EcoGoons? Come down from the trees!
Thu, Feb 19, 09
In various mostly-European projects, we’ve been noticing that trees are coming under assault from presumably well meaning tree-hugging architects. Four of the more visible cases in recent months:
The cocoon is supported by steel suspension cables that are attached to the tree’s stronger branches above. With the tree trunk running through the center of the cocoon, the trunk naturally acts as a hand rail and central divider between the home’s triangular shaped spaces. The polygonal-shaped panels of the EcoCoon make the structure easily assembled on site. Each made of pre-insulated materials with high thermal resistance, the panels are designed to make the interior more comfortable without using a ton of resources.
Much like other retreats, the EcoCoons allow its inhabitants to re-connect to nature. On each level of the shelters, one panel is hinged so it can open up into a terrace while smaller, fixed windows give residents a chance to peek out into the surrounding nature.
Nestled amidst lush pine and magnolia trees, this treehouse from Baumraum updates a traditional backwoods form with a sharp modern profile. The quadratic cube is supported by two high-quality steel frames and features a terrace and an outdoor shower. The interior is outfitted with a full set of modern features including a stereo system, heating, and large windows that contribute ample amounts of natural light, making it a perfect place to enjoy the outdoors no matter the season.
As a nod to childhood treehouses and those good old days of youthful splendor, Dustin Feider obsessed himself with developing the perfect eco-friendly version of the tree sanctuary. After much trial and error, the 23-year old freelance furniture designer came up with a unique and green take on the conventional kiddie sanctuary which he dubbed the O2 Sustainability Treehouse. Inspired by the construction of Buckminster Fuller’s infamous geodesic dome, Feider discovered that by following Bucky’s lead, he could use less material and construct a more stable structure than that of the ‘traditional’ treehouse – most importantly, without at all harming the tree.
Mitchell Joachim insists that his plans are not futuristic. As the Executive Director for Terreform, a “philanthropic design collective,” he is responsible for progressive solutions for current problems. Save for the overt reliance on CGI imagery, the plans he presented at Postopolis! seem robustly conditional on collective goodwill, but still grounded on hard statistics and grounded feasibilities.
Is there a good reason for all this? Judge for yourselves, in this video where Joachim explains the imperative for hugging trees so closely.
Information vs. Judgment: A VC’s dilemma
Wed, Feb 18, 09
Yesterday in Does “A VC” have a blind spot for Apple? we outlined how Union Square Ventures VC Fred Wilson was drinking the Adobe Kool-Aid on why Apple hasn’t seen fit to allow Flash on the iPhone. His piece got dozens of comments, many of them quite negative as Wilson himself noted in comments he left here.
I’m glad to see that Wilson had his own “So I screwed up” moment and says he learned a lot from the commentary and moved on. That is as it should be.
Wilson’s “People”
I am, however, bothered by the way he concluded his follow-up piece, From Blog To Forum, with this:
All of this is fantastic for many reasons but there is one that stands out as the most valuable to me. It makes me a better investor. Kontra said this in his comment on the Apple/Flash thing:
Hopefully, you have people advising you on platform choices on a strategic level, going beyond press releases.
I do have people advising me. It’s you. And thank you for doing such a damn good job of it.
The part that bothers me (that I emphasized) is his consideration of his commentators. Though we live in the same city, I never met Wilson and don’t know him personally so I have no basis to judge whether he’s being condescending or not. And that personal stuff isn’t important to me, but the relationship between publishers/bloggers and their commentators as the bedrock of a new social order is.
Information is cheap and money for nothing
As the title of his site indicates Wilson is a venture capitalist; he invests in companies. The currency of his practice is the ability to make strategic decisions on the viability of ideas/companies he invests in. To do that he needs information.
Though he says he’s not a “technologist,” with an engineering degree from MIT and so many years in the business, it’s hard to ignore that he knew so little about the subject matter he himself chose to write about. Apparently at Union Square Ventures, partners’ blogs don’t get tech-checked by technology staff. Wilson says that’s not needed because I and his commentators are here to provide the necessary information and fact-check.
After all, aren’t we living in the Web 2.0 era with crowd-sourcing? Isn’t this supposed to be the antidote to closed-doors editorial practices of the mainstream media? Hasn’t User Generated Content mushroomed recently as a fertile ground for investment? Isn’t the crowd smarter than the blogger?
