MotherPie

New Smart Pen is Mightier than The Sword

The new Pulse smartpen sounds like an incredible device for learning, recording and processing new information. When you think of how technology is changing us, how mobile phones are extending our sense of self, now there is a new tech device that parents should put in the hands of their children for an educational tool and in the hands of adults as well. As a processing tool, this links audio and visual information.

Now in beta, Livescribe has produced the Pulse smartpen that lets you  "never miss a word"  and is priced at 1G $149,  2G $199. 
The first releases had a college-bound size journal but this month the company is releasing a leather-bound small journal. The company execs say that this is an idea in the application of paper-based computing, a new mobile computing platform that will fundamentally change the way people use pen and paper.  It is "an evolutionary disruptive technology"  that lets you take notes and add a new layer of information on, allowing to think differently while taking notes because you can process the information as you are hearing it and can write down key concepts -- capture the detail and access it," allowing for the capturing all the sensory input... ability to recall things from anyplace, anytime.

As one of the things that will change the world tomorrow, it was featured at TED2008's conference last month: "It looks like a big pen but has two microphones to record sound, a speaker to play it back, a small display and the capacity to capture handwritten notes and drawings in digital form. So it can record what you write and simultaneously it captures the surrounding sounds/voices. It requires a special paper with "buttons" and navigational tools. It can also be loaded with other features, like on-the-fly translation (click on a word in a language and the pen spells it out on the display and by voice in the other desired language), interactive books, and more."

I could use this; my children could use this for their studies. The dyslexic children I know could use this. Can you imagine the business applications for recording business meetings? 

New Media and Little Laptops...

Other new laptops besides the new ultra light $1,799 MacBook Air have come on the market, offering portals to the web and with web-based cloud computing, these might make sense.  New moves in online news journalism are worth keeping an eye on as well.  So... crunching on.

Apple's creative programs make me love my Mac laptop (PowerBook G4) so I'm not changing.  Soon I'll install Office '08 for Mac, just out a few weeks ago and then I'll be done w/ my PC.

But portals to the web and the move to cloud computing? The iPhone seems like the handiest way to go, just for simple access and if I knew AT&T had as good or better coverage in Santa Fe than Sprint, I might just have to get one. Business leaders at Davos all had Blackberries (better email) so it will boil down to these two smart phones (Palm is closing stores and new versions, out next year, will come too late). I've been looking into these other lap top portals, though. 

Cloudbooks (or SubNotebooks) are trend shifts: The race started last fall for small, cheap, light laptops and WaPo has a good article. Eee PC is one cheap (starting at $245) portable subNotebook I read about that seems to have just hit the market with a bang, starting last fall with a Linux-based system.  They've just released in January a Windows based version.   Other mass-market sub-$200 desktops have come on the market, tripling from one to three in less than three months.  At the CES, PC maker Shuttle debuted it's $199 KPC, loaded with a Linux operating system.   Mirus Linux PC, now for sale at Sears.com, is $299 but w/ included rebate is $199, comes w/ Freespire 2.0, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution.  Everex gPC appeared on Wal-Mart shelves for $198 (so popular Wal-Mart is having trouble keeping it in stock), with operating system of gOS, version of Ubuntu 7.10.  Linux is getting easier to use: Two of world's largest PC manufacturers, Dell and Lenovo, offer Linux operating systems. You can find a $200 Linux PC -- pre-installed and the average user doesn't have to do updates like on Windows. and Linux getting easier to use. 

New Media Developments...In the last five years, the New York Times has declined in value by an astonishing 70 percent, and The Newspaper Association of America reported the number of unique visitors to newspaper Web sites last year rose more than 6 percent to a monthly average of 60 million. Monthly visits climbed 9 percent in the fourth quarter from a year ago. During the fourth quarter, 39 percent of all active Web users visited newspaper Web sites, with visits averaging 44 minutes a month. 

Thomas Jefferson said, "I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one in a month, and I feel myself the happier for it," but I bet he'd be following new developments with media tech changes.

Online news continues to shift and there are two things I'm keeping my eye on:

1) ProPublica will be something to watch develop. It is a nonprofit newsroom that plans to launch online this spring with an advisory board that includes five top newspaper editors and collaboration may happen with its original "deep dive" investigative stories appearing in major media sites. As major media sites cut back, hard tough stories will get the short shrift.   This is one of the solutions to this problem. The board includes NYTimes Managing Editor Jill Abramson, Boston Globe Editor Martin Baron, Denver Post Editor Gregory Moore, Seattle Times Editor David Boardman, and Cynthia Tucker, editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Others include U.S. News & World Report editor at large David Gergen, former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll, Fortune columnist Allan Sloan and historian Robert Caro.   Much of its $10 million annual budget has been donated by Herbert and Marion Sandler,ProPublica will fill a void left by cutbacks in the newspaper business that have reduced investigative staffs.

