Japan is really proud of it’s industrial heritage and engineering skills. It’s on display everywhere.
You can’t go through any town without seeing a warren of bridges and canals and elevated highways:
Construction sites also have to happen on a massive scale and surround themselves with a bit of mystique:
There are even ads for robotics and machine tooling companies:
But nowhere is it more obvious of how big their engineering culture is than when you ride the Shinkanzen bullet train. We took it between Kyoto and Tokyo, where the N700 rips along at over a kilometer every fifteen seconds.
At that speed you only have a few seconds to take anything in; many things pass by too fast for your eyes to focus on or for your visual cortex to comprehend. You literally can watch clouds change perspective as you whiz by.
But don’t take my word for it; here’s a video of our trip. I particularly like how the rice paddies come in and out of perspective:
As you whip through the Japanese countryside, you also see strange industrial installations. There’s a Fujitsu elevator factor in the middle of nowhere; it has a giant, many hundred foot tower that is presumably for testing the elevators before they ship. You fly by the huge Sanyo Sun Ark, an interestingly shaped solar lab.
Japan’s countryside is also about man triumphing over nature. Power lines come down from the lush, cloud-swept mountains and gingerly step their way across terraced rice paddies.
A great journey and a fitting representation of the country.
When I was a management consultant we would read briefs written from other teams around the world. The Japanese teams were always raving about both the convenience stores and vending machines in Japan as world leaders in retailing.
Given that your average bodega in North America contains questionable food of uncertain age and most vending machines are variations on Coca Cola, I’ve always been a bit skeptical. However, being here has made me a convert.
Kings of Convenience
Your typical Japanese city is dotted with 7-Elevens (do not confuse it with the North American version), Family Marts and Lawson Stations (in Tokyo you also get the more upscale “Natural” Lawson).
In addition to drinks, snacks, etc., these stores sell a lot of fresh food. The triangles below are seaweed-wrapped rice with a vegetable/meat/fish core. Needless to say, you have to turn over your inventory pretty quickly to stock that:
Same for the fresh croissants, noodles, fried chicken, etc. that can be found in most of these stores.
There are also ingenious heated racks for serving you hot beverages:
I highly recommend the Boss coffee in a can.
However, the kicker for me was that you can buy Muji in Family Mart stores:
New Yorkers and Londoners are crazy for Muji and it routinely sells there for outrageous prices across a very limited line of goods. In a convenience store – a convenience store! – in Tokyo you can buy more of their products than you can in NYC. Those are shirts in the lower left; underwear above them. Stationery in the middle. On the right are snacks (delicious cheese pretzels; yogurt-covered cherries) with noodles and sauces below them.
NYC and LDN: eat your heart out.
Cointastic
Because Japan’s so safe, they have vending machines for everything. There are your traditional drinks (and yes, that is Tommy Lee Jones for Suntory; Lost in Translation was not a joke):
There are also cigarettes:
And my personal favourite, booze:
The fact that a beer/liquor vending machine does not:
a) Get broken into all the time
b) Lead to drunken youths lounging in the streets
tells you something about the national psyche here.
One other cool thing about some of the vending machines here is that you can pay with your cellphone. (Yet another potential line of business overlooked by North American cellphone companies).
The vending machines here are also not limited to chilled drink cans. This one will make you a hot coffee or a milk shake:
Here’s a shot of showing just how many different drinks you get in each of these vending machines. Compare that to your typical 8 flavours (two of which are usually the most popular one) back home:
It has been a fascinating few weeks in the device-side of the mobile internet. A ton of major events have happened. It worth looking at them all to try and figure out the patterns and understand what’s going on.
Item 1: Blackberry unveils preview of OS 6
Blackberry released a video showing what their new OS 6 is going to look like. It’s worth worth watching, because it’s a bet-the-company move.
Why is this a bet the company move? Take a look at there charts from recent Mary Meeker state of the internet reports.
This first one is from 04/09 and shows the share of handset shipments vs. usage for different manufacturers. One way to read this is that if your usage is higher than your shipment share then people love using your phones. And if people love using your phones, you’re probably going to keep growing.
So how does RIM do? Not well. Lots of shipments, but very low relative usage:
Here’s an updated version from the end of 2009. RIM’s slipping on usage – Android has jumped ahead of them – but they’re holding firm on shipments.
The scary thing for RIM right now is that they have to get people to use the mobile web on their phones. That’s why the video above shows Facebook, Twitter and a bunch of other web properties on the new OS 6. If RIM can’t get people to use the web on their phones, no developers are going to build for their platform and then it’s a vicious cycle to the bottom.
