It is very difficult to have totally original ideas on the internet. iPad was released around the same time I was changing apartments once more. And during the move I came across my broadband connected tablet like browsing device from the dot com bust era. I am talking about the 3 Com Audrey I bought during 2001 for $99 after a friend from S’Pore called that it is available on tigerdirect. I loved it during those lean times. So the release of iPad brought back all those memories. While these thoughts were circling in my mind, kind folks on the interwebs have already written a post I wanted to write . Here is one snippet from that post

Audrey is/was a $500.00 USD “Internet appliance” released by 3Com in 2000 that ran QNX – a popular embedded *nix-like OS. You could surf the web, listen to music and e-mail folks (plus run a few other apps that came with it). It had a touchscreen (tho, you needed a stylus) with a virtual keyboard, but you could also use a wireless keyboard. My setup is a bit worse for the wear, but she still works:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

The device failed because it was too expensive and just a bit ahead of it’s time (you have to remember, the Internet was a different place back then, with the intended, primary means of connecting the Audrey being dial-up). I believe it also failed because there was no good way to develop for it, thus snubbing early adopters who might have been able to get 3Com over the 1st gen hump and provide it a stream of cool apps to make it worth the money for the general public.

On the internet nothing ever dies. There is still the audreyhacking site live. I might just use audrey for few days for the retro feel.

@jeffnolan sent the above tweet about placing more orders than last year on amazon. This prompted me to look at my order history as I was sure I would be in the same boat. Going through the order history confirmed it. Now two consumers from the same geographic region don’t make a trend. But I suspect that this would be the case for a lot more people who are voracious consumer of information on the web i.e. heavy users of blogs, tweets and online news. Increase in spend in itself is not bad if it has merely shifted spending at brick and mortar to online spending for stuff. It would be bad ( at least for my pocket) if this 24/7 connectivity, 1000s of review sites, ease of online ordering has increased our wants and buying behavior.

While buying clothes and food etc is not practical but buying gadgets, books, music, games and software etc is super easy. There is always a new batch of TVs with more features, digital cameras with HD video recording, AV receiver with newer version of HDMI, new notebooks, routers with wifi-n, ipads and iphones. Then there are techmeme, gizmodo, engadget, amazon etc to review it. For more hardcore guys there is dpreview and avsforum. And all of this in your smart phone, connected TV 24/7 at your service. I think all of this creates a never ending anxiety to upgrade stuff. Which is resulting in ever increasing line items in things-I-bought-last-winter list.

Good or bad depends up the age old question about wants and needs. So far I have started going the route of giving useful age in years to various things electronics e.g. TV, notebook at least 5 years, phone 2 years, computer stuff at least 3 years etc.  Will be watching my behavior

Didn’t knew there were Dilbert cartoons. My favorite

Dilbert – Engineers

There is an article on NYTimes about how the age of Kindle or e-bookreaders is going to impact the old-fashioned books and the culture associated with book reading. Much of the article is devoted to the physical nature of books and the signals it sends to people around the person reading the book. For example if I have all my library in Kindle how would others be able to see what I have been reading and infer what sort of a person I am. In another case while traveling seeing another person carry your favorite book makes instant connections.

While I won’t miss these things about books as physical objects. What I would definitely miss is the impact books have when one is growing up with a lot of books around. Some of the earlier books I read were not recommended to me by any one. I happen to read them as they belonged to my elders and were readily available in the house. As a kid when you have spare time you just pick what is around and read it. With ebook readers it is going to be tough. Another thing that concerns me about ebook readers how it is going to impact libraries. I hope I would still be able to borrow books from library the way I do today. May be even better that I won’t have to go to library physically.

As far as the touting the books you are reading in front of your network – it has already been taken care by the “new media”. See my books section. There are applications like livingsocial, weread on facebook. There is even shelfari.com So nothing to complain over there.

Image Courtesy : Flickr Cheneworth

No question about the fact that book reading is great. After completing college education, only way to grow further is by reading books. But reading a book also means time commitment. Typically a week to few weeks of reading every day. So it becomes necessary to select books with care. Though there is always the option of reading few pages or few chapters but that also results in waste.

Over the years my book selection process has become somewhat refined. Before the advent of blogs or even web the way to find good books was word of mouth, newspapers or magazines. There were best seller lists and books of the year but that meant that one would miss good but obscure books. Also the books from past would be missed too. For example there is no way I was going to find about Thomas Schelling’s “Micromotives and Macro behavior” from best sellers list. With blogs this selection process has become really easy and very effective. Since one only subscribe to authors one likes iis quite likely that the books recommended by them on their blogs would be to your taste. And when one is fond of bibliophiles like Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution it is bonus time.

