Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

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Let’s Meet In The Middle

by Lenny Laurier
January 27, 2010
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Now Apple has always been a follower, never being the first to market with a new product. Instead they study the market and figure out what it is we want, instead of telling us what we need. Since the advent of computing, MP3 players, and the like, Apple’s foundation is built on doing things differently. I’ve always found it fascinating that even though they follow the market, they have a remarkable way of pulling 180° and manifesting themselves into a leader of the market. We’ve seen this with the iPod. We’ve seen this with the iPhone. Now, we’ll see it again with the iPad.

If you haven’t already heard (which I’m sure you have unless you live in a bubble) that Apple has introduced a new way to absorb media. You got your iPhone to communicate, your MacBook for work, and soon you’ll have your iPad in the middle. Now, a lot of you may feel that there is no use for the iPad, or maybe it doesn’t do enough to warrant its purchase. So I’m going to break it down and give you reasons why the iPad is here, and why it’s going to stay.

It’s not about the hardware, it’s about the content.

With the iPad you’ve got instant access to everything media. You want to listen to a song? Boo yah, fire up iTunes. Have some down time? Go ahead, choose from a plethora of games. Life is too busy and you can’t find time to sit down and watch your favourite TV show? Just download it to your iPad, and enjoy it on your train commute to work. Want to catch up on the daily news, or snuggle up with a great book? Don’t worry the iPad has you covered by offering you a library of books, newspapers, and internet browsing at your fingertips. I can keep going, but I think you get the point. So you’re asking yourself, “What’s the difference, I can already do that with my smartphone?” That may be true, but wouldn’t it all be better on a 9.7 inch screen? Yeah… I thought as much.

Forget waiting, let’s get down to business.

We spend 45 to 65 minutes a day just waiting. I mean just standing around waiting for a person; waiting to get to a place; or just waiting for a thing to arrive. This precious time spent waiting could be use to get something done instead of twiddling our thumbs. Carrying a laptop around to get in some work during these periods would be great, but its form factor doesn’t lend itself well in these ‘waiting’ circumstances. Instead we are waiting to get home, just to realize that if we weren’t waiting, we could be home relaxing, instead of catching up on some work. I say good riddance to waiting. Convenience trumps awkwardness, and carrying a laptop everywhere I go just isn’t in my taro cards. Here comes iPad to the rescue. Got 5 minutes to kill, respond to some emails. Got about 10 minutes, run through your powerpoint deck before you give that presentation. Hey, while you’re at it, you got time to manage your schedule and prioritize your day. We’re talking about precious minute’s people, not a game, not a game… and the iPad is here to give you some of those minutes back.

Reconnect with your publisher.

The iPad will offer a new way to consume newspapers, books, and magazines. We are used to surfing media websites immersed with not only text, but video and other interactive elements which have made the web a value-added medium for the publishing industry. The problem is the industry needs subscriptions to survive. The web became the source of free content, but this ad supported revenue model wasn’t strong enough to provide sustenance. Why pay for physical pages when you can get the same content for free, right? What is the value add of the paper publishing? I hate to say it again, but iPad to the rescue, offering more than what any paper or computer based medium can offer. The great articles and breathtaking photography are now married together with interactive content allowing not only absorption but full engagement of content. Paper can’t provide you that experience, and the computer doesn’t provide the same intimacy since you’re forced to interface with a keyboard and mouse. The iPad offers a better experience all in the palm of your hands. And on top of all this, now you can do all this without sitting hunched over a laptop. The iPad is just more conformable. Period.

So, in conclusion…

All and all, the iPad is not the most revolutionary device. It’s kinda of like an iPhone, only larger. This device is not only larger in size though, it’s also larger in user experience. It meets your smartphone and your laptop in the middle, offering itself as a source of organization and entertainment. Microsoft partnerships brought the tablet computer to the market first, but they treated the tablet as a modified laptop instead of it’s own separate entity. Apple has followed its predecessors providing a product that already exists, but managed once again to manifest themselves as a leader by showing others the way to success. So I say, the Apple iPad is here to stay and is here to show us a new way of absorbing media. We may have known that we wanted a better experience, we just didn’t know how. And now, I think we’ve found a middle ground.

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E-Ink is Dead. Long Live E-Ink!

by Yaw Otchere
January 21, 2010
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E-Ink, the hot new technology that’s in all of today’s latest e-readers is actually more than 10 years old. The E-Ink Corporation started manufacturing the stuff in 1997 based on work from MIT’s media lab. In the time since, we’ve seen it go into a number of e-reader devices from Sony, Amazon, and lately a slew of other manufacturers.

