Category: Technology

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Copyright Purpose

Copyright, CopyLeft.

Control of one’s creative works is complicated in the era of YouTube, rapid expansion of computing power, the shaken music industry, and Open Source software.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor once wrote:

“The Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression. By establishing the marketable right to the use of one’s expression, copyright supplies an economic incentive to create and disseminate.”

Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539 (1985). O’Connor was joined in the decision by Chief Justice Burger and Justices Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist and Stevens.

A new book, “Free Ride,” by the journalist Robert Levine, discusses copyright, the Internet and the impact of digital piracy.

Copyright often encourages free speech. It sometimes inhibits free speech. The idea that copyright is the be-all and end-all of free expression is simplistic. The idea that it inhibits free speech is simplistic. I think this is true of politics in general, but everyone argues about stuff like a 4-year-old.

Read an interview with Levine by Salon.com.

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Steve Jobs Life and Death

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” Jobs said. “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Steve Jobs passed away today at 56 years old.

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Informate versus Automate: Customer service hangs in the balance

Slate.com had an insightful article by Zeynep Tufekci about how software automation (using artificial intelligence via software algorithms) is risky and bad for customer service.

In the article Ms. Tufekci describes the employee-to-customer ratios at the largest web companies:

http://slate.me/oXohl2

A similar dynamic dominates policies of social networking platforms—and you only need to look at the employee/user numbers to understand that it could not be any other way. Facebook has about 2,000 employees to 750 million users; Twitter 600 employees to about 100 million users. That’s only three human employees per million users for Facebook and about six for Twitter. Google is larger, with about 30,000 employees, but an enormous portion of the 2 billion netizens use many of its services every day. It probably has about 50,000 users per employee, but for a broader range of services.

With such ratios, the business model becomes to push work onto the user—for example, have the users flag/report what they consider inappropriate content—and then automate the rest.

This explains in part why it is frustrating to use Google’s free products when something breaks down: there is literally no one to help you! You must service yourself by combing through support forum posts and hopefully lucking upon a clear solution (or at least unresolved explanation).

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Selling Tickets to your Event

New ways to sell tickets

If you are having an event and need to sell tickets, EventBrite might be the best way to go.

We used EventBrite to sell tickets to our North Country Film Festival in 2010. It was a success.

Now, the California-based company has released an iPad app that faciliates at-the-door sales. The NYTimes has an article:

To deal with similar situations, and to compete more directly with the big guns of the industry, in June the company introduced Eventbrite at the Door. Using an iPad app and a credit card scanner, Eventbrite at the Door customers can let in advance ticket holders and sell 400 new tickets per hour.

We are hoping that soon their new At the Door app can utilize the awesome Square card reader software available for Android and iOS. It does not appear possible yet… from Techcrunch:

Eventbrite is bundling the hardware and testing it in beta with about five or six event organizers, but it plans to release it as an iPad app this summer. The first iteration will be called Eventbrite at the Door, but as more features are added, such as seating, it will evolve into a full mobile box office. CEO Kevin Hartz sees it as akin to Opentable terminals at restaurants. Eventually he’d like to partner with Square for the card swipe readers, but is waiting for Square to open up its API. Square just launched its own iPad cash register app as well, but that is geared more at merchants than event organizers.

 

In the meanwhile, EventBrite charges less than TicketMaster:

The company charges consumers 2.5 percent of the cost of each ticket plus 99 cents, plus credit card charges of about 3 percent. For a $20 ticket, those fees would come to about $2.10, or 10.5 percent — much less than customers are used to paying through Ticketmaster, where surcharges are often 30 percent or higher.

The industry resists EventBrite’s low costs to consumers:

“A lot of people in the music business don’t want ticketing democratized,” said Josh Baron, editor of the music magazine Relix and co-author of the book “Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped.” “It’s a business, and venues want money.”

 

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Which Tablet is the best platform upon which to build an app?

From InfoWorld:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobile-technology/rim-blackberry-playbook-unfinished-unusable-534

Not only can it not compete with an Apple iPad, it can’t compete with the second-best tablet, Motorola Xoom, nor even with marginal Android tablets such as the Galaxy Tab that use the smartphone version of the Android OS rather than the Honeycomb tablet version. In fact, if my choice were between a PlayBook and a Windows 7 tablet — my benchmark for unusability — I think I’d rather go sans tablet.

The fundamental nature of the PlayBook’s flaws begin with the requirement that a BlackBerry be tethered to it for access to business email, calendars, or contacts. Other than using a Webmail client, a PlayBook without a BlackBerry is unable to communicate. You can’t connect to POP, IMAP, or Exchange servers directly from the tablet, as you can from an iOS or Android device — you must have a BlackBerry tethered via Bluetooth using the BlackBerry Bridge application. In that case, you essentially see your BlackBerry email, calendar, and contacts in a window on the PlayBook when connected.

And the other competitor:

Tablet deathmatch: HP TouchPad vs. Apple iPad 2

http://bit.ly/kJWzeS

Plainly put, the TouchPad is a mediocre tablet that poses no threat to the iPad or to Android tablets such as the Galaxy Tab 10.1 or Xoom. Even though the iPad 2’s high bar is no secret, it once again appears that corner-cutting or rush to market has been allowed to tie a potentially strong tablet’s arm behind its back.

[ InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman says “Whatever you do, don’t buy a Chromebook.” | See all of InfoWorld’s tablet deathmatch comparisons and personalize the tablet scores to your needs.

David Pogue from the NYTimes:

It’s the H.P. TouchPad ($500 for the 16-gig model, $600 for 32 gigs): a black rectangle with a glossy 9.7-inch multitouch screen. You can zoom into maps, photos or Web pages by putting two fingers on the glass and spreading or pinching them. The screen image rotates when you turn the tablet 90 degrees.