Worse, RIM will still look financially good as they’ve got a massive salesforce and are still the leaders in integrating with corporate email systems. They’ve also got great relationships with the carriers so they’ll be able to use price to ship a lot of units. They’ll even throw off a lot of cash in the meantime but it will be like watching GM’s arc from 1960-2010. I’ll keep watching the graph above: if it doesn’t shift, they are doomed.
The battle for smart phones used to be about who was the best at selling high-priced devices to corporations (the only ones who could afford them). RIM won by having a great keyboard and Exchange email integration. But Apple redefined the space and made it a consumer game – which will be won by whoever has the most intersting apps on their platform.
Which brings us to…
Item 2: Some Guy Named Steve’s Thoughts on Flash
This morning Steve Jobs wrote a post where he explained why Apple will not support Flash on the iPlatform. It’s a beautiful piece because it is the intersection of deep technical knowledge and keen insights on business strategy. Even if you know nothing about Flash or technology, you can appreciate the letter.
The implications are striking. Flash is dead as a technology for anything other than lazily creating websites for small businesses. The market seems to understand this:
So what are the implications for software developers?
First, if you’re on Flash, migrate away from it as fast as you can. Similarly, migrate away from any software tool that uses anything other than web standards to enable you to code across platforms (and even then be wary).
Second, focus on making your data clean and creating an API. If you don’t have the resources to develop across multiple platforms (after all, you were using Flash for that), you need to convince someone to do it for you. Give them access to your data and let them go to town.
Adobe got whacked by the Apple stick today as Apple reaffirmed their focus on their platform. But Apple doesn’t just take away, Steve giveth too…
Item 3: The Crazy Pricing of Apple’s iAds
The Business Insider is claiming, courtesy of the WSJ, that Apple is looking to price its iAds at 10X the traditional price of ads. They’re going to charge $0.01/impression and $2.00 per click (!). They keep 40%; the developer of the software program keeps the rest.
Why is Apple charging so much for this? Well first, they’re the only game in town (see Item 2) so they can. More importantly though, 60% x $2.00 = $1.20. That’s a huge amount of money for a developer – particularly given that the average price of an iPhone app is $2.40.
You can bet that many more developers are going to be clamoring to put these ads in their applications. Which means that more people will be trying to develop for the iPhone. Which means that more people will buy and use the iPhone as it has the coolest, best apps. Go take a look at item #1 again and you can see why it’s RIM’s bet-the-company moment.
There’s no way Apple will sustain this pricing over the long haul, but it might be enough to kick RIM or Symbian out of the game. Especially since Palm’s now gone…
Item 4: What the Hell is HP Doing?
The last major event of the past few weeks (at least, at the time of writing this) is HP buying Palm. HP’s got a long history in the mobile space (remember the iPaq or the Jornada?) and now they’re “doubling down on the Web OS [Palm's operating system].”
Many people assume that they’re doing this to re-enter the hot mobile space, etc. but I’ll bet $5 it’s for the following:
1) HP has been at risk of getting ’stuck’ as a computer manufacturer. They make middle-of-the-road devices and the market is fragmenting to the high- and the low-end. By buying the WebOS they can build some cheaper and/or differentiated devices like netbooks, tablets, etc. without having to pay about $40/unit to Microsoft for a copy of Windows. (They already make high-end [and high margin] devices like the Blackbird and VoodooPC)
This is augmented by the fact that software is shifting to the Web: you use your browser, Facebook and Twitter – and you don’t care if the underlying platform is Windows or WebOS.
2) You’re going to see a whole lot of WebOS systems in the government and enterprise. Remember that HP has a massive consulting organization. The Web means that this group increasingly spends its time moving bits around its clients’ organizations; that’s where the money is. Now they can offer linux-based devices on the server side and WebOS-based devices on the client side, meaning that an HP offering just got cheaper than the competition.
Don’t be surprised if 5 years from now you go to your doctor’s office or local fire department and everyone’s using an iPaq Palm device.
3) What you won’t see is a great phone. Palm hasn’t shown themselves good at picking carrier partners (witness the long exclusivity to Spring) and HP doesn’t sell phones, so don’t expect them to do a good job either. Also, Palm’s never going to beat Apple or Android on the software side; they lack the scale and focus to do so.
There are going to be a lot of devices that use the WebOS but the developers are going to be working on commercial apps for industry (think medical records) or HP will be paying the Facebooks, Twitters, etc. of the world to create versions of their apps on the WebOS platform.
