Sophie-Tech X: Intuition and Learning - How the UI Changes the Game Fundamentally and Why Anachronisms are Sometimes Better

It's been a while since the last Sophie-Tech post.  Here's a short review.  With the birth of my daughter in 2007 came an opportunity to observe a new human interfacing with technology that didn't exist when I was in her position.  By observing her approaches to and successes with technology, I am able to infer quite a lot - both good and bad - about the technology, especially the UI.

Today the focus is on the UI as represented by the lowly touch tone keypad, versus the lowly - and anachronistic - pulse telephone.  I was recently surprised to learn that Sophie is able to dial the telephone.  This isn't the dialing she did a couple years ago, when she called 9-1-1 on my Blackberry, but truly a completed phone call.  At the age of three.  She dialed my wife's cell phone.  She was supervised by her older sister in the task, but it was just to watch her do it.  She has since demonstrated it all by herself.

This is not about cleverness on the part of a kid, but is about the alteration of a time-honored interface that hones in on different and more powerful properties than were had by the previous interface.  The old rotary dial phone was based on the principle of turning a wheel and thus generating a certain known number of clicks  that could be translated into a route.  You had to be careful when doing it, because to make it work there had to be a hard point that would stop the rotation of the dial, and if you were in a hurry you could bruise your finger on the post.  If you didn't turn it all the way to the post, then though you started to dial a seven, you could turn it into a six, just by stopping the rotation early.  This was what passed for great fun when I was a kid;  that and dialing up the time and temperature number.

The touch tone interface changed all that, though.  You could not turn a seven into a six, and you did not have to worry about injuring your finger when spinning the dial.  Instead of being based on the art of counting pulses, it became about the art of recognizing tones.  There was a degree of skill involved in dialing the phone, now there is not.  You remember a pattern of numbers, and then you touch a series of pads with those numbers on them.

This is all so simple even a kid can do it.  Really.  All they need to know is a sequence of information and they can translate that sequence directly into a connection.  No mechanical knowledge or skill is required.  This isn't about being a guy in his 40's all of a sudden complaining about things - that never comes to anything anyway, so why bother - but it is about the design of newer interfaces, and the surprising limiting effects that technological development can make.

What would you say if I made the statement that the Steampunk movement is actually a good example of how the UI can be done differently?  Does an anachronistic appearance automatically mean that a technology is not as good as another?  This has really bothered me in the past, because I have seen decisions made around, of all things, the appearance of a UI.  This is the actualization of the Dilbert comic strip where the pointy-haired boss wants a background color of mauve because mauve has more RAM.

The truth of the matter is that the touch tone enables the entire telephone network to run - hang with me, kids - as part of the internet.  The ways that signals are sent have been merged into the ONE WAY (capitalized to foreshadow the Matrix-esque nature).  Your telephone signal is very likely working off of a technology called VOIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol (yes, the same IP from when your tech guy asks you to give him the IP address for your computer, and you tell him it's a Dell... will the scars never heal?), and that technology works only with the beeps.  The pulses need not apply.

It isn't even that we need pulses, except... there is a problem that can exist in times when the power is not so available.  If you are using VOIP and the power goes out, then it is likely your phone will.  Remember how in olden days your telephone received its power from the low-voltage feed present in the wire?  Since the switch has been converted to use optical transmission - the fiber optics that basically go from the phone company to the room where your router is installed - you can understand that you can't have light going through all the time, ready to power your equipment should you need to make a phone call.  So, the power of the phone is only there when the power of the house is as well.

I know, that problem is solved by having a cell phone.  That is true... at least just as true as if you go to a Colts game and the stadium is packed and Manning throws such an incredible pass that 50,000 people have enough bandwidth through their phones to post the picture they just took of the pass to Facebook.  Try that out before you decide how true it is.  I did at the Bengals game last year, and let's just say the hamsters running the switching equipment at the phone company were working through their breaks!

So what is the point?  The point is that in our quest to take the anachronistic out and replace it with the smoothly-digital, gray slider-bar, cookie-cutter graphics, stole-this-Flash-animation-from-another-site world, we sometimes take a step backwards, a step illustrated by the contrast between the ability to dial a number, and the ability to understand what is happening.  Truthfully, my daughter also dials her pretend phone and has conversations, so the relative difference between her play and her true ability to place a call is nil.  The bar has been lowered, sacrificing some reliability.

Here is a short list of some anachronistic things I think we could all learn from, and possibly resurrect:

1) The rheostat.  This is basically a control to determine the level of sound, or electrical function, or whatever is being controlled, that is allowed to pass.  Think about the volume control.  I recently had to adjust the slider control for my speakers, then the volume control for my video player, just to be able to clearly hear the sound.  That is because in the effort to engineer digital controls into everything, there have been multiple controls placed into the same application, and both are required.  A simple rheostat that controls the physical volume of the speakers does the trick without having to make multiple adjustments using multiple similar, but maddeningly different in a few key areas, interfaces.

2) The physical connection.  No, really.  It struck me today that, though the technology has improved greatly, with every leap forward in 'technology', we sacrifice a little QoS - quality of service.  I use Skype on a daily basis, and I experience signal problems there which would never be experienced with a physical connection (I realize there is a plug at a couple steps in the process, however 1) you don't have a dedicated circuit, just a logical one and 2) you use radio technology if you're using wireless access, so signal degradation is as close as the nearest electrical device.  First there is a problem with the video feeds - annoying, but understandable, and certainly something that I'd expect with a physical connection as well, because of the slower nature of the data transfer; then comes the call killer - audio difficulties.  If the video feeds are shut off, then the quality of the call should be at least as good as it used to be when a call came in on copper, through copper switches.  If we cannot fix the quality of our calls to be at least as good as they were when we used copper - I won't get into the strangeness that is present when trying to understand how a signal sent using electricity can be clearer than one sent using light, the purest substance we have - can we truly say that we have accomplished anything other than adding to the capacity to transmit data?  This is the digital equivalent of putting 500 people in steerage and heading out on a trans-Atlantic voyage, versus putting 100 people in cabins and making more trips.

