From Google’s ChromeOS team:
Video-teleconferencing may have finally found s reason to exist.
Poker.
According to a friend who is deep into a business plan than leverages video teleconferencing as an enabling technology, one vendor tells him that online poker is pushing the popularity of video calls; not team meetings, not holiday calls to the in-laws, not porn, but a new form of online poker where the players agree to use their webcams to come closer to the smoke-filled backrooms of poker lore. You’ve doubtlessly seen online poker players on ESPN playing against the old-school guys like Doyle Brunson. The online players are so unaccustomed to showing their faces and playing behind the anonymity of a virtual poker table that they resort to sunglasses and hoodies to mask the tells that a classic player use to read whether or not an opponent is bluffing. Now, in so-called “live dealer games,” a sub-culture of video teleconferencing poker players is emerging, a trend predicted last year in Poker News, when player Barry Greenstein said:
“You’ll use “video conferencing” situations where when you play online. People will be able to look at you, they will be able to see that you’re playing it. They will be able to see that you’re not in a conference with someone else and that it’s the same guy playing the whole time. As least maybe as we get to the final table or the final few tables, and you will not only, onscreen, be able to see your eight other opponents as you get to the final table, but so will everyone else have kind of this video room of people playing online, and it will look like live poker that will be played online.”
Having spent the past two months in discussions with a video teleconferencing company about a possible position (they passed on me), I’ve spent some time getting more familiar with the landscape, having last dug in on video teleconferencing in the early 90s when I was still reporting on technology for Forbes and the first PC based solutions were beginning to emerge thanks to the H.234 video standard, and some early efforts by Intel to move videoconferencing onto the PC and out of the dedicated ISDN systems such as PictureTels.
The results were less than satisfactory, and for most of the past 20 years anyone with a PC and the will to buy a web cam could experience video calling thanks to CUSeeMe, iChat, and eventually any two-bit chat client worth its salt from Microsoft NetMeeting to MSN to Yahoo and Google Talk.
As a kid the phone book had a picture of the first AT&T Picturephone — rolled out for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. This struck me, a six year-old, as very interesting and in synch with what George Jetson was concurrently using on his cartoon and Dick Tracy on his wrist in the Sunday funnies. A few years later Stanley Kubrick revived the concept in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and by the time I was a young adult when the first video-teleconferencing systems made their commercial debut, I was primed to be a user. The future of the phone was TV.
The reality, after two decades of video telephony, is a lot less compelling. Video calls are intrusive, contrived, and an imposition where everyone loses the ability to multitask, have to worry about whether or not the sun is shining too brightly over my shoulder or my hair is combed. Once a call is arranged — and they seem to always need to be arranged ( impromptu calls are not appreciated in my personal experience) the dread begins and because the action is taking place down here, on the screen, where the caller’s face appears, not up on top of the laptop’s bezel where the camera is, eye contact is rarely ever made. In the end, seeing the person I am speaking to has never substantially enhanced the conversation — in fact it usually impedes it due to pixellation, dropped audio, and the host of other technical glitches associated with a VOIP connection over tenuous bandwidth. I’ve seen efforts to promote the technology internally at businesses, but in my experience a great deal of the in-room systems — the expensive stuff sold by Tandberg, etc. — gathers dust in the long term or is turned on for board meetings and the like
PC to PC or device-based videotelephony is having a bit of a renaissance after a choppy decade. First, Skype’s IPO filing has put the market back on the radar — but I would hazard that most of Skype’s traffic is audio only, with video initiated in only a rare few circumstances. Then there is the iPhone 4G with a forward facing camera and Apple’s Facetime application, followed a few months later by the HTC EVO which comes preloaded with Qik, another app that takes advantage of the device’s dual cameras. Two months on the EVO and I have yet to make or receive a Qik video call and I highly doubt I ever will.
Last night two developments changed mobile teleconferencing from a dedicated/wi-fi, same-phone-to-asame-phone model to a cross platform paradigm that could finally see mobile video take off.