Just as e-ink is making its way into the mainstream consciousness, a new technology threatens to smash it into oblivion before it ever really catches on. For all its advantages, e-ink screen are far from perfect, and anything e-ink can do, this new technology can do better; and then some.

Before we get into what’s coming, let’s take a look at e-ink in detail.

E-Ink’s Strengths

E-Ink’s two greatest strengths are its low-power consumption, and the fact that e-ink screens are easy on the eyes. In a world where devices with vivid screens last a day if you’re lucky, and strain your eyes if you look at them too long, e-ink can be a godsend in the right application. This is why e-readers are such a popular application of e-ink technology. People read books for weeks, not days, and if they had to charge their e-reader as often as their phone, they would never get off the shelf. A reading session can last for hours, and looking at LCD screens for that long has always been considered bad for the eyes. Because of this, e-ink scores two big wins.

E-Ink’s Weaknesses

E-Ink is nice, but not for everything. Looking at anything but a static page on e-ink is a good way to get a headache. E-Ink manages to achieve its low power using a technology that takes a half-second or so to refresh. This causes a problem when displaying video and web pages since they are out the gates in fractions of a second. And what about colour? Most e-ink screens are grayscale only, meaning that anything other than pages of text look worse on e-ink than on any other screen. This is the big reason why e-ink, despite it advantages, has only really been used in e-readers. Any other kind of media just wouldn’t work on this technology.

The New King on the Block

So what’s a print media enthusiast to do? On the one hand, e-ink allows easy reading and low-power consumption, but on the other anything but text looks awful. If only there was a technology that combined low power, lower eye-strain, and still allowed you to view full colour, full motion media. If only…

It turns out there is such a technology: Pixel Qi. Pixel Qi is a new dual mode screen technology from Mary Lou Jespen, the genius designer behind the screen on the OLPC laptop. Pixel Qi combines a regular full power LCD with a low-power, full colour “transflective” mode that has the strengths of E-Ink, but in glorious full-colour with full motion.

What does this mean? It means tablet computers created with Pixel Qi can go into low power e-reader mode and still allow a wider range of media viewing, and also go into regular LCD mode when you just wanna watch a video the way we do nowadays.

Pixel-Qi is the future of multimedia tablets, combining e-ink’s strengths, with new media powers. E-Ink is the current king of print media tablets. The King is Dead. Long Live the King!

Category technology Tags ,

Amazon, You’ve Kindled My Interest

by Yaw Otchere
January 6, 2010
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Amazon Kindle (2010-01-06)

Despite my best efforts to stay away from the dedicated e-reader market, Amazon has piqued my interest with the international edition of the Kindle 2. Back when it was a US exclusive, I could turn up my nose and say “I wasn’t interested anyways”. But now that it’s just a few mouse clicks (and a few hundred dollars) away, now I have to come to terms with the fact that I may actually want one. I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that the Kindle is undeniably interesting, the problem is that for everything it does well, there are a few fatal flaws that are keeping my credit card firmly in my pocket for now.

The Good

Amazon does some things exceptionally well with the Kindle that make it a very enticing prospect for a fence-sitter like me. Building on these strengths makes a lot of sense to continue to grow their market.

Design

Amazon nailed the industrial design of the Kindle 2. Thin and sleek, light and easy to hold. These are key issues for an e-reader as they are currently targeted at replacing the reading experience of books which tend to have many, if not all of the above characteristics.

Easy to use

By using e-ink technology in the Kindle, Amazon makes e-reading easy on the eyes. This is a key issue in the age of constant eye-strain caused by LCD screens. They also make buying e-books drop-dead simple by having the Amazon store available wirelessly at all times.

Books are cheap

By making many e-books (including most bestsellers) available for much less than the physical books, Amazon creates a great value proposition for buying the kindle. The kinds of people who would buy a kindle are likely heavy readers ($400 price tag for 1 book a year? Please!). Over time, assuming they keep the kindle for long enough, buyers can save more than the cost of the kindle in book savings alone.

The Bad

Everything doesn’t come up roses though; there are a few key problems that make the Kindle not quite ready for prime-time in my eyes.

Lock-In

Amazon is the only company that makes books for the Kindle, and books bought for the Kindle don’t work on any other devices. Sure, Apple pulled this off with iTunes for years, but in the end even they agreed that that was the wrong business model. For media like books, music, and movies, being able to use them independent of a specific device is absolutely key. Other e-reader companies seem to agree with this point, and are making hardware that reads from a common, standard format.

