Geek News and Musings

Barnes & Noble may be challenging Amazon’s dominance of the e-book world, but the Kindle sales are still growing faster than the Nook’s — at least if you connect the dots between some of the numbers included in a recently-published article by The New York Times.

The article doesn’t hide the fact that Amazon has the vast majority of marketshare, with Barnes & Noble saying it has 27 percent of the market, compared to Amazon’s share of “at least 60 percent.” At the same time, the article writes that “to the delight of publishers” (who see Amazon as a competitor), Barnes & Noble has “grabbed a lot of market share from Amazon.” In response, Amazon told The Times that Kindle sales (a number that includes both the Kindle Fire tablet and Kindle e-readers) grew 177 percent during the nine-week holiday period.

How does that compare to the Nook? The article doesn’t say, but earlier this month, Barnes & Noble actually reported its own holiday growth numbers, and they were a little underwhelming. During the same period fo time, the company’s device sales grew 70 percent — not bad, perhaps, but a sign that Amazon still has greater momentum.

Sometimes you have to see things to truly appreciate their magnitude. Apple’s latest quarter was so massive that MG had to write two posts about it: $46 billion in revenues, 37 million iPhones sold, 15 million iPads. The chart above, which comes from Asymco (see a fully interactive version here), shows how unusual this quarter was for Apple.

The quarter was driven by iPhone and iPad sales. And you can see that by looking at the blue and red lines, which show unit sales of each. iPhone sales went from 17 million the quarter before to 37 million. They more than doubled in a single quarter.

But look closely at the iPad line. What I just noticed for the first time is that Apple sold almost as many iPads last quarter as it sold iPhones in the previous quarter. And now it is selling as many iPads as iPods. That red line is going to keep on going up. Will it ever catch up to iPhone sales?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lots of people these days avoid dairy and instead reach for alternatives to milk. We’ve covered making your own soy milk and almond milk in the past; if you prefer rice milk you can make your own by blending rice, water, and a sweetener. More »

Editor’s note: Hank Nothhaft is the co-founder and chief product officer of Trapit, a personalized content discovery platform currently in beta. Trapit was incubated at SRI and the CALO project.

eBay’s recent acquisition of the recommendation service Hunch was an important score for the online retailer, giving it a way to mine the ever-mounting mounds of structured and unstructured data for more relevant and accurate consumer recommendations.

Such recommendation engines are already (and have long been) a necessity, not only for retailers, but for the entire Web. Every major internet company, from media outlets to social networks to software applications, is having to meet an expectation of better understanding their customers as individuals, to provide them with information and suggestions that they themselves may not even have realized they want or need.

Integrating better recommendation algorithms and services was really just the first part of a larger, necessary movement to make the Web more personalized. As we watch the ongoing struggles of search engines to provide relevant yet deep-diving results, or Facebook’s fruitless attempts to better identify which content shared by your friends is most important for you to see, it’s clear that we need something smarter, something more sophisticated than mere recommendations and customization. Personalizing the Web is one of the most important and difficult engineering tasks we now face in the evolution of the Internet.

Recommendations Have Hit the Ceiling

Amazon and Netflix once stood as exemplars of recommendation, providing suggestions based on what other users with similar habits and product histories selected, with a touch of genetic genre data thrown in. Yet both have faltered in recommendation relevance as the crowd-sourced approach has become more of an echo chamber than a personalized filter. (And Amazon certainly does itself no favors with its barrage of “recommendations” for its own Kindle Fire).

These recommendation engines were once ground-breaking, but they have failed to evolve. And more importantly, our expectations as Web consumers have evolved beyond the simple concepts of “users who purchased item X also purchased item Y.” At best, services that claim personalization based upon these aggregate metrics attempt to triangulate an identity for us as individuals based upon the galaxy of other individuals. They try to pin us down into an archetype, into a box of likes and interests, without recognizing that as humans, what we desire, want and need is in constant flux and ever-evolving.

In all fairness, that’s an incredibly difficult awareness to achieve. But its disingenuous to attribute “personalization” to services that are really just crowd sourced general interest mapping. And those results are just insultingly banal!

Getting Closer, All the Time

The acquisition of Hunch will hopefully signal a shift from recommendations to actual personalization. This is not because Hunch is such a precise personalization tool, but rather because it is an excellent recommendation engine. As more relevant recommendations become ubiquitous as the standard across the Web, we can finally begin to aim to shoot beyond that baseline to realizing a personalized Web.

Over the next few years, technology that truly understands and recognizes us as dynamic and unique individuals rather than types will be the predominate trend. Siri’s adaptability and cognizance is the first major step in this direction, and we will begin to see that type of finely-tuned, perpetually trained artificial intelligence helping turn the Web and our technology more and more towards us as individuals.

It’s a movement from the Web mentality of searching, to one of delivery. It’s a shift from pull to push technology–and it’s happening because there is enormous upside for the first movers in the era of personalization.

The shift to a more personalized Web is all about revenue and customer/user experience.