3) The chalkboard.  We moved to the dry erase world a while ago, but there is a problem.  When you are solving a problem, you first have to decide which colors to use for which pieces of the puzzle, then you have to find markers that work - does it bother anyone else that people who are supposed to write thousands of lines of code that will be used to issue payrolls don't have the pre-requisite skill it takes to close the cap on a marker?! How good is their code if their coloring skills are suspect?  Out of the lines = code.Fail, my Moutain Dew besotten comrade!.  Then you have to make sure the markers aren't permanent.  Then you have to find the eraser.  When you have a chalkboard, you have one color that you use, and a freeform experience.  You don't worry about colors, or about anything else other than working on your problem.  And erasers are optional - anything can be an eraser, and it comes out in the wash.

4) The CD.  WAIT!  CD's aren't dead yet!  Maybe not, but MP3's have put a serious hurt on them.  I equate this one to taking my kids to one of Emeril Lagasse's restaurants a couple years ago.  Serious coin was dropped for some of the greatest food on Earth.  I savored each bite, wringing every bit of flavor and texture out of the dish, enjoying it in a way that would make the chef feel good about the craft.  My kids devoured everything with the same gusto and speed they do a Big Mac, so the details didn't make a bit of difference to them.  A $40 duck entree and a Big Mac being placed at the same level?!  The same is true of the music stored on a CD, versus that from an MP3.  The MP3 produces a digitized, COMPRESSED version of the music.  It squeezes the same music into a tighter space than a regular audio file.  When you squeeze audio, you lose some of it.  It happens.  The average of 3 and 5 is 4.  The average of 4 and 4 is... 4.  When I try to uncompress those numbers, how do I know which are 3's, which are 5's and which are 4's?  There are algorithms that can do it, sort of, but by the time you take out sampling loss, and compression loss, and, and, and, the music suffers.  If you're not a fanatic about your music it doesn't make a difference, but I want to hear the bass line, and I want to hear the little things the keyboard player is doing, and unless I'm listening to some grunge, I don't want muddied-up sound.


There are many other things that could go into this list, but I think the point is made.  With great technology comes great responsibility...great design and a dedication to using the best, not just the 'looks like everything else' should also follow.

How the Youngest Technology Platforms Can Learn From the World’s Oldest Technology Platform

“Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world.” – Jimmy Carter, as quoted on www.brainyquote.com

Technology is all around us even when it's not computer-based technology.  In fact, there is a long and distinguished tradition of technology that predates the computer by a few millennia, and we can look to some of the oldest technologies to find out how we should – or in some cases should not – do new technology design.

Here goes…  Walk into the men’s room (or ladies’ room - I'm assuming here - I don't poke bears with sticks, shut off a PC during an update or invade territory I’m not supposed to be in), especially a newly-constructed one, and take in the advanced architecture and technology features there to support the oldest functions in the newest ways. 

Let’s begin at the back and move forward.  There are paper gaskets created go in there for sanitary purposes, but they don’t exactly fit.  They are deployed using a tearing out motion that leaves each one of them damaged, sometimes to the point they don’t really work.  But for the sake of this example, let’s assume you get one that works correctly.

You’re in the middle of that efficient and modern facility that has an automatic flush system.  The problem is twofold: there is only one sensor that uses optics to sense a change in light exposure and process otherwise, rather than one of those augmented with a pressure switch to eliminate the problem of the phantom flush.  So much time went into designing them, and so much architecture was done so they wouldn’t be seen as the frightening things that my 3 year-old still somehow sees as frightening, but those eyes are either not calibrated or are not sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a passing shadow cast by someone placing the said cover onto the toilet from a true end of engagement. 

Now, consider if you will the ventilation systems that are in places such as this.  Often times, even if the initial gasket processing works well, the airflow blows it into the bowl, especially when the pressure changes from door movement. 

We will skip a door that does not latch and the paper dispenser that is either too difficult to use, or so poorly engineered in a weight of the roll versus tensile strength manner that after the first dispensing the rest of the paper rolls up inside and requires an expedition to extract another sample.  We will, though, run into the same technology issues with the electric eyes on the water and soap dispensers.  We also have a recursion of the airflow issue with the air dryers. 

You may be asking how that applies to software, or a website, but consider this: the lessons from designing around the most basic of technologies are the same design points for good stuff anywhere.

1)     Security only works if it works.  This sounds too simple, but is every transaction your software/site does that involves sensitive information encrypted properly, and secured properly at the other end?  Are you sure?  Security of sensitive information is too often the equivalent of that paper gasket. 

2)     Controls need to match the needs of the users.  There are many instances when autocorrect does the wrong thing, where the hover buttons delay, then cause you to have clicked on something you didn’t intend, etc.  If you have something that happens automatically, and the users don’t need it to be that way, it is actually technology misapplied.

