Heading to Chennai for a week

April and I are off to Chennai to teach in an IDLO program on microfinance.

No, I don’t know much about microfinance (April does!), but I do know a bit about social media, so I’ll be running a session in the program on that.

If you know of any interesting uses of social media in that region of Asia (participants will be coming from the whole region), particularly in areas of development, finance or local bootstrapping (self-development?), please email me, or leave comments here. I’m collecting stories.

 

Windows Mobile is one way Microsoft can’t innovate

I’m not sure how many articles I’ve read over the years that not only say that Windows Mobile sucks, but detail the same reasons why: putting a tiny version of Windows on small screens is an idiotic idea, no matter how comfortable it’s supposed to make those zillions of Windows users; burying important commands behind layers of menus is similarly egregious on tiny devices.

Every click matters immensely (something I once dubbed the “Law of Convenience“).

My favorite of these articles is a November 2007 David Pogue piece in the NY Times reviewing the T-Mobile Shadow smartphone. Pogue spends half the article waxing about the beautiful hardware, then writes the priceless paragraph: “But then you turn the thing on.” Then he reams Windows Mobile 6 (um, isn’t Microsoft supposed to get things right after version 3?).

Pogue’s was far from the first article to pillory Windows Mobile or its predecessor, good old WinCE, which was born back in 1996.

This week BusinessWeek’s Olga Kharif writes another piece that says roughly the same thing, and ends with an overly optimistic kicker: “Users of Windows Mobile will share some of that delight before long, if Microsoft has anything to say about it.”

Some of her optimism probably comes from Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Danger, the makers of the Sidekick. Alas, that’s not the right move for Windows Mobile at all.
I was a loyal Sidekick II user for several years. When I first got this thing that looked like a Transformered bar of Lever 2000 soap, it was fabulous. The keyboard was better than anything on the market. The Web browser was beautifully implemented, flowing page contents pretty elegantly into a small screen and letting you roll from link to link with the (also elegantly implemented) roll and click interface buttons. The UI thought through your work flow wonderfully. It seemed the next thing you wanted to do was always under your thumb on the scroll wheel.

Then a couple of years of progress rolled by, and Danger stood still. At GPRS speeds, I never used the browser. Only in emergencies. Apps? I got a couple nice apps early in the process, then never really got more. There was no organic market for them, no open platform, no innovation. And Danger didn’t innovate a whit on their initial UI. I never upgraded to the III, because it was just as hefty as before and didn’t have any great new features.

A piece of Danger split off a few years ago to found Android, developing an open-source phone platform. Brilliant. That’s what Google bought and is now in the process of rolling out with hundreds of developers and multiple manufacturers. They’ve got buzz and energy.

I don’t see how what was left of Danger changes Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. Can’t see it. Two radically different phone UIs and user experiences, tuned to completely different markets (biz vs. bling), both closed to modification or improvement. Programmer culture clash. A UI camel. And I don’t see Microsoft abandoning such a long investment in a small-system OS.

Windows Mobile has staked out some market share, but that’s falling now as the iPhone zooms on by, and I don’t see a recovery path. The WIMP interface has been tired for a long time already on desktops, and was never suited to handhelds. Who sold Microsoft on that congenitally flawed dogma I don’t know, but they should be regretting that decision.

Meanwhile, I’ll happily use my iPhone, await the new iPhone apps under way, and wonder how I’m going to choose between an Android platform and what I have today.

 

An iPhone grumble grumble (ok, two)

What happened to the nifty link between addresses in my Google Calendar and the Google Maps app on my iPhone?

Once upon a time, I’d fill in the location data for an appointment on the Web. Easy. Then I’d look up the appointment on my iPhone (using the mobile Google iPhone apps), click on the “map” link, and it would launch the iPhone’s map app, where it was a piece of cake to get directions from “current location” (thanks, Apple!).

Except something’s messed up now. When I click on that same link now, it takes that browser window to the Web version of Google Maps, which over EDGE takes a good two years to paint. Then all my easy navigation doesn’t work anymore. Grrr.