Consider the shift that is still occurring with our televisions. Whereas we have long considered our television sets to be mere boxes for broadcasting pre determined content to us as passive consumers, we are increasingly taking control of that content. This extends beyond mere DVR capabilities, as Web-enabled televisions begin to offer a new layer of personalization.

Our televisions will eventually become truly our own, unique televisions. Better yet, we will have accounts that we can log into that will personalize any television set with programming specifically selected by and for us.

Groupon, no doubt, is itching to find ways to personalize each and every offer they have for each individual it is sent to. Groupon knows that targeting by regions increases conversion and sales, but imagine how much they could amplify that effect if they were targeting based on a rich and sophisticated understanding of the individual person that receives each offer?

We can imagine this type of personalization applied to all of our current technologies, but it first requires a fundamental, philosophical shift in how we think about and understand the notion of personalization. A big part of that means that recommendation technology needs to be properly understood as the tip of the iceberg — it’s table stakes and nothing more. The real game is played with true personalization and a sophisticated understanding of individuals and all of their unique, ever-shifting personas.

The Endless March of Personalization Progress

At this stage, personalization is best achieved as a mashup of our interest graph, social graph, individual input, and Pandora-eque qualifications of structured data. When maximized, this can work quite well, but we can’t stop there.

As the Web becomes our own personal web, the technology needs to register and understand our flux in personality. This means incorporating both more direct and more ambient information, such as awareness of time, location, my schedule, my habits and engagement with content. Furthermore, it means realizing that human identity is a constantly shifting target. The work of personalization is never done, even if it is done with less direct input and feedback from me personally.

Content creators, marketers, sales professionals and publishers crave that myth of stability in defining their users and audience. Yet as the Web has shifted to become dominated by the stream metaphor, that myth has been easily eroded.

This is not a bad thing, even if it makes understanding that customer baseline upon which we build businesses that much more difficult to determine. It was always a myth to begin with — we simply did not have the data or the tools to operate otherwise and recognize users as individuals, as the amalgam of ever-shifting interests and personalities that they truly are.

What replaces that baseline of stability, however, is the flux of new opportunities, of understanding our customers and audience in increasingly focused and nuanced terms. Likewise, we as Web consumers are starting to expect this understanding from the websites and businesses with which we choose to interact.

For companies, recommendation is the gateway into recognizing the value of a much more attuned personalization. And as recommendation layers become ubiquitous, we can now finally begin moving beyond it, to achieve personalization as the next great triumph of the Web.

Artist Jeff Meadows did a great custom paint job on his shoes! From an interview with him on Illustration Mundo.

From the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, this contribution by V.Valenti, showing a superb space-age Lestoil ad.

Lestoil Woman of the Future, 1968.

To paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, “iPads are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” It’s an ugly story. Over a hundred employees “injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis” because its use “meant workers could clean more screens each minute.” Other workers killed or injured by explosions. All so that iPads can be built as cheaply as possible, so that Apple can maintain its 44.7% gross margins. Isn’t that awful?

Yes, of course — but let’s try to maintain a nuanced perspective here. This is hardly a new story, and it’s hardly unique to the tech industry. Think of the exploitation of child labor to harvest Egyptian cotton and Cote d’Ivoire cocoa. Plus ça change; a decade ago it was Indonesian sweatshops and Indian fireworks exciting outrage. Think of the exploitation of Congolese workers to mine coltan, used in electronics everywhere. Show me a country with a large population of desperately poor people, and I’ll show you horrific exploitation of impoverished workers.

Please note, though, that the latter is an inevitable symptom of the former; and again, let’s please try to maintain a sense of perspective. It’s awful that a dozen Chinese workers were killed and hundreds injured building iPads–but at the same time, coal mining kills more than two thousand Chinese workers a year (down from almost 7000 ten years ago) and nobody’s suddenly outraged about them. We in the West don’t really seem to care that Chinese employees work under awful conditions and die in appalling numbers — unless they make shiny things that we use. We claim we don’t want people to suffer, but in fact we just don’t want our iProducts tainted by that suffering. Isn’t that more than a little hypocritical?

So what? you might say. It’s all horrible! Stop them all, or any of it that we can stop, right now! Right?

No. Not necessarily. This is a really complex and difficult issue, and there’s no obvious right answer. Over the last thirty years, trade and export-driven growth have been insanely great for China, and made life enormously better for the overwhelming majority of its billion-plus people. (My personal experience bears out all the data, for what it’s worth: in 1997 I spent a month roaming solo through central China, then came back nine years later. China 1997 and China 2006 were like two entirely different nations, and the latter was vastly better off.)

If Apple and other Western manufacturers were to pull production from China to other, better-paid, union-friendlier jurisdictions with stronger protections for worker rights, that would be disastrous for Apple’s profit margins and innovation speed — but it would also be disastrous for China’s people. On the whole, overall, despite the gruesome and heartrending disasters in the spotlight right now, both sides benefit greatly. That’s how and why free trade works.

