Sonic.net

Is this really a sustainable model? After all, Comcast offers 1.5Mbps service for a list price of $40; Sonic.net’s new offering is more than 600x faster at only twice the price.

Dane Jasper, Sonic.net’s CEO, tells me that the new fiber-to-the-home deployment is a trial and will reach about 700 homes when complete. “Honestly, only as those wrap up will we have a complete picture of the economic model,” he says. “But I believe that fast service for a low cost is possible.”

If the pilot in Sebastopol, California goes well, Sonic.net hopes to expand the service across the region.

Sonic.net

Jasper doesn’t think like a typical US Internet exec; in an interview last year, he made clear that his company tries to avoid artificial limits as a way to make more money. “The natural model when you have a simple duopoly capturing the majority of the market is segmentation: maximize ARPU [average revenue per user] by artificially limiting service in order to drive additional monthly spending. But fundamentally this is the wrong model for a service provider like us, and we have looked to Europe for inspiration… I believe that removing the artificial limits on speed, and including home phone with the product are both very exciting.”

via 1Gbps fiber for $70—in America? Yup..

If you stumble into the business section of any major newspaper this week, you are reading the same term in headline after headline. The cloud. Not a dark thing that hangs over you. But a friendly thing that watches out for you. “It just works” apparently, only this time it is called iCloud. “The truth is in the cloud” apparently. Easily said. But so much harder to do. I mean who made the internet so hard to use in the first place? But iDigress.

Apple have decided to make ‘the cloud’ a consumer category this week. Which involves motivating business journalists to explain it to consumers in advance of the new iOS 5  launch. 

This explanation from MG Seigler:

“…With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an almost tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic…”

When innovation planners, plan, they assume it is a race; where first to market has an unshakable advantage, for upwards of about 40 pct of the pie. Yet Apple who regularly schools the world on ‘what we mean by innovative’, is most often fashionably late to market. Not just gobbling what is left on the table. But making more of it to compete for.

Google, Microsoft and Amazon have been making consumer grade cloud-offerings already. In Google’s case this effort has been under way for years.

This news today from ifixit:

“…With today’s release of the first production Chromebook, the Samsung Series 5 3G, Google has officially entered the retail consumer laptop market with a device they promise will change computing forever.

Running Google’s own ChromeOS, the Series 5 Chromebook is Google’s answer to machines running monolithic operating systems, which they regard as overbearing and process intensive…”

And, Amazon announced cloud drive and cloud player months ago to consumers. With the help of Lady Gaga they have been breaking it in, and breaking their servers.

The Telegraph saw it this way at launch:

“…Amazon weren’t the first to launch such a ‘music locker’ service but they are one of the most high profile companies to do so. In the process they’ve beaten Google and Apple, who are widely expected to launch similar services soon…” 

Once again we see the conceit, that the first mover defines the rules of engagement. Reviewers, are regularly stunned by new introductions from Apple.  ’The ipod will never fix their computer business… the jesus-phone amounts to some kind of toy…the ipad is just a really big ipod touch… Perhaps that says something Apple’s cunning. Perhaps it is a statement about what innovation really is. Perhaps that speaks to the state of journalism. But we will surely look back at this week in five and ten years time. Certainly in the first two categories, at least. 

When you prefix ‘the cloud’ with the letter i, there will be no shortage of hype getting written about the event. But few pundits appear ready to explain the significance of the event itself; what happened this week, to Apple, to it’s rivals, and to the rest of us.

The whole review is really quite juicy. 

“…The brain is a belief engine. It relies on two processes: patternicity and agenticity. It finds meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. It infuses patterns with meaning, and imagines intention and agency in inanimate objects and chance occurrences. We believe before we reason. Once beliefs are formed, we seek out confirmatory arguments and evidence to justify them. We ignore contrary evidence or make up rationalizations to explain it away. We do not like to admit we are wrong. We seldom change our minds.

Our thinking is what Morgan Levy has called “intelligently illogical.” If our ancestors assumed that the wind rustling the bushes was a lion and they ran away, that wasn’t a big problem. If there really was a lion and they didn’t run away, they were in trouble. Natural selection favors strategies that make many false causal assumptions in order to not miss the true ones that are essential to survival. Superstition and magical thinking are natural processes of a learning brain. People believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things…”

three lessons from the book are:

•  Beliefs come first, reasons follow.

•  False beliefs arise from the same thought processes that our brains evolved to enable them to learn about the world.

•  Our faulty thinking mechanisms can’t be eliminated but our errors can be corrected by science.

via Science-Based Medicine » The Believing Brain.