The other grumble is really to ATT. Yesterday I drove from downtown SF to San Mateo on 280, one of the two major thruways serving the Peninsula. I don’t drive this daily, and I seldom have a call going all the way down, but yesterday I was on one call during most of the drive, and I fell off it three times. My signal dropped to zero, I lost the call, then I had to wait at least a minute each time to regain signal.

Really, ATT people. If you can’t overpower 280 so that calls never drop, what can you do?

 

Interesting sessions on the future of life and the Net

I’m at the Stanford Legal Futures Conference, which today adopted a FOO Camp approach that, in truth, isn’t that FOOish. Last night they posted the schedule, which has multiple panels with five or six smart people on each. OK.

But that doesn’t mean the sessions aren’t full of great stuff.

One small snippet: Jay Rosen quoted Raymond Williams saying “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” Then he proceeded to draw a distinction between inferring consumer behavior and following people’s actions, where action is what people do when they exercise their freedom.

It’ll take me a while to digest this, but it gives me a useful way to explain a trend I’m seeing, which is the slow death of traditional market segment analysis and the inference of behaviors in order to run marketing campaigns.

What replaces it? Good listening, fast following, smart adaptation. Segments vanish because their assumptions break all the time. Micro-niches emerge as people from different segments act in similar ways. Some grow really large; most stay small.

 

Dan Pink’s new career advice — in manga!

Over the years, Dan Pink has written many pieces that I’ve found truly inspiring, from his 1997 Fast Company cover story Free Agent Nation to his more recent book A Whole New Mind.

Now he’s going to offer career advice in a whole new form: manga.  You can sample the first section of The Adventures of Johnny Bunko here (pdf),  or read a short BusinessWeek review. The theory, I guess, is that people don’t read long books anymore, so it’s time to deliver material to them in as accessible a format as possible.

I’m a huge fan of visual information and graphic works, from Understanding Comics to Fun Home and Persepolis, so go, Dan!

 

TED’s been barcamped!

Heard from Shannon today that a self-organizing alternative to TED, the supremely expensive annual conference, is also taking place in Monterey this weekend.

The new event, BIL (get it?), has a site and a wiki (BIL = Beauty, Intelligence, Levity; TED = Technology, Entertainment, Design).

In similar fashion a few years back,  Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, Ross Mayfield, Matt Mullenweg, Tantek Celik and others started the first barcamp the same weekend as O’Reilly Media’s invitation-only FOO (Friends Of O’Reilly) Camp. Now barcamps are popping up all over, making open-space-style events commonplace.

Local duties will keep me from BIL, but I love the idea.

 

Interviews of note

If you want a quick take on the top interviews here at FastForward, check out:

• Sandy Kemsley
• David Weinberger
• Liv Brahin
• Jim McGee (to be posted shortly)
• Rob Paterson

 

Doing video interviews from Fast’s user conference

I’m almost done with three days of video interviews from Norwegian enterprise search vendor Fast’s annual user conference. I’m doing what David Weinberger did last year (you can see his interviews here). This year, David gave a great talk.

Other speakers here include Don Tapscott, JP Rangaswami, Andrew McAfee and John Hagel. We’re interviewing them all, plus some bloggers (several of whom I’ve known and admired for a long time but have hardly met f2f, such as Jon Husband, Jim McGee and Robert Paterson) and some attendees.

It’s been a fun and informative conference, made more fun through the work with a small team (Sara, Greg, Ben, Janet) to create these interviews, which are being posted to the Fast Forward blog.

 

Clay Shirky will be our guest on next Monday’s Yi-Tan call

Even though the topics of crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, social media and self-organization have been in the air a bunch lately, I have found few people who can break through the surface layers of what’s happening and also explain their insights to people in simple, palpable terms. Clay’s the best.

As luck would have it, Clay has finished his first book, Here Comes Everybody, which is due on a bookshelf near you shortly (you can pre-order it on Amazon). Clay will be our guest next Monday for the weekly Yi-Tan Tech Community Call.  For more details on the call, head here.