Tango, a Palo Alto start-up featured at GigaOm’s Mobilize conference, unveiled its iPhone and Android app which permits decent anywhere video calls over 3G and 4G as well as wifi. I downloaded it onto my Evo, asked my son to put it on his iPhone, our names and numbers were matched from our existing contact lists by Tango, and we were having a video call twenty feet from each other. “Come here Mr. Watson, I need you,” was not the historic first words, but after two months we both were using the front-facing cameras of our app phones for the first time. 
Today (Oct. 5), Skype finally rolled out its Android app, but it carries some restrictions and is very underwhelming. First, it’s wifi only on Android for everyone except Verizon Wireless customers; and two: it doesn’t support video. WTF Skype? Getting a VOIP app onto a carrier network has been very taboo in the carriers eyes, who have declared full Skype on their network a “toxic” application that threatens their network security, capacity (and business model.) Eventually, as the carriers wean themselves from the landline-voice cash cow and begin to embrace the “internet of things,” Skype and other video teleconferencing players will have an easier time enabling any devices across any network. For now — don’t hold your breath.
Mobile video has much more potential, particularly in the more dynamic youth/netgen market, than desktop video teleconferencing has had for the past twenty years. Maybe Tweens will climb all over it the way they did with the Blackberry Messenger service. On the desk top and enterprise front there will be a lot of disruption, especially for the dedicated room system vendors as a host of desktop solutions ranging from the browser based TokBox, to Skype and ooVoo move upstream seeking the SMB market (see GigaOm’s case for a Skype-Cisco partnership).
For all of this movement and maneuvering, video telephony seems to be a technology in search of an application. Here are some obvious ones:
And of course, poker.
I hate my iPod — dumb device (the Nano) with a singular function — playing music. This Sony device, once given a camera, will completely realize the dream of a Dick Tracy wrist watch with incredible multi-functionality. It’s been said that the smart phone killed the wrist watch; that may be the case. I don’t wear a watch. But I also don’t want a portable music player that only does music and lives on its own island. I don’t want to use my EVO as a music player — far too bulky for the rower. The fact this sony device can be paired with any Android phone is simple genius. I may need to get one.
Stephen O’Grady nails down and confirms what Esteban Panzeri and I saw in the winter of 2009 when we were in discussions with Amazon Web Services to built a cloud application for a hardware project in a former life. Amazon is much, much more than a store these days, and up on the hill above Seattle, in the old Veteran’s Hospital, looms a revolution in cloud computing that is going to cause a train wreck among traditional enterprise software companies.
When I learned from Pooj Preena that Dropbox was using AWS to host its excellent cloud storage service; and after reading J.D. Lasica’s seminal white paper on identity in the age of cloud computing, I began to grok the implications of Amazon’s servers-in-the-skies. But add on that some higher level services in the stack and things start to get very very very interesting. Here’s O’Grady’s piece:
“Maybe it’s the lingering perception that they’re just a retailer, but the lack of a healthy fear of Amazon is still curious. Even as players large and small acknowledge the dominance of AWS within the public cloud computing market, the lack of an immune response to its continued expansion defies simple explanation.
“If Amazon restricted itself to basic public cloud computing services, that would be one thing. Most of the large systems players have turned their attention to the burgeoning market for quote unquote private cloud services. Whether these same cloud players appreciate the fact that a large portion of their interest in the private cloud is a function of the public cloud economic realities established by Amazon is unclear, but unimportant. Amazon is singularly responsible for the framing that is the public cloud today, a framing which generally relegates those with traditional enterprise margins in mind to private cloud settings.”
via Hiding in Plain Sight: The Rise of Amazon Web Services – tecosystems.
The photographs of Chinese iPad clones running Android are filtering their way west and indeed, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to port the operating system onto anything from a flat screen television to a cheap large screen smartphone. Android seems destined to become the mass market OS for mobile internet devices, and as hardware manufacturers figure out how to junk it up with their own skins, you can be sure to see a plethora of 10″ screens sometime soon. After a month in the Android world on my HTC EVO smartphone, and several months on the genuine iPad, I have to wonder what the mass market appeal of an Android tablet will be once they start shipping in volume later this year.