2) CNN will very soon launch it's iReport journalism initiative - user generated reporting.  This is a direct opposite move to #1 above and it will take both to work. The site will be iReport.com.  Right now, hubs for "citizen journalism" on the Web include well-backed companies like Current Media, which recently filed for an IPO, as well as start-ups of varying size like NowPublic and GroundReport.

Magazines and improving online presence...These changes are needed but I think as things lighten up, deeper reading (intellectual magazines and books) will still be needed. Atlantic Monthly has made changes to online magazine, putting old content by Mark Twain up, having single advertisers pay to bring down firewall, more content up for online-only...  Last week the editor announced that the online edition is free.

Part II: Privacy and The (Watching) Eyes...

Part II: Privacy & Eyes Looking In:

Starting with the eye as the definition of self, artistically and symbolically in Part I, Eyes Looking Out, I am now in Part II looking at the issue of technology and privacy and wondering how this will alter our very sense of self, our soul and our way of seeing our identities and our world. 

For our children, things will be and are dramatically, radically different, far more different than they already are, tech wise.  Profound changes are altering us in ways that are complex and scary and unfathomable. Like the kohl used for protection around eyes long ago and today (this kohl-lined eye at right is from an Egyptian sarcophagus in the Met), what firewalls or metaphorical kohl and protections will we have?   What will we give up for convenience, for safety, for security and what are the long-term implications? 

Part I: Privacy and The (Watching) Eyes...

The eye is the seat of the soul, right?  What is the soul behind the all-seeing eyes and what is happening to us in the process?  The eye and privacy are two disjointed ideas but stay with me as I ramble here on VERY IMPORTANT issues of privacy and how I connect the two. It is sort of creepy how fast this technology is making us COMPLETELY TRANSPARENT.  I'm researching eyes as symbols at the moment so I hope this isn't too esoteric.

Part I: Eyes Looking Out

The painting at right is from the oldest oil paintings, just discovered on the rocky surfaces of caves in Afghanistan. Notice how prominent the eye is depicted, outlined in black. The importance of the eyes as a symbol and how eyes have been historically used in art is interesting. The Turks have the Evil Eye as a blue glass charm to ward off evil and other cultures have had eyes as milagros and charms as well.  Looking directly into the eyes of someone, being "shifty-eyed" or the third-eye... But the eyes of someone, of anyone, of me, of you, focus on what is of interest, what is chosen to look at, to see and think about. OK, I digress, but studying the eyes on the wood containers of Egyptian mummies in the Metropolitan Museum in NYC or the Nubian and Egyptian collections in the museum on the campus of Emory University, I saw the same black-outlined eyes and dug a bit for the history of this art and decoration technique.  Kohl  was used historically for protection of the eyes and vision and is still used as eyeliner today by women in the Middle East, around the Arabian Penninsula  It is used by men and women in the desert and it helps against the sun's glare (think of the way football players use this).  Johnny Depp wore kohl around his eyes to play the character Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Carribean. What protection, what kohl-ish tool or firewall might you have, for protection?

Think of the roots of the word visionary. Tim Berners-Lee, inventer of the world wide web, was a visionary, and he saw the possibilities of technology and ourselves as totally transparent data-fied beings. But the all-seeing eye and eyes as windows to the soul puts the idea of eyes as both entries into our inner soul and self and our window entry out to the world.  It is really a two-way thing but the barrier between the two is being demolished, changed, altered via technology and this is shifting our culture. This mind's eye, the third eye, might be the important eye of the future. 

Our mind's eye will no longer need to determine time or direction by looking outward to the natural world.  Instead, we can look outward to technology that can posit our place, geographically and socially.  How convenient, these gadgets that can do our sensing and seeing for us. 

But this is also shifting ourselves. How will this change our perspective?  How will this change us?   We will want the conveniences and we will pay to participate. 

Next: Part II: Eyes Looking In and Privacy

Tim Berners-Lee: The Most Influential Person (Technology)...

Leading the list of the most influential person in technology in the last 150 years is Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web (last year he was named one of the top minds by Time magazine). This new list was just released late last week. Imagine -he only implemented his idea 18 years ago.  The fact that he led the list didn't surprise me at all.  What did surprise me was other famous tech people were ranked lower, such as Bill Gates (#31) and Steve Jobs (#14) and Jeff Bezos (#34). Look at the top 10 (Intel's founders are in the top 10 -- but hey - Intel pulled the panel together to come up with this list):

   1. Tim Berners-Lee – Founder of the modern-day World Wide Web 
   2. Sergey Brin – Co-founder of  Google 
   3. Larry  Page – Co-founder of Google 
   4. Guglielmo Marconi – Inventor of the Radiotelegraph  system 
   5. Jack Kilby – Inventor of the Integrated Circuit and  Calculator 
   6. Gordon Moore – Co-founder of  Intel (but I know of him from Moore's Law)
   7. Alan Turing – played a major role in deciphering German  Code in WWII 
   8. Robert Noyce – Co-founder of  Intel 
   9. William Shockley – Co-Inventor of the  Transistor 
  10. Don Estridge – Led the development of the IBM  computer
Here's the full list.