But it also is a striking precursor of what each and every US government service is will face in the future. Perhaps the USPS is the redheaded step-child of the GAO. But the patterns are strikingly familiar in Healthcare, Emergency Services, Libraries… to name a few.  Without a long term plan to do anything but wrest costs or gain exemptions to them, one must wonder if and when Innovation will get to Washington. 

“…Its a lonely calling. “Washington is full of Carnegie and Brookings Institutes with people who can tell you every option we have in Egypt or Pakistan,” laments Herr, who has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University.

“Try and find someone who does that on the postal service. There arent many.”Yet Herr finds the USPS fascinating: ubiquitous, relied on, and headed off a cliff. Its trucks are everywhere; few give it a second thought. “Its one of those things that the public just takes for granted,” he says. “The mailman shows up, drops off the mail, and thats it.

“He is struck by how many USPS executives started out as letter carriers or clerks. He finds them so consumed with delivering mail that they have been slow to grasp how swiftly the services financial condition is deteriorating. “We said, Whats your 10-year plan? ” Herr recalls. “They didnt have one.”

via The postal service is running out of options – Business – US business – Bloomberg Businessweek – msnbc.com.

Sir, think about this: Syria has banned all foreign networks, like CNN and the BBC, but if you go to YouTube and type in “Dara’a” you will see the most vivid up-to-date video of the Syrian regime’s crackdown — all shot with cellphones or flip-cams by Syrians and then uploaded to YouTube or to newly created Web sites like Sham News Network. Nothing stays hidden anymore.

The second trend we see in the Arab Spring is a manifestation of “Carlson’s Law,” posited by Curtis Carlson, the C.E.O. of SRI International, in Silicon Valley, which states that: “In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.” As a result, says Carlson, the sweet spot for innovation today is “moving down,” closer to the people, not up, because all the people together are smarter than anyone alone and all the people now have the tools to invent and collaborate.

The regime of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was just too dumb and slow to manage the unrest. The Tahrir revolutionaries were smart but chaotic, and without leadership.

via Advice for China – NYTimes.com.

It looks like a wonderful read. It would be interesting to see more retr0-inquiries across the many sub-disciplines of design, in the canon. Perhaps there some already exist? Any contenders worth mentioning?

“Design is an incredibly self-referential for of expression, and that’s quite alright, as I deeply believe creativity is combinatorial — everything borrows from what came before, everything is a remix, all creative work is essentially derivative work. So knowledge of what came before greatly enriches and empowers our creativity. And, over the past century alone, countless books have been published to make sense of the landscape, language and legacy of graphic design, each exploring a specific facet of this complex ecosystem of visual communication. But how does it all fit together? That’s exactly what Jason Godfrey set out to investigate in 2009 in Bibliographic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books — yes, it’s a graphic design book about graphic design books, and it doesn’t get any more meta than this, and that’s a wonderful thing.Godfrey culls the 100 most influential design books of the past 100 years, contextualizing each with succinct background text on what makes it exceptional and important. The collection spans an incredible range of style, genre, subject matter, geography, and cultural concern, from the stories of the pioneering type foundries to vintage Polish film posters to classic graphic design manuals by László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Müller-Brockmann to contemporary design visionaries like Stefan Sagmeister and Paula Scher…”

via Bibliographic: The 100 Best Design Books of the Past 100 Years | Brain Pickings.

It reviews Genevieve Bell’s presentation at SXSW. Genevieve is a researcher at Intel, currently exploring the intersection of honesty and machine intelligence. Additionally, she compares some of her own work with ideas and experiments of Dan Ariely, to help us identify what-we-know-we-don’t-know about modeling ‘contextual awareness’, in operating systems and applications for so-called smart devices. 

For Genevieve the trick is in knowing how (humans cope) with the telling and receiving of little white lies.

“Giving Up on Being Honest

Can “smart devices” ever understand our intent in the range of ways with communicate with others? Can they understand when we are trying to be communal, rather than be an authority? And can they communicate in a manner that feels communal?

Genevieve noted in her talk that as human beings, we tell 2 to 200 lies a day. And while most of them are insignificant, the lies are often what smooth over friction in human relations.

But what kind of lies are these? Dan Ariely, in a somewhat unrehearsed session today with Sarah Szalavitz, walked the audience through his ongoing research into human dishonesty.

What he uncovered is that humans have a “fudge factor,” a level of dishonesty we’re willing to engage in and still consider ourselves honest. His insight into the behaviour isn’t huge, as we’ve all been caught in white lies (perhaps more in our lives than we’d care to admit). Instead, it’s rooted in what’s considered acceptable based on context and consequence.