Most of the blog authors when talking about books point to its page on big river aka Amazon. Once at Amazon it is easy to find what other’s are talking about the books in customer reviews. This is all good but what I am really excited about is the ability to check if the book is available at one of the branches of local Santa Clara County libraries (SCCL). This is possible by a little greasemonkey script on firefox that was written for Seattle Public Library which I improvised for SCCL. So now I have a blog filtered stream of books whose reviews I can read on Amazon and check their availability in the local libraries. An optimized solution, just what the good engineer ordered.

Livemint has become quite popular during the last year or two of its existence. But sometimes funny things happen on the first page. Example in case is the screenshot above taken on  Nov 14th about 12:30pm IST. This image shows 4 different values of the BSE sensex index. Which one should I believe? While I can understand why it would happen, but I think it should be embarassing for the site owners.

There has been a visible shift towards design on Beta Thoughts in the past few months. If you are one of the 1.5 readers of this blog you might have noticed it. While I have always been interested in the design of things – but only after the google reader’s recommendation engine recommended “core77′s design blog” that this interest has gone into over drive. Besides my work as a NetWeaver professional revolves around thinking from user’s perspective aka user centric design. So what all of this has to do with the title of this post? Read on…

Core77′s recent post pointed to a lengthy but immensely enjoyable article about the design and development of Wii Fit which might have over taken Grand Theft Auto sales by  now. Don’t miss reading the complete article for some of the craziest places there ideas come from. Over here I would just point out to how important the user centric design is for them

Miyamoto-san banged the table and said, “That’s wrong!” He told this person that from the consumer’s point-of-view, clarity was important. That people don’t say, “You need to lose 2 BMI points to reach your ideal weight”, they say, “You need to lose 3 pounds to reach your ideal weight”. We wanted people from age 5 to 95 to enjoy using Wii and he pointed out that most of those people wouldn’t know what BMI is. He demanded to know how this person could be so backward-looking when so many employees were working so hard to negotiate with official organizations to allow kilograms to be displayed in the game for the benefit of the consumers.

Image Courtesy - Goodrob13′s photostream at flickr

When Dash Express, a GPS with internet connectivity and utilizing the collective knowledge about routes from its users was announced, it was quite an innovative concept. But it seems ants might have beaten them to it. Though a bit of rudimentary technology but it works from the Telegraph article (HT Marginal Revolution)

His team set up an “ant motorway” with two routes of different widths from the nest to some sugar syrup. Soon the narrower route soon became congested.

But when an ant returning along the congested route to the nest collided with another ant just starting out, the returning ant pushed the newcomer onto the other path.

It is a pity that Dash is getting out of making their own hardware. I am sure they will survive and hope to use their technology someday in some form.

I have just started reading “Do you matter?” by Apple design guru Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery. In the very first chapter I came across a paragraph which is just too good to be read alone

The iPod is an iconic product of our time, a glorious example of design and business success. So close your eyes and imagine you’re holding an iPod. Now take away iTunes, take away the ability to buy the song you like for 99¢ without having to pay $15 for a dozen more on a CD you don’t want, lose the ability to create play lists, cut out the packaging, take out the ads, delete the Apple logo, and shutter all the Apple stores. The remaining question is, “Do you still have an iPod?” Yes, the physical product in your hand is exactly the same, but what do you have now? Really, what do you have?

Well, you have a nicely designed object. Is it an iPod still? No, it’s not, because an iPod is a portal to a kaleidoscope of experience. An iPod is not just an object. The object is an icon that is a portal to an experience.

So essentially what is being talked over here is a total customer experience. Think of the product or service you provide and now think about the experience that is being created for your customers. For example for an enterprise software vendor it would be the software itself, how it was sold, how it was implemented, how is the maintenance support provided, how are trainings held for users, user conferences and these days how vibrant is the online community etc.

While all of this is good and very helpful way of making the product and services highly successful. There is one small lurking doubt I have in the corner of my mind. Apple very tightly controls almost all attributes about its offerings. Obviously it has been very successful in the consumer electronics space. But can this be extended everywhere where the producer/provider cannot have such a fine control for various reasons.

Hat Tip: I was introduced to the book by Core 77′s design blog this post.

I am sure you have heard the news of new MacBooks. As anything Apple these days you have to admire the industrial design and thought that has gone into building this. The “brick” design or unibody design is quite an innovation for notebooks. Do watch this video detailing the manufacturing and design process and see how every one on the team is so passionate about the product they have made. This should be an inspiration to product teams around the globe.