3)     There is a natural flow to everything, and it needs to be used when necessary, and avoided when not.  Like the ventilation that isn’t calibrated for the flows of the room, the workflows within your software and processes need to be set up so that they aren’t destructive.  A great example of this is when you don’t fill out every blank of a form, hit submit, then have to go back in and refill everything because of that one.  This also happens when you’re using a piece of software and try to alter a graphic, only to click one pixel too low in a menu so you click on the next item down and change the default settings for the whole program. And into the bowl goes the gasket…

As I was having difficulty tonight with jitter in my Skype signal and simultaneously bad reception for my cell phone, it struck me that these design basics have been lost in what I’ll call bleeding-edge dwelling.  30 years ago neither existed, but we had some awfully good signal through the copper via analog switches.  The functional difference between a call done on an analog copper line and a wireless videochat with such a poor signal that you can’t use the video is that the copper line carries the voice well, while the same signal issues causing video problems also introduce chatter and jitter.  When Skype works it’s essential to help maintain contact with my family, but when it doesn’t…

We have made so many strides in the technology, but we get less use out of it.  By trying to assist in the designing of automatic things, we have introduced elements that actually undo what we try to accomplish.  Automation is great – I regularly use it myself – but it has to be done right.  What if we spent as much time on the actual usability of our designs as we did on the ‘coolness’ factor?  Might we have also added a pressure switch to those electric eyes to confirm ‘done’ versus ‘fidgeted’?  Might voice to text development not have lagged the development of keyboards for smartphones?  Just some thoughts.

The Difference Between Social Media, Mass E-mail and Direct Mail...

Right now, in some ways, I'd have to say - VERY LITTLE!  Perusing my different updates on my smartphone - there are about 500 different icons you need to know about if you are going to take advantage of the ability to have your phone remind you when you have social media contacts - I noticed I have a another request for me to acknowledge that someone is related to me.  I won't point out the particular social app, but it does use a lot of information off of Facebook.  The name of my potential relative? Facebook User.

I recently received an e-mail threatening me with removal from the subscription list for a magazine I never subscribed to, about manufacturing facilities.  It's a cycle I go through yearly, receiving about three warnings to re-subscribe, each duly ignored, they go away, leaving the subscription intact.  They return to threaten me again the following year.

I also recently received something in the snail mail addressed to the parents of Vitor.

These are interesting, not because they prevented me from being Charlie Brown, waiting out by the mailbox with no mail, but because of the apparent disconnect they entail.  First and foremost, I have no child named Vitor, nor have I ever had one.  Secondly, someone with privacy protections turned on tried to connect with me, though I have no way of knowing who it was.  I'll leave the mass e-mail to be the evidence it is.

One of the enticing facets of social media is the idea that a two-way, or more, ongoing conversation and interaction can take place between people.  It adds in the benefits of being able to communicate almost as quickly as with a phone call, but also allows multi-media and enhanced communications of ideas, stands, ideals and platforms.  It is designed as a way that individuals can stay in touch, each with a feeling of simultaneous freedom and connectedness.

Except...

Some of the same communications issues plague social media as do that dying behemoth - mass mailing.  The intent of both is to maintain a connection with someone else, and in fact that connection business is a revenue generator for someone, somewhere.  Yet, there is an ever present buzz about the effectiveness of contact campaigns, mailing lists and other, older asynchronous marketing connection devices... and not a good buzz.  In fact, just this morning I read a new blog post by M. E. Kabay about his repeated attempts to get taken off of a mailing list, and his frustration is a very familiar one.

In the case of social media, there is such a rush to 'do' social media - I cringe with I hear people talking about 'doing' social media, because the effect is pretty much the same as when they 'do' ECM, de-duplication, or anything else technical - and to 'get out there' with a presence.  There is a real and present problem with it, though.  In the rush to do something, you cannot afford to do it improperly.  It is far better to be a laggard than a bad leader.  One way people are happy you made it, the other they curse the day you stepped into the spotlight.

In the case of the social media in question, the amount of coding to determine whether or not someone has privacy restrictions on their Facebook account may not be too wieldy - I don't pretend to be a programmer, so I'm not certain of what would be needed to do that - but it doesn't appear to have been done at all. It could have been one of my cousins, one of my siblings, even one of my children, but I'll never know, because I won't associate my online persona with someone I don't know.  They not only sent me a request to say that User is related to me, they keep sending me reminders about it.  When my phone syncs there's also the nice little 'you have something, and you can pick it up at the click of a button, assuming you know what our icon stands for' reminders, that tells me I have one family connection to confirm.

I don't intend this to be something perceived as an attack on one piece of the social media pie.  I do intend it to be a warning about the velocity of our changes and implementations.  For social media to be truly transformative in our e-vironment [I'll claim that one, if no one else has dibs] it needs the focus to be on the social aspect, not the tendency to get out and market things.  In the case above, 'seeing' that the user's name wouldn't be shared, they could easily be given a message that tells them their privacy settings will keep their request from being processed.  Instead of that, the coding was done so that it would be automatic, and then pushed out to the intended recipient.  Coding to not bother people with the privacy restricted and thus meaningless information might have delayed roll-out.

I receive the updates that contain just the name Facebook User, and that they want to have me confirm I'm related.  The direct mail wants me to purchase Junior Miss registration for a daughter (Vitor must be a girl?) I don't have.  Both of them want to use a family connection - part of my social network, if you will - to further their interests.  Neither of them has a clue who the identities involved are.  The direct marketing company is using a polluted list, the social media application company isn't paying attention to their finished product.

