Inventing the Future

“Who would've thought…it figures”

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John Sundman, friend, founder of Wetmachine and my colleague at Curl, wrote some reflections on what went wrong at the two Rich Internet Application startups he worked for. (One was Curl.) I think his comments are spot-on. Here are some concurring reminisces, and one additional hindsight: we engineers were wrong not realize the deep structural flaw in our position.

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Intel, OLPC, and Croquet

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It is interesting to compare Intel’s participation in Croquet vs. the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC).

Intel is a corporate member of the Croquet consortium, along with HP and Qwaq. Intel’s CEO Justin Rattner demonstrated Croquet-based Qwaq Forums during his keynote at the big Intel Developers Forum, and they are building a joint product with Qwaq. This all makes complete sense for Intel. For example, this week the market research pundits at Forrester released a report that says the 3D Internet will be ubiquitous in business in the next few years and that Information & Knowledge specialists should get started now with Qwaq. But there’s an even deeper fit specifically for Intel, which does not apply to OLPC.

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And Croquet is good for the environment, too!

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Nice article about teleconferencing (including Qwaq, which is based on Croquet) versus travel.

I wonder if there’s real data on the relative merits of the energy used in office buildings vs. telecommuting. Office buildings are potentially more efficient through scaling, although the economic incentives are so lacking that there’s usually a lot of waste. While homes are energy hogs, we do already have and heat them for our non-work time.

i finger gadgets

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Damn, I thought I had found a Christmas gift for my wife that was not a gadget. You may love a gadget. You may tell your friends. You may keep using it for a year. Or not. But to me, a gadget is defined as something you don’t immediately replace when it’s lost. Gadgets aren’t game-changers that permanently alter how you live.

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Self-destruction of a monster?

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My cable company seems to be self-destructing. We can only hope.

Recently I wrote about my cableco cutting off my service, and not turning it back on until I answered questions about my and my wife’s social security numbers and download habits.

Last Monday I called to complain that despite the premium I was paying for 3Mb/s service, I was getting 300 Kb/s downloads and worse. They responded by cutting me off completely. I’ll spare you the dialog, but you can just substitute any page from Franz Kafka or Lewis Carroll. A guy came on Wednesday to replace my cable modem and splitter, and it appeared in his immediate testing to yield close to the expected 3000 Kb/s.

Over the next few days I found that I only got that speed immediately after rebooting the cable-modem. After a few minutes, it would drop to 1500, 600, 300, 150, and finally 30 Kb/s. Slower than an acoustic modem from before my children were born. All through the rest of the week, I would reboot, and watch as the speed fell off.

Charter stopped taking my calls altogether. They just hung up on me over and over again.

After one of these calls we ordered DSL from our local phone company. The modem arrived Friday. I plugged it in and it worked! 3.5 to 4 Mb/s. And it has stayed that way ever since. I’ve been trying to get my mail and Webpages copied off from Charter, but they won’t let me log in.

Since then, I’ve discovered two things I didn’t know or pay any attention to when things just worked:

  • Charter Communications is run by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. What an asshole.
  • Despite increasing their revenue from saps like me by more than 10% over this quarter last year, they announced this week that they’re losing even more money than ever, and their stock lost nearly 20% of it’s value. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving group.

    • This war brought to you by the RIAA

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    This morning my Internet service was out. Usually, I call and get either a recorded message saying that there’s an outage in my area and that technicians have been dispatched, or a I get a voice menu that talks me through resetting my modem. They don’t let you talk to an actual person until you do this.

    But today, I got right through to a person. He asked for my social security number, my wife’s social security number, and what I used the Internet for. I was specifically asked what I downloaded. After several more minutes of monkeying around, the putative technician (who must have recieved his degree from a Blackwater USA training camp), told me that “it was broken” and they’d send someone out next Tuesday. After several minutes of screaming at him, and then my wife screaming at him (the big guns), the service was back on.

    Could this possibly be anything other than Homeland Security outsourcing the RIAA’s bidding to the telecom operators? It sounds absurd, but the weird thing is — we already they know that this has happened. There’s no question of “can this happen”, only a question of what happened here in this case.

    The Real-Time Internet, circa 2007 – It's about the information, not the interaction

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    World-Wide Web technology is primarily static. The technology is designed around slow repeated cycles of request-a-page/get-a-page. Technologies like Flash, Curl, and Laszlo are aimed at improving this interaction while staying within the WWW framework. But the Web isn’t about interaction, it’s about information and, to a certain extent, transactions. While these drivers remain unchanged, two stories in my local paper this week have shown me that the expectations of pace have changed.

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