Would Descartes have programmed in Pascal?
And machine code, which lies beneath and decides the destiny of both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that belongs to the Old Testament, and is talmudic and cabalistic.

Sometimes things change so fast it's frightening. Sometimes they stay the same and that's even scarier. This is an excerpt form Umberto Eco's column in the Italian weekly Espresso dated, September 30 1994.

1994 is almost 20 years ago. An entire generation exists from then to now. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - the more things change, the more they stay the same, sometimes.