Marketing and relationship-building are not bad, and they are what social media is poised to make a real possibility, but the one thing about social media that has to be retained if it is to rise up to the level its proponents want it to is its attachment to real connections.  When we start to treat social media in the same way we treat direct mail, we have traded six bad apples for a half-dozen rotten ones.  I enjoy social media, its creativity, the ability to stay in touch with more people, the ability to share interests and thoughts with people I have met - all of it - and I hope to try to keep its uniqueness and relevance intact as the struggle goes on to thoroughly mine its power.

Catch the Net - NGPS and T-911...


“It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly” - Isaac Asimov, as quoted on thinkexist.com


Did you know that there are multiple radios within the smartphone you're likely reading this on?  It's true.  It seems that each feature added brings another radio, because it's cheaper to put in another tiny set to do what needs to be done than to have a larger, more complex, yet tunable radio set.  In other words, if you love your Bluetooth connections, and you love your text messaging, then you already are using two different radios, and you didn't even know it.


This is shorter than the normal post, but it contain two ideas that may well bear consideration, if for no other reason than to start some dialogs.


Idea #1: I"ll call this one NGPS, which I'll define below.  You may have read about near-field communication, the low-powered radio signal that enables some interesting possibilities when devices are close to each other.  You have undoubtedly heard of GPS, the technology that allows you to trace where you are on the globe with a reasonable degree of accuracy (know that we'll never get the precision the military has, which is why our GPS units go nuts every once in a while, but you definitely take the bad with the good of knowing our folks in uniform can do what they do as accurately as possible).  Here's what happens, though.  When we want to text message each other, even if we're 10 feet away, our signal will leave our phone, hit the cell tower, be transferred to the controllers at our service provider, then relayed to the intended recipient after they are located.  It all happens fast, but there is a delay, and sometimes there is quite a substantial delay in the message delivery.  How many times have you been sitting with someone, and one or the other of you received a message the other sent sometimes hours previously?


You might think that this is just a 'teens texting each other at the mall' issue, but it isn't.  Personally, with four kids, if my wife and I didn't text each other occasionally there'd be days when we'd not hear from each other.  Even if we're in the same room, she could be dealing with the toddler and I could be dealing with the homework for a couple of them and neither one of us would know if the other wrote the check for the yearbook.


Do you know what causes the delay?  Take your pick... tower troubles, network troubles, weather, excessive messages to deliver, red button anomalies (where someone new wanders in, and instead of asking what the red button shuts down goes ahead and hits it first).  Text messaging is not some sort of guarantee, and it runs into a lot of competition.  Even with things operating at different frequencies, there is competition for resources, etc.  As smartphones become even more prevalent, it is just going to get worse.


Enter NGPS (I searched on this one, and didn't find it used this way, so... DIBS!!!).  This isn't Motorola's Next Generation Public Safety, it stands for Neighborhood GPS.  Here's the scoop - we know that devices can locate each other using Bluetooth, and wireless networks, and, and, and, but the communication we depend on so much still has to be routed through the whole system.  So, we can find each other, and we can know exactly where we are, but we still have to go through the switching equipment.  Why?


Picture this... you want to text someone, and the NGPS knows you're both in the same area (there would be location-based settings, and privacy concerns, etc., but there are always those things going on), it sends the signal straight to the intended phone.  If you're farther apart, but both going through the same tower, then that local cell is where it is broadcast.  That is where the cell phone got the cell portion of its name - everything is divided into cells, and your phone coverage is delivered to the cell where you are, and when you are moving your call is transferred to the next cell, and so on.  There are a million things that would have to happen to get this done, but the largest would be the total commoditization of text messaging and other things, which would remove the different costs for different plans and carriers.  However, it could be done, as could the next idea...


Idea #2: This is called T-911.  Lately there has been a real concern about public warnings and safety systems that can broadcast messages to large groups of people, and there are a lot of companies providing the service.  Here's what is not well-known: there is no such thing as an instant text message.  You see, the model being used relies on the transmission of the text messages to the carriers, then the distribution of those messages appropriately.  That means they have to find the phones, then send the messages, and run into the same kind of delays that other text messages do.  


I'll repeat.  There is no such thing as an instant text message.  There's just too much overhead, some of it coming from the necessity to send the messages through the carrier's equipment, some of it coming fro the necessity of maintaining the lists of people subscribing, their numbers, their carriers, etc.


Why?  In my area, every Friday morning at 11:00 we hear something off in the distance - the Civil Defense siren. They run a test every week.  I didn't sign up for that notification, I didn't unsubscribe, it was - stay with me here - decided that in the interest of safety of all involved, the alerts would be broadcast to everyone within earshot.


Here is where T-911 comes in.  Going back to the way that cell phones work, there isn't a tower for AT&T, a tower for Verizon, a tower for Sprint, etc.  There is a cell tower, and the signals go through it to get to the rest of the network.  That's how you get coverage.  The distribution of the charges and such is handled behind the scenes.  All you know is that you have a signal.


For you to receive and send, you have to be known to that cell.  That means your phone is constantly transmitting its ID and location to the cell tower.  The cell tower has switching equipment on it to make sure to handshake with the next cell tower in your path, and then pass you on so you don't miss anything.  So you may change cells, but the cell tower will know about you. My solution to the issue of public warning systems is not to have an opt-in list, but to enable the broadcast of such warnings from the tower switch to the phones within that cell.  All of them.  The Civil Defense, or the local police, or EMA - whomever - would issue the alerts via a special link.  Each phone that was turned on in the cell would receive the message, should it be sent out.  Here are a couple of obvious questions, and possible answers:


1) What about someone who has their phone turned off when it's broadcast on the cell.  How would they receive the warning?  Not really a valid issue for two reasons.  The first is that, if someone has their phone turned off, there is a good likelihood that they wouldn't receive the opt-in message until after the danger has already been dealt with, or occurred to them anyway.  Just opting in to receive a message does not turn your phone on to receive a message.  The second reason is that it is possible for the text message to be opted into, sent, and still not received in a timely manner.  The delivery method is not guaranteed, therefore you can't make assumptions about its safety, or lack thereof, you can only try to improve its efficacy.  I can tell you for sure that a text message sent to all phone in a cell via the tower will be much more rapidly and thoroughly received than will the same message routed through five carriers.