In one example, he ran an experiment where people were given a test with a ton of questions, but only five minutes to solve them all. In the provided time period, it would be impossible to answer them all. When time was up, the people would grade their own tests, run them through a shredder in the back of the room, then tell the facilitator how many answers they got right.

The shredder was designed, however, to not shred the test. They could compare what people said to how many were actually right.

From this experiment, they saw that most people only lied just a little—if they only solved four problems, they’d say six. Makes sense, right?

But in an separate experiment, Dan saw if people would cheat with regard to remembering the 10 Commandments. In that case, no one cheated. One finding that came out of that research was that when we are reminded about own morality, we become more honest. But the honor code must come before we engage in an activity, not after it. Otherwise, we will be tempted to cheat.

But the third experiment he related was the following: You see two empty boxes, and then a couple of dots flash on the screen within those boxes. You are asked the question, “Are there more dots on the right or the left?” You receive 10 cents if you say right and one dollar if you say left, in all cases. This is repeated a hundred times with each research subject.

In the lab, they saw that people cheat a little bit through the process. But at some point, 80% of the people lose it, and they start cheating all the time. Different people switch at different points, depending on the context.

Dan called this the “what the hell” effect. In people’s minds, they’re saying: “I’m a cheat, I might as well enjoy it.”

via How Honest Should Smart Devices Be? | Blog | design mind.

1) What percentage of your colleagues use the words: ‘let’s brainstorm about…’ ?

2) what percentage of that group know, can recite the 4 rules of brainstorming, as defined by osborne?

3) What percentage of the group in number two, know the importance of building on the wild ideas of others? 

back to Hiner’s diagnosis:

“…The basic rules of brainstorming have been around since Alex Osborne coined the phrase in 1939, as part of his method for creative problem solving. However, it’s amazing how many organizations attempt to engage in brainstorming without following the rules and end up killing some of the best ideas because of it. Osborne once said, “It is easier to tone down a wild idea than to think up a new one.” In that spirit, true brainstorming should be always be a negativity-free process that encourages people to throw out their wildest ideas without fear of them being quickly shot down or ridiculed. Some of the craziest ideas could morph into something amazingly useful. You can find lots of variations of the brainstorming rules on the web, but my favorite are the ones that the Walt Disney World “imagineers” use:

Rule 1 – There is no such thing as a bad idea. We never know how one idea (however far-fetched) might lead into another one that is exactly right.

Rule 2 – We don’t talk yet about why not. There will be plenty of time for realities later, so we don’t want them to get in the way of the good ideas now.

Rule 3 – Nothing should stifle the flow of ideas. Not buts or can’ts or other “stopping” words. We want to hear words such as “and,” “or,” and “what if?”

Rule 4 –  There is no such thing as a bad idea. (We take that one very seriously.)…”

via How to kill innovation, in five easy steps | TechRepublic.

Entrepreneurs like to say there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Is education innovation that next big idea?

via Is College (Finally) Ready For Its Innovation Revolution? – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic.

The study backs up what I, personally, found while doing a massive research project recently. The issue is this: leisure reading is a lean back activity while research reading is a lean forward activity. An ereader with touch interface and note-taking capabilities that interface seamlessly with the screen would be ideal – think an iPad app for note-taking – and heuristic abstraction programs could help with the skimming problem. However, there are still a number of cognitive cuing issues to deal with in reading on an ereader vs. reading on the page.

They also found the following interesting problems with reading on e-readers:

Students did most of the reading in fixed locations: 47 percent of reading was at home, 25 percent at school, 17 percent on a bus and 11 percent in a coffee shop or office.

The Kindle DX was more likely to replace students’ paper-based reading than their computer-based reading.

Of the students who continued to use the device, some read near a computer so they could look up references or do other tasks that were easier to do on a computer. Others tucked a sheet of paper into the case so they could write notes.

With paper, three quarters of students marked up texts as they read. This included highlighting key passages, underlining, drawing pictures and writing notes in margins.

A drawback of the Kindle DX was the difficulty of switching between reading techniques, such as skimming an article’s illustrations or references just before reading the complete text. Students frequently made such switches as they read course material.

The digital text also disrupted a technique called cognitive mapping, in which readers used physical cues such as the location on the page and the position in the book to go back and find a section of text or even to help retain and recall the information they had read.

via Study: Kindles Aren’t Quite All That With The Kids On Campus.