It runs the WebOS from Palm, which means there are far fewer apps. It is not an Android device.

 

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Building independent internet networks

This is a follow-up post to an earlier topic PDG wrote about after the Egyptian crackdown and censorship of the internet.

Dubbed the “Internet in a suitcase” project, a team at the New America Foundation’s “Open Technology Initiative” is creating hardware and software which create separate pathways for communications, whether cell transmissions or wireless data.

The lead expert, psychologist Sascha Meinrath (see his blog), writes:

“We’re going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil…. The implication is that this disempowers central authorities from infringing on people’s fundamental human right to communicate.”

The NYTimes in an article this week described their work as:

The group’s suitcase project will rely on a version of “mesh network” technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub. In other words, a voice, picture or e-mail message could hop directly between the modified wireless devices — each one acting as a mini cell “tower” and phone — and bypass the official network.

Mr. Meinrath said that the suitcase would include small wireless antennas, which could increase the area of coverage; a laptop to administer the system; thumb drives and CDs to spread the software to more devices and encrypt the communications; and other components like Ethernet cables.

Hats off to these programmers and engineers, and also to the Obama administration’s other initiatives.

Read an earlier post on internet censorship here at PDG.

Sascha’s bio from New America Foundation reads:

Sascha Meinrath is the Director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative and has been described as a “community Internet pioneer” and an “entrepreneurial visionary.” He is a well-known expert on community wireless networks, municipal broadband, and telecommunications policy. In 2009 he was named one of Ars Technica’s Tech Policy “People to Watch” and is also the 2009 recipient of the Public Knowledge IP3 Award for excellence in public interest advocacy.

Sascha is a co-founder of Measurement Lab, a distributed server platform for researchers around the world to deploy Internet measurement tools, advance network research, and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections.

He also coordinates the Open Source Wireless Coalition, a global partnership of open source wireless integrators, researchers, implementors and companies dedicated to the development of open source, interoperable, low-cost wireless technologies. He is a regular contributor to Government Technology’s Digital Communities, the online portal and comprehensive information resource for the public sector.

Sascha has worked with Free Press, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), the Acorn Active Media Foundation, the Ethos Group, and the CUWiN Foundation.

 

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Apple iPad Subscriptions — Evil?

Insight into the world of iOS developers

CNET ran a story yesterday about BeamItDown Software, the start-up software developer who made the iFlow Reader app for iOS. They condemn Apple for a draconian policy.

And a full interview at CNET of BeamItDown’s co-founder Dennis Morin.

Nowhere in the history of application development has there been rules associated with it, let alone hundreds of rules like there are now. I mean, this extends their [Apple’s] control-freak nature to a whole new level. So yeah I can sell an app on my Web site, that’s fine. But if I have something for sale on my Web site, I have to have a button in the app that allows a user to purchase that item through Apple’s In-App Purchase system for the same price that I sell it at on my Web site.

Now if I’m selling a book for $10 and someone clicks on that button in the app, I lose $1.15 on the sale and Apple makes $3. Let’s face it, the user doesn’t give a s—. They’re going to purchase it from wherever’s easiest to purchase it.

The bottom line is that if you buy a book through iBooks, Apple makes 30 percent on the sale. And if you buy a book through iFlow, Apple makes 30 percent on the sale. And I lose money.

To clarify the outrage these developers feel:

What people don’t understand is that if you’re selling an app on iOS, Apple hosts that app on their server. You upload it, the customer downloads it, it gets downloaded from their servers. OK. With In-App Purchase it doesn’t work that way. You host everything. You ship it directly to the customer. All Apple does in the process is collect the money and basically give you a token that says it was collected and you do everything else. It’s essentially doing exactly the same thing as a credit-card processing company for this 30 percent. Nothing more.

Another article: http://bit.ly/ixbNAv

 

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Amazon’s Cloud service failure

A client of ours wants to host their video subscription site on Amazon’s cloud services.  Last week they had an outage. Egads, this was not to supposed to happen.  A point of view by Scott Gilbertson:

Amazon Autopsy Reveals Causes of Cloud Death

Amazon is also promising to improve its communication with customers when things go wrong, but as we pointed out earlier, the real problem is not necessarily Amazon. While Amazon’s services unquestionably failed, those sites that had a true distributed system in place (e.g. Netflix, SmugMug, SimpleGeo) were not affected.

In the end it depends how you were using EC2. If you were simply using it as a scalable web hosting service, your site went down. If you were using EC2 as a platform to build your own cloud architecture, then your services did not go down. The later is a very complex thing to do, and it’s telling that the sites that survived unaffected were all large companies with entire engineering teams dedicated to creating reliable EC2-based systems.

That may be the real lesson of Amazon’s failure — EC2 is no substitute for quality engineers.

Amazon has offered its promised apology. It’s published its post-mortem on the recent outage of its AWS EC2 (Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud) and RDS (Relational Database Service). It says what went wrong and how it’s planning to avoid such problems in the future.

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Techie debate over cloudhosting services

Rackspace vs Amazon Web Services

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2448812

Understanding why cloud services (software as a service, saas) removed infrastructure as a competitive advantage:

http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2011/03/11/how-important-is-software/

And what does Cloud services even mean?!

Read the article at readwriteweb.com

And how Facebook has released an open computing initiative, removing infrastructure (hardware, software) as a competitive advantage for competitors.

Even email can outsourced to a cloud provider. Enter: Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) (but beta), and a former Twitter techie’s  Message Bus API.

Read the article at Twitter and Webshots Veterans Launch New E-Mail API