2) But I have to pay for text messages, and this would force me to pay for a message I really don't want.  Not really.  If you text customer support, are you charged?  If you have a pay for use phone, you don't have to pay to call them to refill minutes.  These are administrative billing issues, not technical limitations.  You don't really think it costs your bank a whole dollar to do the electronic wizardry it takes to allow you to use another bank's ATM, do you?  In the same vein, thinking it actually costs your company anything to send a text message to you is a false assumption.  Besides all that, if the text message is blanket sent via the tower, it won't go through the carrier's equipment ANYWAY, so they wouldn't be able to bill you for it, even if they wanted to.


3) This is America!  If I don't want a text message, I shouldn't have to get one!  Hold your jets, then give me the procedure to opt out of hearing the fire alarm in your house, or your place of business (other than taking out the battery, which is illegal).  We live in a republic, not a democracy (check my facts - in a democracy, a true one, there'd be some sort of voting going on as to whether or not to roll the fire trucks to fight the fire, and then you could opt in if you wanted to, or decline), and there are certain things that are done for the greater good of the masses, even though they are a pain sometimes.  The public safety is paramount, and for that reason we have instituted systems that annoy you with sound (the emergency public broadcasting system that interrupts your TV watching every once in a while for one - it's the same thing, since we mostly all pay for TV, whether via cable, satellite or fiber).




I don't know if either of these systems will ever see the light of day, but they do present some interesting possibilities for sure.

Have a Carbonated Beverage and a Pleasant Facial Expression


"It shouldn't surprise you that a system that is designed to be manufactured as cheaply as possible is designed with no security constraints whatsoever." - Peter Neumann, as quoted on thinkexist.com


This is a quick design note. I was observing a process taking place during a break today, and it contained a couple of reminders about design. The issue is that we have the desire to go to a cashless system of paying for things. Noble, but problematic, because we are held hostage by physical constraints.  The eventual goal is to eliminate the use of currency, but until the physical problems that attend swiping of cards are overcome, that won't work.

Of course, as normally happens with these types of things, one thought leads to another.  The following are the two design reminders, followed by a chain of questions.  If you develop any of these ideas into an actionable business plan, or a profitable invention, I'll need a T-shirt, and maybe a steak dinner or something of that sort (as well as due attribution and a spot on the patent form...). 


Reminder #1 - If it's digital, yet has a physical component, then it's not purely digital, and the mechanical design points and weaknesses need to be addressed: I saw a student attempting to use his credit card to purchase a soda from a machine. It took him a couple of minutes to get the card to swipe. I don't know if the stripe was dirty, or the reader was dirty, but it was an interesting process to see him get it to work.  At one point I thought he was just going to give up, but it finally worked after he cleaned it repeatedly, swiped it multiple times, and generally did the things one normally does when something that should work doesn't.  I had $1.25 in quarters, and purchased a soda in 10 seconds.  Thinking about that famous commercial promoting credit card use versus a check, I thought it especially humorous, but it did lead me to some questions.


Question #1 for the designers of that soda vending system: Why not include a keypad so that if the card won't swipe correctly the user can enter their card number and PIN?  how much more does a swiper with a keypad cost, over time?


Question #2 for the designers of that soda vending system: Why is the quicktap method not already deployed?  It's in the stores, and would get the machines set up to be usable far into the future.  And, it would eliminate the scanning problem.


Question #1 for the credit card system designers: Why is there not an authentication scheme that uses a digitally-stored fingerprint as the PIN?  The technology to read fingerprints exists widely, and (I'm thinking the scanning of fingerprints could be a service provided by all Visa-issuing banks to record fingerprints for users who are in a different area from their home banks).  The payoff would then be nearly theft-proof cards that could be used if the swiper works, if it's entered via a keypad with PIN, if it's entered via keypad with a fingerprint, or if it's tapped.


Question #1 for the makers of soda machines: Why is there no optional machinery to use pennies?  Smaller machines wouldn't have room, but I don't know how many times I've seen a student have enough to get something with pennies, but not with silver coins.  This might not be really valid in a scenario of a machine inside a hotel, but for machines on a high school or college campus, there would be interest.  Perhaps a joint venture with CoinStar?




Reminder #2 - If a cashless system is truly desired, there needs to be a web-based kiosk site: I was recently in a hotel with a business center.  I used the system to print out some documents, and the system there was one where you receive a PIN, which you then enter when you are beside the printer and it prints out your document.  Those systems have been around a while, but I had yet to use one, and so when I finally did, a new fusion hit me.  Ordering something from your office could be a dual-click purchase (one-click is already owned by Amazon).



Question #3 for the designers of that soda vending system: Why not borrow a page out of the eBook phenomenon and allow people to register a credit card, then when they want to order up a soda they just do so online?  They coudl even have a one-time use PIN sent to their cell phones, which they then enter on the pad when they're at the machine.  The stock of the machine could easily be controlled remotely, and when one is purchased, the ones on hand could be decremented by one so that there is enough reserved to fulfill the outstanding purchases, all the make sure that they'd not get to the machine only to find their selection was not there.


