Archive for December, 2009

TecTrend of the Year

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

It was not in medicine or biotech, where the news has been on the political front, and the magic bullets of genomics are proving elusive.

It was not in search. Bing avoided being scoffed at, but it has not upended search or put any real scare into Google. Wolfram Alpha never understood my queries the handful of times I played with it.

Social media are in contention. This was the year that Facebook and Twitter made the big time. My brother in law offered an alternate view, unkindly calling Facebook ‘AOL for the 21st century.’ Sites that depend on coolness are always at risk from a newer, cooler site, but having an online social presence has gone mainstream, like email a decade ago.

Mobility has also gone mainstream, and the iPhone edges out the Kindle as Gadget of the Year – not its debut, but the year you couldn’t avoid it if you wanted to. But as one commentary noted (alas, I forgot to bookmark it so I can’t link it), the more powerful smartphones become, the more they become just another way to go online. Mobile will merge into the Internet.

Which makes this the year of the Cloud. It isn’t a gadget, and it doesn’t have the pop culture visibility of social media, because cloud computing is inherently a back end technology. Most of the time we don’t know, care, or think about where our applications and data are stored, only that we can get at them (and other people can’t).

But as I’ve suggested previously, mobility reinforces the push toward the cloud. So long as you only have one computer, local storage is simple and convenient. But once you also have a mobile device, you want handy access to your apps and files – meaning they have to be available to you online, and it no longer really matters where they are stored, only that they are secure.

So I designate cloud computing as our official TecTrend of the Year for 2009. Stay on top of industry news with TecTrends Reporters, and you won’t have to wait for another New Year’s Eve to know next year’s trends.

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Posted in Cloud Computing, Mobile Internet | 2 Comments »

Murdoch versus Google: The Future of Content

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

A column by Richard Morgan in The Deal reports on a recent Australian TV interview in which Rupert Murdoch railed against free online content, and threatened to delist all his newspapers’ content from Google.

This was throwing red meat to blogs and forums, and the uproar was as predictable as it was entertaining. Rupert Murdoch is not a beloved figure, best known for hard edged politics and less than highbrow journalism. If the New York Post vanishes from my Google results I won’t miss it.

In contrast, unless you are a publisher or a rival search engine, what’s not to like about Google? We use it constantly, it gives pretty good results, and we don’t pay a dime. Even the ads are unobstrusive.

All the same, of course, Murdoch has a point. Whatever you think of his content, quality content is expensive to produce. And as a content creator myself I’d certainly like to be paid for mine.

But Murdoch also says ‘we shouldn’t have had it free all this time,’ and here he is wrong. If online news content weren’t free, for the most part we wouldn’t be paying for it – we simply wouldn’t be reading it. (There are exceptions for specialized content, as from Murdoch’s own Wall St. Journal.)

I read online news much the same way I read print magazines at my local library branch or Barnes & Noble. I’ll grab half a dozen magazines and thumb through them, reading any interesting articles, then toss the issue aside.

Online, it’s a series of Firefox tabs I work my way through, but I’m no more loyal to the sources I’m reading online than to the stack on a library table. My ‘loyalty’ goes to the library, or to Firefox, not the publications they make available.

When Salon, Slate, and the NYT tried to put content behind a subscription wall I simply went elsewhere. So did most of their readers, which is why the paywalls were abandoned.

But I still subscribe to a dead tree paper that thumps onto my driveway every morning, just as I buy books even though I could check them out of the library.

For this reason the uproar of publishers over Google Books also strikes me as wrongheaded. I use Google Books regularly. But it doesn’t replace book buying, it replaces the library/bookstore easy chair (and Interlibrary Loan for books not readily available). The excisions forced by publishers are as needless as they are annoying.

Print, I suspect, is far from dead. As the column linked above notes, 48 percent of American adults still read a print paper, and subscriptions are holding up surprisingly well.

This does not solve the problem of online content. Perhaps advertisers will realize that there is more to ads than click-throughs. (They pay plenty for TV ads, and no one clicks on those.)

In the longer term, I suspect we will evolve toward channels of content.

For books, a spectrum running from Google Books to the Kindle to hardbacks. For periodicals, perhaps, a spectrum from online to ’streaming’ print to the dead tree local paper.

Information does not want to be free, it wants to be accessible. And that is what the market, technology, and culture are gradually working their way through.

Update: An article I just came across in The Economist reports a study confirming what I called the lack of loyalty in online reading. But they gave it a better name, primly – or perhaps tartly – referring to British online news readers as  ‘shamelessly promiscuous‘ about where they go for content.

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Posted in New Media | 5 Comments »

TecTrends Reporter on Innovation: Everything Old is New Again

Monday, December 7th, 2009

The latest search technology innovation? Human intelligence. Last month I noted this article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a growing trend: Human filtering to improve information quality. The theme comes up again in an article that just crossed my desk, ‘Bing or Bust,’ by Benjamin Johnson in November’s Computers in Libraries.

Bing, says Johnson, has rediscovered categories. But his real point is not Bing versus Google. It is the continuing – and growing – relevance of traditional library skills such as classification and cataloging in cutting through the clutter to make sense of information. This is why at Information Sources a trained librarian assigns subject headings and maintains our proprietary thesaurus of metadata.

Now, on to November’s TecTrends Reporter on Innovations in Science and Technology. It covers the waterfront, as they used to say, summarizing 57 articles across the gamut of technologies. A few highlights:

  • Much to Apple’s dismay, technically sophisticated Mac fans are making ‘Hackintosh’ computers by adapting cheap netbooks to run the Mac operating system. Apple may not be happy, reports Fast Company, but firms such as the major social sites have profited by letting their customers take the lead and following where they go.
  • If you are like me, you take steel for granted as a mature, even ‘old’ technology. But I was wrong, says Industry Week. Innovations in materials science, from advanced steels to carbon fibers, have made lightweight vehicles 163 pounds lighter in just the last two years. It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile anymore, or even his steel.
  • Quantum computing has weird properties, rooted in fundamental physics, that allow quantum computers to crack a code in minutes that would take a powerful conventional computer 50 million years. (!) And, reports Baseline, they are already being tested in the laboratory, with basic models to be offered for sale in the next year.
  • Invisible ink has a long history, but according to The Economist there could be a big future for the opposite – ink that fades out after a set period of time. Potential applications would include transportation tickets, but no word on whether you can jot notes on your expired, and faded, bus transfer.
  • Carbon nanotubes could bring back spring-powered devices, according to EE World. Nanotube springs may be competitive with batteries, storing 1000 times more power for their weight than steel springs like the one in a traditional wind-up clock.

You could Google “innovations in technology” and take your chances with the first few pages of 250,000 hits. Or you can let TecTrends Reporters be your wilderness guide. At Information Sources, we read the tech press because you don’t have time.

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Posted in Meta | 3 Comments »