Ownership

This particular issue is bigger than Amazon, bigger than e-books, and applies to electronic Media in general. As a rule, companies make the point that electronic media is licensed and not owned. In practice this means that I can’t (legally) lend or sell my e-books the way I can with my physical ones. Sure the individual books are cheaper, but if everyone in my family has to buy a copy to read them, where are the savings? I can share a book I buy from the store with anyone I want, and even sell it later. How will e-books make up for that lost right?

Conclusion

Overall the Amazon Kindle is probably the best e-reader currently on the market, and is a really compelling e-reading device, but being locked to Amazon for all eternity, and being restricted by confusing licenses and artificial restrictions means that for now I’ll stick with good ‘ol ink and dead trees.

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Tablet Computer, Where Art Thou?

by Lenny Laurier
December 18, 2009
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Magazines - Tablet Computing

Magazines companies are taking a preemptive strike at building an interactive magazine prototype for tablet computing. As you already know, the publishing industry smells trouble. As content continually migrates from the paper pages to the Internet, magazines and newspapers subscriptions are facing extinction. Profits are dwindling as people trade the paper medium for the free web version of the content. Why pay for it when you can get it for free, right? Although sometimes, I think we forget that nothing in this life is free. Someone always flips the bill. So if we don’t start paying for it, eventually people will stop producing it (unless your idea premium content is amateur shorts on YouTube).

Magazines and newspapers such as Sports Illustrated, WIRED, and the New York Times, are already banking on tablets coming in and saving the day. They believe that this mysterious hero will provide a new avenue to explore magazines in different and exciting ways. Sports Illustrated has already a working prototype of their interactive magazine. It allows you to customize your experience: organize content the way you would like; watch embedded video clips; browse through their photography section; and much more. Since actions speak louder than words, the video below would probably give you a better idea.

The New York Times has been playing with different way to absorb content. As you might already know, you can get a copy of the New York Times automatically download to your Amazon Kindle. Don’t have a Kindle? Well you can try out either the Times Skimmer, or the Times Reader. These two products allow you to consume the news in a different layout. Times Skimmer is web based and presents various articles in a table, making it easy to skim through the headlines that catch your attention. On the other hand, the Times Reader sits on your computer, and the new addition is instantly delivered to your computer… for a small subscription fee of course (those who already subscribe to the New York Times can get this service for free). WIRED also has a prototype which was previewed at the WIRED store.

Interactive magazines also have the potential of bringing in new advertising revenue stream, giving the advertiser space to add interactive content to their advertisements. The addition of interactive elements allows magazines to demand more money for this type of engagement with the consumer. Also, the ability to download new issues to your tablet (instead of waiting for it in the mail), and the increased content interaction, may be enough to get consumers to purchase a subscription.

Personally, I can’t wait for the tablet computer market to boom. I want one, and I want it now! I love reading magazines, and reading one on a tablet computer would be even better. A great combination of high quality imagery, carefully selected typography, and superbly written articles always makes it a joyous experience, and brings the story to life page by page.

Category design, technology Tags ,

The Zack Morris Phone

by Lenny Laurier
November 24, 2009
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Motorola DynaTAC 8000x

New cellphones appear practically every month, and have evolve drastically over the decades. These devices promote an array of features that was once thought only to exist in sci-fi movies. As we journey into a future, innovation in this market has shown us that nothing impossible; but sometimes we need to know where we’ve been in order to see where we’re heading. So let’s take this chance to take a look at the cellphone that started it all.

Dr. Martin Cooper
Dr. Martin Coooper

Motorola was the first to engineer the cell phone. Motorola’s General Manager at the time, Dr. Martin Cooper, invented the cellphone and made the first mobile phone call on the street of New York in April 1973. Unlike today, a guy talking on a portable phone had people astonished as they stared at Dr. Cooper roaming the streets talking into this mysterious unit (kind of like when Bluetooth headset were first introduced and people look like crazy people talking to themselves). This guy must have had a great sense of humour since he made the first phone call to his rival Dr. Joel S. Engel, Head of Research at AT&T Bell Laboratories, who was trying to create the exact same thing.

Motorola release the first commercial cellphone, the Motorola DynaTac 8000x, in 1983. At a grand price tag of $3,995 US, the DynaTAC weighed 2.5 pounds and was 10 inches tall (sans antenna). You might have seen this phone on the 1990s sitcom Saved By The Bell. Zack Morris, the main character on the show, had the Motorola phone on the show now dubbed the ‘Zack Morris Phone’.

So there you have it, a little walk down memory lane. To closes off this session, here’s a video below of Mark-Paul Gosselaar, aka Zack Morris, on the Jimmy Fallon Show…

…and for kicks I thought I would throw in this cool video on the evolution of the cellphone:

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