If Wilson knows the answers, he’s a better man than I. But what I do know is that I don’t “advise” Wilson. He doesn’t know why I chose to point out his errors or defended Apple. And I don’t know why Wilson promoted Adobe and Nokia at the expense of Apple. These could all be because we both have a monetary reason. For all we know, he might be getting ready to invest in Flash-based startups and I might be working at Apple.
Information vs. Judgment
What exchanged between us was information. But what a VC needs most of all is judgment. Information is cheap and bountiful. Good judgment is rare and expensive. I offered no information to Wilson that he couldn’t get himself by Googling for an hour before he wrote his piece. I offered no judgment to Wilson, because he hasn’t paid for it.
Who’s your daddy?
That brings us to the primary question here: in the age of information abundance and what seems like infinite commentator willingness, can we create businesses that harvest information and monetize it without compensating those who provide it? Further, is that sustainable? Would Wilson open up all of his investment decisions to his blog commentators before finalizing them? And if that were to happen, would he compensate those who contributed profitable information? Otherwise, is Wilson buying judgment, but getting his information for free from his commentators? And is that fair?
Does “A VC” have a blind spot for Apple?
Mon, Feb 16, 09
We don’t do formal take-downs of uninformed polemics here, but it’s a bank holiday today so we’ll take the case of “Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?” by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures:
Wilson: I think the news that Flash is coming to smartphones over the next year is a big deal.
“News”? According to various estimates and projections, Flash has already been on one billion cellphones (cumulative) and 40% of all new handsets shipped in 2008. I’ll leave it to Wilson to untangle all the versions of Flash/FlashLite and their respective limitations on any given mobile device. But it’s not for trying: Adobe has already struggled to make Flash a “standard” on mobile devices for several years now.
It’s the UI, stupid!
Wilson: Now almost every video site on the web uses a Flash video player. The same is true of audio.
The word “Flash” has become a Rorschach inkblot test. Mention the word and some may think it’s those annoying display ads. For others it’s audio/video delivery widgets all over the web. For a different demographic, it’s interactive casual games. For some e-commerce sites and enterprise intranets, it’s a drill-down data delivery platform.
Adobe has had a problem of defining and then decisively promoting Flash, FlashLite, Flex and AIR. Wilson is apparently bitten by this confusion. In userland reality, there is no Flash “player.” Sure, users have to download a web browser plugin, but once that’s done, the “playback” of audio/video media is, to Adobe’s credit, a fairly seamless part of a web page.
Codec != UI
So what’s so special about the Flash plugin then? Not much. In fact, as a simple audio/video delivery medium, nothing at all. It’s just H.264 video. Now what company is the principal promoter of H.264? According to none other than Adobe:
The broadest distribution of H.264 is via QuickTime from Apple, which is included in iTunes, iPods, iPhone, and the QuickTime Player on Mac and Windows. H.264 is also integrated into everything from mobile phones (Nokia, SonyEricsson) to HD-TV and Digital Radio. There is a wide range of interoperating products supporting this standard. Visit www.mpegif.org for updated news about H.264.
What did Adobe use for video prior to H.264?
Flash Player supports the Sorenson Spark video codec (based on H.263) and On2 VP6. H.263 is the predecessor of H.264 and was designed for teleconferencing applications, at 64k rates. H.264 delivers even higher quality at lower bitrates. H.264 will deliver the same or better quality when to compared to the same encoding profile in On2.
What Wilson perhaps likes about “Flash video” are the playback controls around the video and various UI widgets that display information about what’s being played elegantly. These, however, are design issues not necessarily technical advantages. Embedded H.264 playback can also be interacted with JavaScript UI controls and various sites, including Apple, have been doing it with QuickTime for many years.
It’s interesting to note that Adobe’s adoption of H.264 was greatly accelerated by Google’s arrangement with Apple to convert YouTube videos from various Flash codecs to H.264 for playback on the widely popular iPhone, and Microsoft’s impending “Flash-killer” Silverlight that featured HD quality video.
It’s the UI, stupid!
Wilson: It’s also true that a lot of the interesting new desktop apps like Twhirl and Tweetdeck are written for AIR, Flash’s runtime cousin for the desktop. I’d love to have apps like this on my smartphone too.
There’s nothing whatsoever about these apps that can’t be implemented on the iPhone without having to use Flash.