Question #4 for the designers of that soda vending system: Expanding on the previous thought, why is it that the machine itself doesn't have its own cell number, and when someone receives a text message telling them their PIN, they could alternately go stand in front of the machine, then click a return link that would send the vend signal to the machine's number, and they'd not need to do anything other than click a single link?

Question #2 for the credit card system designers: Bridging off of the previous question, why not have a 'text for code' system where a card holder could text message a number, and a one-time use number could be sent to their phone that could then be used anywhere?  A pre-set limit could be set up, and the number could be entered on the keypad at the cash register.

Question #1 for the makers of checkout scanners, a thought, really, inspired by the above, but not directly connected: Why is it not yet possible to have a smartphone display a bar code on the screen that was sent to it via a credit card's one-time use request system.  The last scan of the grocery order would be the payment.  No swiping, no validation code to enter, no ZIP code to enter, etc. 

In Memoriam: Kenneth Olsen

“We felt quite confident with the way we were building computers. We knew we could do almost anything we wanted to do, but the big limitation was the memory.” – Ken Olsen


This past weekend Kenneth Olsen, inventor and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation passed away. While often ridiculed for a comment made about the lack of desire for personal computers, his thoughts and intentions led to some of the computing concepts still in use today, and served as some good iron for big iron to be sharpened by.

One of the most fundamental differences between the computers put out in Digital's heyday and others is that they were 6-bit systems, instead of the 8-bit systems we are familiar with. Six bits gave just enough space to define a letter, and I'm assuming the thought process can't totally be separated from his roots, it seemed to him that it was better to borrow a register for the occasional number than to waste two bits for each letter. Practical realities and a monster machine called the s/360 turned that idea into a blip on the radar of history, but he fought the good fight anyway. In a past job I actually was able to use a DECWriter, and it reminds me of the impressions I got of Mr. Olsen while doing a research paper - it was definitely not the newest machine, but it was well-defined for what it did, and worked exceptionally well.

For those who may have more than a passing interest (and you should, not because I authored the paper, but because if you have no knowledge of history, you will be doomed to repeat it, the following link will take you to a PDF version of a biographical research paper I did on him a few years ago as part of my work in the Center for Information and Communication Sciences. While researching I tried to contact Mr. Olsen for an interview, and the closest I got was a very nice gatekeeper at one of the offices at MIT's Alumni Association who promised to pass the request on. That may be his most remarkable invention, a bubble of privacy in the era of everyone being privy to everyone else's business.

Kenneth Olsen: A Man of Faith and Science, Letters and Labs - Controversial, Blunt, and Quite Possibly More Accurate Than Ever Imagined

Cross-posting: ECM Where?: Part 4 of 5 http://cicsworld.org/blogs/ctuite/ This may be the longest blog post in the series, but there also may be a few more ways of considering some of the practicalities of ECM than normal as well. Links to the previous posts in the series are on the right, and the Douglas Adams (stay tuned) finale is coming up next week.

"The mercenaries will always beat the draftees, but the volunteers will crush them both." - Chuck Noll, as quoted by Tony Dungy in "Uncommon"

It's been a while since the last Sophie-tech, so to review, I have a three year-old daughter, and when she was born it brought about a thought: she was born into an era of unprecedented technology growth - the first time I interfaced with a computer was around the fifth grade, the first time she did was via the monitoring before she was born - and I thought it would be good to observe how she naturally grows into what I have to adapt into via an occasional series.  This one has to do with smartphones.

Despite all the visions of handset-less smart communicators, embedded networking chips and all the other sci-fi thoughtwork, our production usage smartphones now involve basically two types of user interface - the keyboard and the touchscreen.  I'm discounting voice commands for now, since there are none currently in wide-spread use that are anywhere close enough to be able to be accurate. 

Sophie's reactions -

Risk: this is the child who dialed 9-1-1 on my previous cell phone,  so she's already known to be a button afficionado, and she maintains that consistently.  The risk of her dialing the emergency number is reduced on the button-based interface, but only because there are a lot of buttons.  On the touch screen interface she was able to wreak a new and different kind of havoc, because everywhere you touch there's a click and something happens.  She managed to fill my screen with icons and make a couple of calls to random contacts.

Rewards: This one was surprising. Smartphones with touchscreens specialize in providing large splashy and colorful graphics, so you'd assume that interface would be the toddler's choice.  You'd be wrong,  as I was.  Sophie prefers the buttons of the keyboard to the larger screen. She seems to somehow derive value from the tactile feedback of feeling the button go down.

Verdict: touchscreens come in second place.

How is that possible?  I'll put my 2 cents worth.  As humans we enjoy having our senses engaged when we do things.  If we listen to music we like to see pictures - hence MTV, at least before unreality TV.  If we eat a meal at a restaurant, we like to see the flames leap up as the fire brings the aroma out of the steaks.

A touchscreen is very sensitive,  and due to the way it works you can accidentally do a large number of things with an errant swipe, or by remaining too long on one area. 

The button-centric design isn't as flexible, but provides feedback and a greater degree of control.  There is no approximate with a keypad.

I actually prefer the touchscreen for its resolution and the flexibility, but there is an underlying nod toward the need to engage more than just the eyes - the haptic response. Even the hybrids that use both are providing the two ways because there is not a clearly superior method. This one boils down to preferences and not really on the technology. It looks like two methods are here to stay, at least until the augmented reality implants with linkage to the nervous system.