As the Chinese say, may you live in interesting times…
It’s always refreshing to see someone take their own advice (aka eating their own dog food).
Last week Facebook announced their Open Graph initiative. It’s their hugely ambitious attempt to take over the web. In a nutshell, the idea is that you Facebook will be used to log you on to all websites and all your preferences (which bands you like/hate, etc.) will reside with them and in return they’ll personalize everything for you (both content of sites and ads).
It’s a great idea as long as you trust Facebook with every private aspect of your life. And you don’t mind if they share it with their development partners. And you trust them to delete your info if you like something you shouldn’t have. And you don’t want to use any competing service that might be improved based on your preferences (you can bet Facebook won’t share your data with them). In short, it’s a closed universe and those work really well right up until they don’t – usually when you try to do something someone in the corporate Politburo didn’t want you to.
So, what to do? Well, a group of interesting folks have started OpenLike, an open source project to come up with a standard for ‘liking’ objects on the web (that’s the mechanism for capturing your preferences).
Are these folks doing it out of the goodness of their hearts? Probably in part, but more likely they’re focused on “commoditizing the complement“.
The notion is simple: you want to drive down the cost of anything that augments your product/service. Joel Spolsky wrote the definitive treatise on this. While the notion is simple, identifying a complement isn’t always obvious and that’s what makes OpenLike so interesting.
If you look at the folks behind the initiative, one of them is Chris Dixon, who wrote the blog post about complements referenced above. He runs Hunch, a site that gives you recommendations and gives you better results as you and others use it.
Hunch’s value lies in their algorithms: the more data they have about you – most notably your preferences about what you like/don’t like – the better their algorithms work. In other words, preference data is the complement to their algorithms, so they’ve got a massive interest in making it as cheap as possible for people to give them their preferences.
Facebook is threatening to make it infinitely expensive (they’ll almost certainly never give Hunch that data), so they’ve got a fire under their butt to consider doing something else. They could try buying the preference info from users, but that’s typically not a good way to run your business (ask Microsoft who is offering cash back on search and losing a fortune).
They’re focused on building a killer product that will offer enough “value” (I put it in quotes as it’s such an elusive term) to users for them to want to give them their preferences. But that’s not enough when you’re going up against the web-wide distribution of an industry leader with over 400 million users.
Hence OpenLike. If they can provide an alternative to Facebook’s platform they provide a way for themselves to thrive. Publishers are happy as their content can get shared to more places on the web. Hunch is happy as they can get more preferences. And open web advocates are happy as the user is back in control of their preferences rather than one private company. Plus it’s always nice to see people like Chris walking their talk.
On another note, this will also be a small win for Google, who will now have a search entry for the exact phrase “commoditizing dog food”:
When the Internet arrived in force in the ’90s, one of the promises was a new era of telecommuting. You could live in the middle of nowhere but be part of the high tech workforce in a major city. However, this hasn’t played out and, in fact, the opposite appears to be happening: cities matter more than ever.
This little chart from a recent Brookings Institute presentation (note: PDF) sums it up more beautifully than anything I could say:
If you’re in the tech world, you are agog at the changes Facebook announced yesterday. If you’re not a techie, you probably have absolutely no idea why your geeky friends are so stunned. So let’s walk through an example of what Facebook did so that you can see what’s going on.
First, if you go to Yelp today and are not signed in to Facebook, here’s what you’d see:
Nothing special; just a typical homepage, set to New York, NY in my case.
However, now go to Facebook and login. Now go back to Yelp and take a look at what you see:
Whoa tiger, what just happened? First, a bar at the top of the page tells you that it’s being personalized based on Facebook. You can opt out o whatever’s going on, but it’s not really clear yet what’s happening.
Secondly, the activity is updated to show what your Facebook friends on Yelp have recently done (I’ve put a red box around this).
A couple of things you should realize here:
The moment you loaded Yelp.com, they went to Facebook and pulled down your data. You never got a chance to say “no”
They’ve almost certainly pulled down more than your name. They can get a lot of info about you: your birthday, email address, etc. All of that may have been pulled from Facebook the moment you loaded the page. You don’t know this and you never had a chance to say “no”
Only after the page loads – and all your data has potentially been pulled down – can you opt out. And at that point you have no idea if they’ve actually deleted your info. You just have to trust ‘em
So, what does Yelp do with all your Facebook info? Well, they “personalize” the site for you. If you go to a restaurant that your friends have reviewed, here’s what you see:
In this case, I’ve been told that a Facebook friend of mine has reviewed this place and their review appears first. All that cost me what my email address, full name and date of birth.