Flash is proprietary
Wilson: So it’s very exciting to me that Flash is making a big move over the next year onto smartphones. I’m also very excited to see Nokia and Adobe creating the Open Screen Project and Open Screen Fund to promote an open and consistent experience for web browsing and mobile apps across mobile devices. The mobile web needs to be just like the web for innovation to flourish and capital to flow.
I wonder if Wilson even reads the source material. Here’s what the press release says:
“The Open Screen Project Fund encourages the use of Adobe tools and existing developer skills to create exciting and unique Flash applications for millions of Nokia devices,” said Tero Ojanpera, EVP, Nokia Services.
Developers are invited to submit concepts for applications that are based on the Adobe Flash Platform, will run on Nokia devices… [emp]
Good luck with taking Nokia’s money to create “open” Flash apps that take unique advantage of, say, Palm Pre devices. After a decade, Adobe cannot even get the Flash player to run equally well on Mac OS X. So much for “openness.”
The open vision
Here comes Wilson’s most egregious misdirection:
Wilson: I believe Apple doesn’t share in Adobe and Nokia’s vision of an open and consistent experience for web browsing and mobile apps.
As we have covered previously in Runtime wars (2): Apple’s answer to Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX Apple’s answer to Adobe’s proprietary Flash is open HTML5. In fact, Apple has been by far the largest company dedicated to the promotion of open standards on the web. It’s contributions on HTML5 with <canvas>, CSS animation and various other interactive features duplicating many features of Flash have been exemplary. Its foundational work on WebKit is the reason why Nokia and Adobe themselves have adopted it as their mobile browser! It’s really preposterous for Wilson to mention Flash and “open” in the same breath.
Competition is Apple’s best friend
Wilson: It seems to me that Apple is interested in replicating its iTunes/iPod strategy it used to dominate digital music to dominate the mobile web.
What on earth might Wilson be referring to here? If “mobile web” refers to the iPhone accessing the web via Safari that would be WebKit, the same browser used by Adobe and Nokia and practically every other smartphone manufacturer other than Microsoft. If he’s referring to “native” apps accessing web services, we fail to see his point. All “native” apps running on a mobile device are by definition proprietary to that platform. Open source/native Android apps won’t run on iPhone, Nokia or Pre devices either. But all these apps, native or not, can and do access available web services. Flash-based propriatery apps that may run on multiple platforms bring no discernible advantage. After all, Java has already proved that the ability to run on multiple platforms alone doesn’t translate into user demand and popularity. Already “iPhone [is] making 51 percent of online ad requests among smartphones in the US, and 32 percent worldwide,” says AdMob.
The iPod-killer
Wilson: I don’t think the iTunes/iPod strategy has much life left in it. Things like Pandora, MySpace Music, music blogging, and other forms of streaming music will eventually chip away at that franchise.
Well, wake us up when that happens. Incidentally, while Pandora may work on 50+ devices, guess which platform is the most popular by far.
Wilson: …the mobile web is not going to be dominated by a single device and a single app ecosystem.
Frankly, Wilson hasn’t grokked the iPod/iTunes strategy. Apple didn’t win that war by eliminating all of its competitors, a la Microsoft. Apple, in fact, needs and exquisitely leverages competition so that the battlefield is sufficiently divided into the iPod and all the other iPod-killers. The trick is to equate a market segment with a product: people walk into stores to buy an “iPod” even when they mean to purchase a non-Apple product. The iPod has become a category definer, rendering its competitors irrelevant. The iPhone is in the process of doing the same, whether Wilson likes it or not. In Act II, there is the iPhone and all the other iPhone-killers. While the fat lady hasn’t sung yet to be sure, it’s Apple’s curtain to drop.
Mobile web is and is not just the web
Wilson: I don’t even think an app ecosystem is the long term solution for the mobile web. It’s a bridge enviroment that allows for rich experiences on devices that don’t have reliable high bandwidth connections yet.
There’s very little connective logic among “app ecosystem,” “rich experiences” and “high bandwidth.” Actually, the gating factor for iPhone-class mobile devices currently is battery life, not bandwidth. Sure AT&T 3G coverage is spotty but a lot of iPhone-class device users have access to WiFi and do use it in abundance, as long as their batteries last. But what an app ecosystem has to do with bandwidth per se is a mystery to us.
Wilson: But the mobile web will eventually just be the web.
Yes and no. Yes, because for the iPhone-class mobile devices running WebKit, it already is. No, because user experience on a mobile device will always be different from desktop devices with larger screens, more computing resources, infinite power source and larger storage, but with little use for location, movement or environment-centric sensors.