At the same time, we can all agree that no businesses anywhere should be poisoning their workers and/or generally treating human lives like disposable Kleenex. This is especially true in a nation whose government only accepts trade unions which are powerless government puppets. But I would argue that it’s China’s steadily growing wealth — which comes from trade, and especially, manufacturing — that will ultimately transform it into a nation where real unions and real worker rights can and do exist.

It’s worth noting that Foxconn’s problems are China’s national problems writ small. Hexane pollution and aluminum dust are scale-model versions of the nationwide poisoned milk scandal, or the ongoing catastrophe of Beijing’s hyper-polluted air, or the major lakes entirely conquered by toxic cyanobacteria. Again, employee exploitation is a symptom, not a problem. The problem is ubiquitous grinding poverty – something that trade, investment, and economic growth slowly, over decades, alleviates, albeit at a terrifying cost to the environment.

Think of the West’s Industrial Revolution. That’s more or less the same revolution transforming China right now. Is it possible to have such a revolution without some concomitant Dickensian horrors? The available evidence sadly indicates “probably not.”

In the interim, what Apple (and the countless less-sexy enterprises whose products are manufactured in China under similar conditions) can do to improve the lot of those who craft its wares is this: increase their leverage over their suppliers, by making the threat of moving production elsewhere credible. Foxconn wants to keep Apple happy, obviously – but they’d be a lot more proactive about doing so if they genuinely thought they might lose massive amounts of Apple’s business to someone else.

A concrete example: Apple shouldn’t get Foxconn to manufacture iPads in Brazil: they should have another company entirely build iPads in Brazil. Right now Apple needs Foxconn almost as much as Foxconn needs Apple. Real competition among suppliers would mean that each of them will jump a lot higher and faster when Apple says “worker rights.”

But let’s not get myopic about Apple and iPads, when the landscape of globalization and its excesses is so much vaster and more diverse. Let’s not pretend that the dynamic is purely “rich Western tech companies exploiting poor nations.” And let’s remember that technology, and China’s growing wealth, will probably ultimately solve this problem. Remember that decade-old outrage about child labor in India’s fireworks industry? Well, it’s much diminished these days, thanks to automation and India’s much wealthier society. Similarly, China’s burgeoning online population has pressured its government to pay attention to air pollution… and Foxconn is already roboticizing its assembly lines.

Most of all, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the technology pioneered in large part by the very same cohort of Western companies who outsource production to China is, slowly but steadily, lifting China, India and sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty. That, not where your iPad came from, is the most important story in the world today.

Image: Smog over Tiananmen Square in 2006, by yours truly. By all accounts it’s gotten much worse since.

[Video Link] I was up at the MAKE offices earlier this week and saw this little traffic cone that the interns made on a MakerBot Cupcake 3D printer.

A great Mike Masnick Techdirt editorial deals with MPAA second-in-command Michael O’Leary’s statement that, “[the Internet is] a platform we’re not at this point comfortable with.”

The MPAA’s O’Leary concedes that the industry was out-manned and outgunned in cyberspace. He says the MPAA “is [undergoing] a process of education, a process of getting a much, much greater presence in the online environment. This was a fight on a platform we’re not at this point comfortable with, and we were going up against an opponent that controls that platform.”

Yes, even when he tries to say that they’re trying to learn about that confounded internet thingy, he sounds ridiculous and dismissive. But the real point is his inadvertent admission within that statement: the MPAA (and the rest of “old” Hollywood) simply “is not comfortable with” the internet. And that’s really what SOPA and PIPA were about. Rather than trying to understand this new platform, and learn from the many entertainers who do get the internet, they did what the MPAA does and simply tried to regulate that which they don’t understand and fear.

Furthermore, even more ridiculous is the end of that sentence: “an opponent that controls that platform.” As the article makes clear, he means Google. Which shows that he still doesn’t get it. First, Google didn’t lead the protests. It came late to the game, after the grassroots had already taken off with this stuff and run with it. But, more to the point, contrary to what O’Leary and the MPAA seem to believe: Google does not control the internet. No one does.

MPAA Exec Admits: ‘We’re Not Comfortable With The Internet’

An unsigned rap group called After the Smoke couldn’t post their song “One in a Million” to YouTube because every time they tried, it generated a YouTube content-match error saying that Universal Music owned their song. It turned out that UMG had laid claim to a leaked video that had a UMG artist performing the unsigned band’s track in it, and this effectively gave Universal the power to censor the unsigned band’s song.

YouTube’s content-matching system has a lot of problems, as archivist Carl Malamud discovered when corporations started to claim that they owned the public domain US government videos he posted, threatening to cost him his YouTube account. And Universal attained notoriety for abusing content match by claiming to own the song that MegaUpload commissioned from major artists criticizing Universal and other rightsholder groups for their copyright stance.

Universal Music May Have Inadvertently Exposed a Flaw in the YouTube Takedown Process

« Previous entries