The significant application for the tablet — the so-called “content consumption” device (consumption is so tubercular in my mind) — is e-readers in my opinion. Sure, you can watch a nice movie or video courtesy of iTunes on the iPad, and doubtlessly Amazon, Netflix, and Doubletwist will be pushing moving picture content onto Android tablets with ease. But in my experience the big application is reading, be it the Kindle app on the iPad or the new magazine formats such as Flipboard and the traditional magazine publishers. So far the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have the lead in iPad formats, and I tend to make a point of refreshing them before hopping onto a plane. Flipboard is a nice enough user experience, integrating links from my Facebook and Twitter network, and it is a good platform for prolific publishers like AllThingsD and others with a need to push their content.
The point of this post is to wonder outloud how publishers will port from the iPad to Android tablets and if the experience will be as compelling as the early iterations on the Apple platform. If I were leading the platform decision at a Conde Nast or Time Inc. I would be very concerned about the production challenges of supporting the two platforms. While Wired may be declaring the Web to be dead, I have to disagree, seeing Android as an extension of the desktop browser/HTML model we’ve lived with for nearly two decades. iPad as a closed example of “splinternet” — yes, I concede that Apple model is a walled garden for developers and consumers, but a short lived one as Android gathers momentum and steam this summer and into the holiday season.
Prediction: next year the dominant launch-first platform will be Android.
A true test of a consumer electronics brand’s strength and fidelity to the customer and not pure profit is their ability to withstand the siren call of junking up their products with crapware/bloatware. For some devices the bounties paid by second tier software providers is the difference between turning a PC or a phone from a loss leader to a profit engine. Does Apple do that? Or Google? Nope. But HTC and Sprint did with my EVO, junking it up with a foolish NASCAR and NFL widget more pernicious and tenacious than a toenail fungus. It is amazing how any app or widget on the phone associated with the handset maker (HTC) or the network provider (Sprint) is invariably a P.O.S.
“But bloatware isn’t a feature in all smartphones. AT&T hasn’t piled extraneous software onto Apple’s iPhone. Motorola’s Droid phone ships with just the core applications. Google and T-Mobile resisted the bloatware impulse with the Nexus One.”
But not the rest of the gang. Put the user first and at least make this stuff easy to remove. Forever. Please
via Bloatware Creeps Into Android Phones | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.
In the 1990s (when exactly I cannot say because the their archive has no search function) Suck.com declared that the American cure for depression was the consumption of consumer electronics. Feel blue? Buy a Palm Pilot. Feeling stupid? Buy the folding external keyboard and the wireless data modem for that Palm Pilot. 3D televisions, gaming consoles, the latest Call of Duty, handheld weather stations, binnacle mounted GPS-Nav Chart Plotters with integrated radar and XM Satellite radio …. Then there is the whole Apple addiction, with something from Cupertino to pine for at least every six months. Add in all those iTunes downloads, Kindle books, Netflix, paid apps, online subscriptions to get through costwalls: I need to do a digital audit of my finances. Off the top of my head — from DSL to DirectTV to cell phone subscriptions, the big ticket recurring items, I’m spending $500 a month on digital services and easily $1000 a year family wide on new devices. I guess all those days picking through Garry Ray’s discards in the PC Week lab infected me with the need to try new stuff.
When will it end? I joke that in my retirement there will be no PCs. But what about cell phones? When my eyesight really goes and I start reading large-font books (thank god for the Kindle’s font sizer), will I own a large font cell phone like a Jitterbug? (note to self, burgeoning market in elderly CE devices).