The Yi-Tan calls last a mere 40 minutes and take place every Monday at 10:30am Pacific time. If you’d like to join this call (or future calls), please email me.

 

Viz afterthoughts: manifesti, missing tools and what would Leonard do?

I won’t be able to attend tomorrow’s concluding day at VizThink, so I’m debriefing now, at the end of a fun and brain-filling day.

It would be wonderful if this collection of graphics wizards could come together to frame out some manifesti. What do we believe? What do we want?

One such manifesto, created by an IDEO employee, has brought new ethics and sustainability considerations into the design process: the Designers Accord. That’s pretty ambitious.

We could aim a little lower. I’d like a manifesto to build better tools for visualization. My persistent pet peeve in this domain is the lack of simple, open tools that would bring MacDraw into the 21st Century. Picture a vector graphics program that easily helps you create conceptual diagrams, then helps you place them online, wherever you want them. And does all this with clickable elements, so your graphics are interactive.

One Web app I’ve found that’s close is Gliffy. Yesterday I signed up for their pro account (a whopping $30 a year) and started using it more. Not bad, but still not as swift and intuitive as MacDraw was for me from 1984 to 1992, when I switched to PCs.

The neighboring problem is how expensive graphic tablets and tablet computers are. If you’re really going to draw, you might as well draw directly on your computer, and that’s expensive now.

On the graphic tablet front, one of the best offers today is Wacom’s Cintiq. Their entry level device is the 12WX, which retails at about $1K.  And it’s 4.4 lbs, practically the weight of my PC. Ouch.  Before I bought my current ThinkPad widescreen, I priced their X series tablet. For a $1K premium, I would have had a slower processor and smaller screen (thus having to get an external monitor), and I would have had to purchase an external dock or optical drive. So a $1500 penalty, at least. For a pretty thick tablet.

I was so hoping Apple would scale the iPhone up about 6x screen size, so that could be my tablet. I don’t really want the Air, I want a new device that has the feel, accessibility and connectivity of the iPhone (ok, faster connectivity, please) with more screen real estate.

One last post-Viz thought. About two years back, I very much enjoyed reading Leonard Shlain’s book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.  Shlain’s very controversial thesis is that the linear alphabet killed off the balanced, god-and-goddess birth myths that existed and replaced them with monotheistic, paternalistic and angry gods. While killing off the divine feminine, they also killed off images. Shlain believes we’re now in the process of re-integrating images and the feminine after millennia of being pushed aside. I tend to agree.

So I wonder what Shlain would have seen at VizThink. What he’d have thought of the many practitioners working hard to make visual art speak as loudly as the words we’re all accustomed to.

 

Nice ethics panel at VizThink

On stage now: four graphics editors who’ve worked at Time, Newsweek, Wired, Conde Nast and many more publications, talking about their experiences with graphics that blew it. Check out this page on the conference wiki.

It’s great to hear frank stories of the difficult choices the media faces, and how they resolve those choices for good or bad.

 

Using photophlow as I blog and tweet (and Brain) and keep real brain from popping

photophlow is one of the way-coolest apps I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s sort of a perfect way to talk about this VizThink conference.

The app asks for your Flickr ID, then offers a beautiful way for multiple people to talk together (using an elegant built-in chat) over shared media. Way elegant Web 2.0 app.

Then photophlow lets you add account info for IM, email, twitter and tumblr for example. So I can tweet about a photo from photophlow. Very sweet. And of course, I’m adding thoughts to my Brain all this time.

I said “sort of” because there aren’t enough photos uploaded from VizThink yet to Flickr (tagged vizthink08), so a few of us are merrily chatting away, but we don’t have enough material to talk over.

Email me if you’d like an invite into photophlow to chat about this.

 

My other table neighbor…

On my right is Alan Stillman, CEO of Kwikpoint, which makes handy fold-out visual language translators. If you travel much, you’ve wanted these or even bought something similar.

One of his translators is for medical emergencies, used by emergency crews all over. You can instantly see how useful it is.  Nice guy, too!