BTW, this completely blows anonymity out of the water. Yelp shows me my friend’s Facebook photo and puts it next to their Yelp username. If any of your friends were trying to maintain different identities they just lost it. This is potentially harmless on a restaurant review site, but can you imagine this on a political blog?
This should really, really scare you. Facebook has just opened up all of your private data to 3rd parties. You can’t opt out of doing this at all. If you’re logged in to Facebook, the moment you visit a site that’s part of their “Open Graph” project, you’ve passed your data on. And you have to trust the site to delete your info if you ask them to.
Here’s the nightmare scenario. Somebody creates a website that offers Free iPads (or insert your tchotchke of choice) in return for signing up for marketing offers or signing up for daily health tips or something else. They put an ad on Facebook to generate traffic (and ensure that you’re signed in to Facebook when you click the ad). They take part in the Facebook Open Graph so the moment you visit they’ve downloaded all your data. Six months later the site goes down and it turns out that instead it was actually run by the Russian mob and they’re using guessing social security numbers. This is identity theft paradise.
So, what can you do? Logout out ever time you leave Facebook. Never click on a Facebook ad. And finally, maybe leave Facebook. Head over to Twitter or go back to email. I’m seriously thinking about it.
Alright, I admit it, I don’t know if Justin Bieber has swine flu, but you could be forgiven thinking that if you typed “What are the symptoms of swine flu?” into Ask.com:
You’re seeing two things:
An over-reliance on algorithms. They’re showing other questions asked by people who also asked “What are the symptoms of swine flu?” The most popular co-occurring questions are shown – and Ask’s computers naively show them as they know nothing about what the questions mean
A glimpse into what people are looking for/how they use their computers. Usually these algorithms are based on what similar questions people asked in the same session – this means that these people were asking about both swine flu and young Bieber within a short time period of one another or never close their web browsers (so the session never ends)
Back in January, the New Yorker had a great article reviewing the state of the modern Arabic novel. It’s worth reading as, I’m guessing that, like me, you know absolutely nothing about Arabic novels – and there’s a lot to know (and a lot of it is very subtle).
If you want to skip the article, I created an Amazon Wishlist where you can see all the books. As I was building the wishlist, I noticed an interesting phenomena. These books are almost always bought together. Take a look at the screenshot below. All seven of those books are in the list:
I wonder if these were always bought together or if the New Yorker article caused them to be clustered together. Ah, the magic of Amazon and collaborative filtering…
Yesterday I was listening to a podcast that referenced Cajmere’sCoffee Pot - commonly referred to as “Percolator” or “It’s time for the percolator”. I was wondering how the original song went, so I figured I’d listen to in on YouTube.
All good, but check out that “featured video” in the upper right corner. I’m guessing that YouTube noticed that people who looked at this video looked at that video – and therefore I might want to as well. But rest assured, I have little desire to copulate with animals.
Recommendation algorithms are hard, and this one’s not working yet.
You may or may not know, but Google tests hundreds of different versions of their search service every day. They’ve turned their users into a giant set of unwitting testers who are constantly providing them feedback on how to improve their product. This unparalleled ability to conduct tests is one of the skills that makes them currently unsurpassed in search.
Yesterday I turned into one of those testers. While searching for a particular term at work, I came across this design:
Here’s what the same search looked like when performed in a different browser:
What can we glean from this? Well, a few things:
Google’s test index (the number of documents is queries against) may be much bigger than it’s current index. The test page returned 5.2M documents vs. 1.3M for the normal version
Location is going to become more important in your search (no surprise in an increasingly mobile world). Note that in the test version, I can change my location from NYC. This is important, as if I search for “Zanzibar”, I get returned the bar in Hell’s Kitchen as the first result, not the beautiful island off the coast of Africa
Finally, Google thinks that they type of content you’re looking for is as important as what you’re looking for. If you were to click “More” under “Everything” in the test version, a list showing Images, Videos, etc. would have opened up (this normally appears at the top of the page). Just like my employer or Best Buy, Google’s trying to make it easier for you to find info using faceted search.
Why type “Zanzibar photos” when you could type “Zanzibar” and then click “images”. While that takes two steps, it allows you to easily flip between different types of info about Zanzibar, rather than having to re-type your query.
This is an interesting way for them to start to integrate all their different search properties together (Google, images, YouTube, scholar, books, etc.), and I hope it makes it into the real world.
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Nothing special; just a typical homepage, set to New York, NY in my case.
Here’s what the same search looked like when performed in a different browser:
What can we glean from this? Well, a few things:
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