A must-read is Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee, published in 1997.  I read it two years ago and it still sticks with me. As the son of mathematicians who invented an early prototype of the computer, and with background in Physics at Oxford, you would think his book would be too technical but it isn't.  It is highly readable and interesting for the visionary and philosophical approach.  He is one of the greatest minds of our time.  The full impact of his vision has only begun to be realized.  Already he has altered our way of thinking, knowing, and socializing.

What kind of computer does he use?  At last report, a Mac with the OSX operating system. (Mac web share was 7.6% in January.) He is just over 50 and has been awarded, in the last few years, a ton of honors, awards and degrees.  He's now officially Sir Timothy Berners-Lee OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA

His vision of the future is most interesting.  More on the flip.

Poor Me. Wah Wah Wah iTears...

Apple's stock is down, at $129/share as I write this. I'm poorer today after buying stock very recently at $160 right before my Mac laptop died.  Now I'm really handicapped (sniff, sniff) trying to work on a borrowed laptop until my Mac is back from the Apple hospital.  Boo-hoo I lost not only moolah boohlah in the market but a ton of things I didn't have backed up on my laptop.  Like photos of my daughter's marriage and my blogroll work-in-progress and all of my tech research.

My two favorite stocks are Apple and Google.  Even though the stocks are down, I'm still crazy about them. Yesterday Google ran a special logo internationally (which it rarely does), in honor of the 50th birthday of Lego.  I think you can measure the geekness of a person by just bringing up Legos in a conversation.  My son-in-law's favorite experience just might have been his visit to LEGOLAND.

On my way to the Apple Store last week I tried to use my Treo to look up the Apple Store address.  It just didn't work well. I didn't know you could do Google 411 (new) for business numbers. While in the Apple Store I played with the iPhones and the way you can get Google and sites up and enlarge them with a finger-spread is pretty cool.  The iPhone Touch will be the WiFi stepping stone between iPod and the iPhone. They've upset the balance of power and Jobs is ahead of the game with his gadgets, locked or unlocked.  I just don't know why the stock is down unless people don't get the direction of things. I've had fun, anyway, figuring out where media will go-go and I know it will get Google-ized.  If it is all about cloud-computing and access, Marshall McLuhan's idea of media as extensions of man is right on.  Connections to the information. 

As I always was taught, it isn't what you know but that you know where to go to get the information and that you know how to think and what to think about. I don't want my mind cluttered with stuff.  I want to click click to my contacts, click to connect, click to get the information that is out there.   Mobile internet devices (MIDs), are the new tweeners... between the laptops and the PDAs.  Eee PCs and other little cheap entry portals are confusing things and bringing down prices, coming to places like Wal-Mart.

Long-term disruptions are harder to understand than short-term changes, especially tech changes.   We're going through the second revolution.  The first was the  tech/internet and this is the second, to cloud computing.   

Boo, boogly-googly hoo-hoo-hoo. 

Apple: Enough, Already? But...the (ohsoCool) iPod Touch...

After singing about Apple recently (before new products were released this week and after), I've just looked at the new iPod Touch, (updates announced this week), right, the latest version of the iPod, Apple's product introduced in 2001.  Over 119 million people have used an iPod as of last fall. This tech leap for the new version is huge, using a multi-touch interface with the "revolutionary technology that made iPhone a hit" and allowing users to get mail, maps and check weather and stocks and browse the web, putting internet in your pocket for $299 for 8GB or $399 for 16GB.

I enjoy the thoughts of Nicholas Carr (his blog, Rough Type, is good) and his writings explain the idea of the future of cloud computing better than anyone.  His articles, linked together, give insight as to where we are headed and why Apple and Google are at the head of our tech revolution that is causing disruption. Carr's Google, Apple and "cloud computing" explains that: "Apple is taking responsibility for "the user interface and people," developing the design for the front end of the integrated network-computing system that accesses the web while Google provides "the perfect back end - the supercomputer that provides the bulk of the data-processing might and storage capacity for the devices."

I wrote that Apple is designing ahead of the market and Carr caught Apple's patent application and wonders if it is a cloud computer docking station.  Carr on Apple's direction to have computers be a portal to the web -- the way to hook to the internet and move away from working with and maintaining our data on our own computers, with more explanation here.