Word of Thumb: Product Placement Gone Viral, Or Am I Just Showing Off

"Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has." - William S. Burroughs, as quoted on thinkexist.com


This is a little outside of my normal posting style, but is connected, especially to the blogosphere posts from one of my other blogs (shameless cross-blog promotion), to something I wanted to write on, and was now inspired by FINALLY being able to accomplish something that I have wanted to accomplish since last October.  More on that in a sec.

A lot of things are written today about social media, but it seems a topic more people know about than do.  It's a buzzword, which is a shame.  People like to talk about it, but still for the average user it is halfheartedly-implemented, which means they stop right where their keyboard does.  That's okay to do for some, but it barely scratches the surface of what is out there and can be done when you add more than just reading and typing into the mix.

October, 2010, brought an interesting epiphany for me, because I was brought more into the SM (aside: social media needs a rename - if abbreviated that way the human mind will slip an errant "&" in there...) world than I had been previously.  I had the opportunity to be part of the FlipCam Team at IBM's Information on Demand (IOD) conference.  Disclaimer: I'm not an IBM employee, just a user and big fan of their Enterprise Content Management software. My task there was to carry around a FlipCam and use it to provide video snippets of "A Day in the Life of An ECM Attendee" that could be turned into video promos/summaries and placed on the conference's YouTube channel at the end of each day.

Here's the kicker: that's the extent of the requirements (other than to get signed releases if we filmed someone as an interview, or focus of the segment).  There was no script, at least at first.  It was just a collection of individuals, each with a separate focus at the conference, providing their perspectives.

So far this sounds like general marketing and promo stuff, but it's different, and more powerful.  There were no scripts from the folks running the program, but in beginning to think about how best to do what I needed to do, and in trying to thnk about how to make something engaging, since they were letting me run around with a new tech toy, I came up with plans for what and when I wanted to film.  I then followed these sort of short scripts, with asides and other things that I had to think about, and wanted to think about.

It was fun working, but doing something I liked, and it was related to my actual job.  It was exciting because it provided an outlet to creativity and an audience for that creativity.  It allowed me to interact with what I was doing and the things that were happening there at the conference, and to create new ways to tell the story about my particular corner of the world. 

At that point it was just footage, but the social part came in when I sent Tweets and blogged about it, with links to the videos the team was shooting, it allowed me to share with an ever-broadening group of folks.  When the links were seen by co-workers on campus, they forwarded them on to others via e-mail, and so on and so on.  The kicker: IBM gained promotion within an audience which included a personal introduction from someone the consumers would at least passingly care about.  In the same project, I gained a voice and creative outlet, and IBM gained representation in a marketing aspect for both the conference, and their software products.  Symbiosis...

So to the title of this post.  Social media gives us all both opportunities to gain voices, and opportunities to gain marketing exposure for the things we do, or are involved in.  In traditional media, if you see a real label, the manufacturer has paid to have it appear.  With social media, however, there is no placement, just glimpses into real things happening in real life.  I had so much fun doing the FlipCam stuff that I got interested in possibly doing more of the same type of thing using my cell phone's video capability.  I hunted around for free tools (I'll buy full versions as I do more of this, but until I find out which things work well...) to do the translations, and the editing, and to get the time, but in the end all of those things came together and I was able to put video I shot into this blog post.  Again, it's not an IBM commercial, it's kind of like my first FlipCam video without the FlipCam.  It's not product placement, but it winds up being a mention of something I do like (the smarter planet initiative), delivered by my favorite toddler when we talked. Here's the story, with a final point below the video:

I brought my older kids each a flashlight from the conference as a 'thanks for not tying your mother up and throwing a raging party while I was safely a couple thousand miles away' present, but for the toddler I bought a little T-shirt.  When I got home, she recognized the letters IBM and asked me what else it said.  I told her, "Let's build a smarter planet," and she repeated it back to me.  It was spontaneous, and cute, and though I had to ask her to say it again after I took a second to turn my camera on, it wasn't scripted.  The lighting was bad, the audio was bad and it wasn't a commercial, it was just a cute moment in which was also some portion of a message about something, now captured in a format that can be used within social media, as well as sent to grandparents and whatnot.

Final point: social media provides a new level of connection between the consumers and the producers.  Today a company that does not engage in an open social discourse is at a disadvantage.  There are a lot of old-guard 'command and control' types who want to be able to script, massage, filter and otherwise align social media into a one-way communication medium.  That can't be successful, because in an age where so much is digital, we have evolved relationships to have a cybernetic component, and most of us want a baseline level of honesty in our relationships. For instance, in one of my clips I mentioned it was exhausting to go to IOD because of the amount of information there is to digest.  'Command and control' says to change that to being energized because of the same factors; social media says it wants to know the straight story of how it was, PLUS know that when you catch up on sleep your brain lights up and applies all you learned. 

With a journey into the electronic we have lost some of the visceral, and by allowing something in that could in some way be taken as bad, the honesty quotient for the work was raised.  Honesty means that when something is wrong we talk about it, when times are good we talk about it, and we grow old and develop together.  And when we have something funny on YouTube, that sometimes promotes things that we are interested in.  I'm sorry to report that a lot of initiatives, and more of those in the education space than you'd expect, are being done in the wrong manner.

Alvin Toffler and the Word of the Decade, 30 Years Later

"The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write. They are those that can not learn, unlearn, relearn." - Alvin Toffler, per a listing of his quotes on Ask.com

Thirty years ago, Toffler coined the term 'prosumer', meaning that the user of the future would be both a producer and a consumer of content. At the time he created that, it hadn't been three years since Kenneth Olsen declared that there'd never be a need for anyone to have a computer in their home. There was no such thing as a smart phone.  There was no internet.  There was no Cisco Systems, and Microsoft was spelled Micro-soft. The closest thing to YouTube was the rerunning of Candid Camera on one of the three national networks, and the only shared music at the time was via radio, on American Bandstand, or on Lawrence Welk.  Online meant that electricity was flowing.