Rich media is not Flash
Wilson: And a big part of getting it there is to get the tools that allow us to seamlessly consume rich media on the web onto mobile devices. To me that means Flash.
Once again, iPhone users are already consuming rich media as seamlessly as any other, notwithstanding the lack of Flash. The iPhone is about to become the largest mobile platform for games, perhaps the “richest” media experience we know. “Rich media” is not the same as Flash, especially in regards to video which in its H.264 glory is available on the iPhone, albeit without the proprietary Flash wrapper.
Flash versus Open
Perhaps one thing we can all agree on is that the future of the web, mobile or otherwise, will be more or less open. That would be HTML, MP3, H.264, HE-AAC, and so on. These are not propriatery Adobe products, they are open standards…unlike Flash.
In confusing codecs with UI, Wilson keeps asking, “why is it tha[t] most streaming audio and video on the web comes through flash players and not html5 based players?” The answer is rather pedestrian: HTML5 is just ramping up, but Flash IDE has been around for many years. Selling Flash IDE and back-end server tools has been a commercial focus for Adobe, while Apple, for example, hasn’t paid much attention to QuickTime technologies and promotion in ages. It’s thus reflected in adoption patterns.
Hopefully, this summary will clear Wilson’s blind spot:
Apple is betting on open technologies (as it makes money on hardware) while Adobe (which only sells software) is betting on wrapping up content in a proprietary shackle called Flash.
Noted: A concert for the Deaf
Fri, Feb 13, 09
From the makes-you-cry department, via gigbloggy, Concert for the deaf and the hard of hearing in Toronto:
Ryerson University’s Centre of Learning Technology and the Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology (SMART) Lab have been working on the Alternative Sensory Information Displays (ASID) project to develop a ‘musical chair’ precisely made to induce vibrant emotions to deaf people…
The chair has a multitude of build-in speakers and vibrating devices delicately calibrated to “translate music and sound into movement. Whether it be rocking or vibrations, the music can be heard through the movement of the chair, expressing to the person sitting, the emotion heard in sound”.
Ellen Hibbard, a deaf PhD candidate in Ryerson’s Communications and Culture program explains: “The first time I used the chair, I was blown away by the amount of information I could get about music from the vibrations” . “For the first time in my life, I could feel sad or happy because of how the music vibrations felt on my skin. I never felt those kinds of feelings before when music was played.” She even goes on to saying she experienced flashbacks triggered by the vibrations of the music, much like music constitutes an amazing memory buffer for us all.
Bloody well done.
Daily question: Pay to read aloud books?
Wed, Feb 11, 09
If cleaning up existing urban dirt by removing it artistically can be considered a crime, why not reading aloud…books?
This from the Wall Street Journal coverage of the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle 2 yesterday:
“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”
An Amazon spokesman noted the text-reading feature depends on text-to-speech technology, and that listeners won’t confuse it with the audiobook experience. Amazon owns Audible, a leading audiobook provider.
Five years ago, Aiken had also objected to Amazon’s book search:
The online retailer Amazon.com has introduced a feature that lets users search for specific words or phrases in a database of the texts of 120,000 books, drawing skepticism from an authors’ group.
The feature, called Search Inside the Book, lets anyone see a few pages of each book in which the phrase appears. Registered users can see up to 20 pages of a book at a time.
Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, a writers’ trade group, regarded the practice as dubious. He said that publishers did not have the right to make the contents of books available without the authors’ permission. ”We find it a matter of serious concern,” Mr. Aiken said.
In 2002, Aiken had asked Author Guild members to “de-link” from Amazon:
Angered at Amazon.com for offering used editions of current books, the Authors Guild is urging members to remove links on their Web sites to the online retailer.
“Amazon’s practice does damage to the publishing industry, decreasing royalty payments to authors and profits to publishers,” the Guild said in a statement Tuesday.
“We believe it is in our members’ best interests to de-link their Web sites from Amazon. There’s no good reason for authors to be complicit in undermining their own sales. It just takes a minute, and it’s the right thing to do.”
Examples abound. But Paul Aiken is a lawyer. He no doubt thinks he’s doing the job he’s paid to do.
Does the Guild need a lawyer or a businessman?
UPDATE: Amazon, itself owner of Audible and Brilliance audiobooks, caved in to allow publishers to decide if the read-aloud feature will be available on Kindle for each book.