It is too bad that Santa Fe doesn't have an Apple Store. Had this product come out before Christmas, it would have been a Santa gift for all of my children and they would have been happy happy.  Today I showed this to my son - he knew it already by name - and he immediately asked for it for his upcoming birthday. He said it did come out before Christmas. It came out in September.  I guess being in Santa Fe puts me a little in the dark ages.  Had I been in NYC, I would have seen it in the Apple store. Back in '02 when iPods were first released, you could have purchased Apple stock for way under $25/share.  In the last year the stock has gone from $82 to a high as $202.  Today the stock is hovering just above $160.  As I say, MMMMM. I love Apple. Enough, already.

Mac & Apple: Innovating Beyond the Market Today...

Apple is innovating ahead of the market.   I am not ready to buy an iPhone or a new MacAir ultra thin laptop, right, unveiled this week.  Not because they aren't worth it.  I'm just not there. Yet. But I think I will be and it is just a matter of time.

I've noticed the stock going down, which it usually does after the pre-MacWorld rallies and I've been up on Apple and glad I bought stock two years ago after being completely sold on my mac and all it could do.  My son is thinking about buying some Apple stock but I'm telling him to hold off for right now while the short-termers sell out then pick it up on the low slide and hold it. I'm not a trained stockbroker by any means, just crazy about my mac and Apple. But will Apple be good for the long-term?  I think so.  I've spent some time thinking about what Apple unveiled and what might be ahead...

A channel changer with no more than five buttons?  I bet that is in Apple's future, too. 

Apple (Creatively) Soldiers On...

This was the cute display in the Apple Store in Oklahoma City in December.  I put my mother on a mac.  She can go into the store if she needs to.  Number one tourist spot for NYC  visitors is the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue.  If you experience an Apple store, you'll understand why it works. But here are more reasons that affirm my belief that Apple stock will continue to go up this year (it was up 135% for the year at the end of December).  Jim Cramer mentions that when the economy is going down, Apple is a tech big gun that just keeps going up. 

As they say for those expecting to attend the big MacExpo next week: "...it's a series of calibrations of the world as you know it. Your perspective will be jolted. Your creativity will be ramped up. You will walk away realizing it's not just the world that's changed. It's you, too."  Ah. The Apple Experience.

Apple's MacBook Pro ranked as the top notebook computer and InfoWorld called Leopard "a turning point for the Mac," in awarding both the Technology Awards which is significant since InfoWorld usually focuses on PC and Windows-based applications.

Best Buy wants to nearly double Apple's product presence in its stores, increasing the number of stores-within-stores to 500 in the next year. Apple now derives 20 percent of its revenue from its physical stores. And the number is growing. In the fourth quarter in 2007, which ended Sept. 30, Apple reported that the retail stores accounted for $1.25 billion of Apple’s $6.2 billion in revenues, a 42 percent increase over the fourth quarter in 2006. Apple plans to expand to Germany, China, France and elsewhere and the profit per square foot for its retail space is far higher than any other consumer electronics or luxury retailer. Tiffany & Company doesn't even come close in comparison. Mac sales per store grew 26 percent year-to-year in fiscal 2007.

At left is a chart of Apple's stock price for two years. Prices usually spike leading up to MacWorld Expo, which opens January 14 in San Francisco.  A new Mac ultra portable laptop is rumored to be unveiled.  At last year's Expo, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone and the name change to Apple, Inc. Bill Gates gave his last keynote address this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, announcing that over 100 million copies of Windows Vistas have been shipped. Some called the Gates keynote boring and no smash hits have come from his keynotes lately. Apple is said to be one full year ahead of its competition.

Mmmmm. I love Apple.

American Cultural Soup: Circular Entertainment...

In five years a quarter of the entertainment being produced will be "circular" according to a study by Nokia.  It will be created, shared and edited within peer groups.  The audience becomes immersed and the creative experience participatory. 

How this creative play works should also involve terms I would think like reiteration, collage, mashup, recycle, regenerate, reconstruct and recursive. Ideas feed off of each other and with new tools and digital forms, these ideas can warp beyond all sorts of boxes and boundaries.  This is why copyright and traditional distribution don't make sense.  Digitization is difficult to contain.

We no longer want to be passive participants.  We want to immerse ourselves, to take things and bend them and shape them to ourselves; to make ourselves part of the playground.  Integrated audiences.  One idea of how this trend is impacting us culturally: creative and creation marked the top 2007 searches on the leading geek social search site del.icio.us with photography and design ranked in the top 10.

My trip to the Metropolitan Museum in NYC over Thanksgiving was ever so much fun because I could recreate my own sense of our American Cultural Soup with a reiteration from Warhol's work. Just as people want to take away icons as digital memories personified (see my post on Digital Photography in Museums), our lives and works are ever open to editing.

American cultural soup: forever reiterated and redefined.