As I reflect on the technology in use today, at the connectedness, at the removal of physical barriers to the storage and use of data, it's hard to imagine a time when we all WEREN'T prosumers.  What has happened is that we have removed the barriers to production and marketing that used to exist.  Where once a network of brick and mortar stores were needed to sell a large amount of stock, a listing of potential materials for sale can be placed on a website with ordering and production taking place simultaneously, taking some of the guesswork out of the manufacturing arena. 

We have gone past the physical layer into the logical layer of the way things work, going from being users of specific solutions to being users of services which we simultaneously provide to others in some way.  If you remember the widespread rollout of touch tone telephone service, many of the telephones in ue had a switch to be used to select whether the particular area where the phone was plugged in had pulse or tone service.  The process to move from pulse to tone service took decades, and may or may not have been hindered by the machinations within the telecommunications space, depending on the data you look at, and your personal bent.

Contrast that with the change a few years ago to digital only signal for cellular telephones.  There was no generation of phones where you manually selected which to use, the functionality was in a few circuits, but mostly there was a large-scale change, enabled by the fact that the phones themselves would generally be replaced within a couple of years, as opposed to the landline telephones, which lasted decades.  We went from the conventional, hands-off landlines to the more configurable cellular model, and all of a sudden there were more and more things that could be done, and offered to the consumers and by the consumers.

Now we are squarely in the age of the smartphone, which is where the thoughts here originated.  I think we are crossing the last frontier between the producers and the consumers, the final barrier to being able to do what we want to do in the way we want to do it, and I think there is a strong correlation between it and the way that computers themselves will be used.  We have crossed the barrier of the operating system from being a product in and of itself to being a means of doing what we need to do, malleable and useful instead of limiting and mostly there just to do things we don't understand.

I was a die hard Blackberry user ever since the forced switch from analog signal (truth be told I preferred the analog because the coverage seemed better - something not surprising since we know that analog signal has a more gradual decline than a digital signal, and your coverage now plummets at the edges), and the tools that were available for it were okay, for the most part.  It was a closed operating system, and though you could develop applications for it, it wasn't something that could be easily broached.

I watched the advent and ascension of the iPhone with more than a little interest, and was impressed by the breadth of applications available for it, but it was still a closed operating system, with tight controls over who was allowed to distribute applications for the dear old iOS.  Even so, just having an operating system that would allow innovation and creativity in development was appealing to say the least.  A closed system, though neat, and combined with the lack of features to support more worklike applications, was not enough to lure me away from the closed system I was already used to.  The hardware was impressive, as was the software, but the closedness was not to my liking.

Enter the Android operating system.  I watched with great interest the development of an open source operating system for a smartphone, as well as the corresponding hardware developments (not to mention Motorola's catchy Droid advertisements).  It finally seemed a choice was emerging that was both rich in features and open enough to offer flexibility in creating your own applications when others wouldn't do. 

One thing that was striking to me was the tone of several of the applications,  Instead of having things done for you already, several of them had a utility flavor to them to allow users to do a lot of the same things that they would on a regular computer.  As an example, I'm attaching a link to a ringtone I created to allow me to indulge a bit of gadget envy because I chose a Samsung phone instead of a Motorola, and so I couldn't really use the Droid ringtone, since it is a trademark, even though it is a great combination of feature and advertising.  So, for your amusement, should you be so inclined, and because my sister wanted a copy, here's the link to the Android ringtone: Android Ringtone  You'll need to download it and place it in the folder where your ringtones reside, and if it doesn't work for you shoot me an e-mail to charles.tuite@gmail.com and I'll send you a zipped file.

You'll notice that the file is sitting in a folder in Google Docs, which is something for later exploration.  You'll also notice that I was finally enabled to be a full prosumer, producing something I wanted via a tool that I consumed, but also providing what I produced to others.  The rub, if you're an old-style capitalist of the traditional ilk, is that I provided the tone to you for the same cost as the application I downloaded which allowed me to do it.  It was free.

The point is that only the old-style iron out the door, volume-based, quantity over quality capitalists find that to be a problem.  I propose that for a prosumer-based economy we need a prosumer-based capitalism system, where the value placed on a device or application is not derived from the ability of the producer to drive the market, not derived from the ability to achieve lock in in some way (such as the OS), and not derived from things accomplished decades ago.  Instead, I believe value that is delivered successfully should be the driver of capitalization, and that delivery of that value and the revenue streams may not need to be delivered from the same place.  This is a relatively new model and is ripe with risk until it gets fully figured out, and it is where the next innovation lies. 

With our feet leaving the ground as things move to the cloud, and the reduction of other barriers, it's time we had a new system anyway.  If we get out ahead of the curve and create that system, then we'll be on it when the rest of the traditional model is sent out to pasture, like the pulse dialing, analog cell phone, and whatever other examples there may be.  Consider this: you can find blacksmiths in almost any area of the United States, but carriage makers really don't exist anymore.Why? Because carriages were locked into a certain operating system, while blacksmiths made material for carriages, but also nails, and custom iron goods, and lamps, and fixtures, and equipment for Renaissance fairs, and, and, and...  Both of them used raw materials, only one of them used raw materials well and in a flexible manner.  Think about it.