It didn’t end today. I killed the Blackberry after four years of Lotus Notes/RIM BES mediocrity and embraced my inner Google ecosystem and bought my first real App phone, an HTC Evo running on Sprint’s 4G network. Why no iPhone? I get the iPhone experience and know full well the Apple ecosystem of iTunes, AppleTV, iPods, and now my iPad. Great experience, wonderful design …. but:
So, to Best Buy for the EVO. I asked the clerk about the memory, and she said 32 GB. Wrong, it has eight. The porting of my number off of AT&T and onto Sprint was the usual Kafka Samsa Cockroach dive into “wait while I transfer you to technical support” but eventually I was out the door and on my way. The phone is nice, more a handheld mobile internet device than a phone really. Portable Wifi (I am retiring my Verizon MiFi) hot spot so I can tether my ThinkPad and iPad off it; decent camera, and a hardware build about what you would expect. Not Apple level, but not too bad either. If one handset maker would try to hit Apple in the build-quality space they could carve a good segment out of the Android market. HTC is no Apple, but they are going great guns after famously being Google’s hardware partner for the first Android phone, the G1 and then the recently discontinued Nexus One. The Taiwanese company’s rise to the forefront (it helps to be a Tour de France fan as HTC is cosponsoring a pro bike team this summer) in handsets is pretty remarkable and due in large part to their position as Google’s favored nation for building reference platforms.
I configured the following apps on the Evo
What else to say? In the end, it just something to deliver a little more noise and as the Fake Steve Jobs would say, a “little more shittiness” in our lives. But what am I complaining about? I dig little computers.
So with all of six hours on Android, let me make the comparisons to Apple — at least the iPad experience which is needless to say a stupid basis to talk a slate form factor versus an app phone. But nevertheless — there is a lot of similarities and differences that have me persuaded that people will focus their online lives on three devices: app phone, pad, and clamshell notebook/netbook. The three macro use-cases are obvious. Smartphone for rapid response communications and idle-moment-diversions; pad for consumption of film, book, newspaper, blog, and games; clamshell-keyboard notebook for writing long-winded blog posts and the Powerpoint Forced March. Right now Apple has the wide lead on seamlessly integrating all three. Heck, the non-Apple pad market is totally nascent and no Wintel hardware company has brought a successful tablet/pad to market. Yet. There will be a flood of Android tablets leading up to CES, some total clones of the iPad, others laden with proprietary skins and some with a nod to the commercial/enterprise market. The Linux variants and sideplayers like JoliCloud will fall to wayside as Android integration proceed across increasingly bigger screens, culminating with Chrome OS on netbooks. If Google can control a seamless experience even with the code projects in the open domain, then every hardware manufacturer can dive in and do the “brown bananas” game of competing on price and driving average margins down to a brutal 1%.
Apple has a beautiful interface with rabid attention to detail that Android lacks. There’s something spare and elegant in Apple’s user interface. Android’s is … not as clean. Clean, and the usual gestures of swipe and pinch work well … but still.
Android is very Volkswagen to Apple’s BMW.
So, enough devices, my depression is lifted, my phone number is the same and … farewell Blackberry and onwards into standing astride the dominant mobile internet architectures, slightly schizo but always enlightened.
I’ve gone fully Google — gmail integration of my churbuck.com email, Google docs, Google Calendar — but when Buzz Bruggeman suggested we talk and I use his Tungle account, I decided, hey, what the heck, sign up for another service.
Anyway — I am on Tungle, syncing my Google calendar to it. If you want to talk and get on my sked, check it out.
Blodget and Goldman dig a grave for the netbook segment. Cause of death: iPad.
This chart from Morgan Stanley says it all. A year ago the netbook category was the hottest thing in PCs. Today …. I don’t imagine anyone is going to weep tears for Atom based netbooks. They may have been little and cute, but their 3G wireless contracts are a millstone around their necks, and they are, in the end, still Windows PCs.
Only slower. Read through to Blodget’s summary of Goldman’s 5 C’s on why the iPad has gutted netbooks.
Remember a year ago, when netbooks were the fastest growing segment of the PC market?
Not anymore.
And not ever again, as far as Goldman Sachs is concerned.
Because Apple’s iPad is going to wipe the netbook market out, says Goldman. (Sorry about that, Microsoft. Netbooks were a headache for you, too, because of the lower software price-points and Linux threat, but now even those low price points are going to zero).
via Apple’s iPad Is Going To Destroy The Netbook Market, Says Goldman (Sorry, Microsoft).