Samsung SmartTV – Building the Hope for Apple’s TV

I just bought a new Samsung 46″ LED SmartTV and I’m very happy.Still waiting for the real smart Apple TV, though.

The “Smart” part shows the great potential the internet+TV combo has, but it seems we will have to wait for Apple to “Get it Right”.

One thing I learned is that the TV is much better for consuming content like videos and songs on Vimeo and YouTube.

The TV comes with a wireless internet connection, integrated browser, Application store and VOD service.

The things I liked :

• Price of about $1200 including installation+delivery+ wireless + wall mount+ Israeli VAT of 17% (we have wars to finance)
• The non smart TV functionality is great – colors, lightening , connectors , etc
• Installation was very straight forward. More of an appliance style than computer style
• Having an alternate VOD with an excellent quality really shows the promise of breaking the tie of content and infrastructure providers.
• Comprehensive localization in the configuration and VOD content as well
• Vimeo is a great web site with an excellent app and high quality content
• It was fun the watch the War on Channel 10 and Ynet at the same time with PIP (Picture in Picture). Well , the war was not really fun, but you see what I mean.

Facebook App Download on Samsung Smart TV

The reasons why we need Apple iTV for are:

• Browser runs “Out of Memory” for the majority of web sites
• No way to change the home page from “Bing”
• Keyboard entry is extremely slow, unless you buy the wireless keyboard
• Auto Updates are cool, but why don’t they happen in the background
• Auto Updates are too frequent , almost every day
• Integration with Google,Facebook,Picasa and online identity  is quite hard. Entering my password was quite a nightmare.
• YouTube is full of much junk and songs get stuck frequently
• No “Ad-Blocking” for the browser and pop-up windows consume the main screen
• The iPad remote control is not working on iOS6 (and I did not get it to work on ios5 either)
• Samsung online registration is  as bad as Nokia’s PC software used to be. Early warning signs

Vimeo on Samsung Smart TV

Why the F22 Crashed and the iPad Took Off

In the 20th century the majority of innovation started as evil nations wanted to destroy other nations.

As a result, the evil (and peaceful) nations devoted large chunks of their tax money to the defense budget.

The flow of research money was the following:

Public (taxes) -> Government -> Defense Agencies -> Universities -> Private Companies (implementation)

Research Budget Flow

Many of the most important contributions to technology and science were created or commercialized through this path: the internet, GPS, atomic energy , satellites and plenty more.

The innovation flowed from the government to enterprises and only then into consumers.

Space and Aviation -> Military ->  Large Enterprises -> Civilian Government -> Small Enterprises -> Consumers

The early experiments or products were extremely  expensive  and sold in small quantities and required public financing.

In the 21st century the flow of innovation and new technology has reversed.

innovation Flow in a Consumer World

The recent launch of an iPhone into space with GPS tracking by civilians, is one amazing example.

The following stock chart provides more evidence. It plots the iShares Dow Jones U.S. Aerospace & Defense Index Fund compared to some major consumer oriented companies like Google, Sony, Amazon.

Chart of Defense Index Vs Consumer Companies 2006-2011

The new innovations are derived from consumer demand and consumer services or products : cellular phones, smart Phones, social networks,cloud computing, personal computers and online advertisement.

I believe this is the reason the Intel, Apple and Google are now the largest companies in the world, displacing companies like SUN, Nortel, Lucent, HP , IBM and similar companies more focused on enterprise and governmental markets. While IBM, Microsoft and Intel are still leading the patent table, one can claim it implies more on the inflation of patents , rather than true  innovation.

Top 10 Companies Patents ROI from MSN

The reversal of innovation can be explained by multiple theories:

Moral – the global society has become more civilian and democratic. Individuals have more civil rights, more control of the public spend and therefore there are fewer wars, less dictators  and less weapons. Unfortunately , I’m not sure all of the facts support this theory. I have found some evidence. For example, from 1988 to 2009 the global military spending share of GDP has dropped by 34% from 3.5% to 2.4% , global average. The number of conflicts decreased by 40% from 1992 to 2009.

Share of Military Expenditure as Percentage of Gross Domestic Product 1988 2099

Armed Conflicts by Region 1946-2009

Economics – In the end of the day we are all consumers and individuals. Economics are driven by numbers and since there are about 1 Billion consumers with a high standard of living, it is the largest market for almost any product. Selling a $300 product to every consumer translates to $300 billion market, this is equal to the global IT market spend. Selling $30 of advertisement to one Billion people …. you can do the math on your own.  Compare that with the cost of design and manufacturing of a new stealth plane.

The R&D alone would cost Billions  of dollars, and each airplane would cost $336M million dollars , if it the project is not aborted during the 20 years of development. Programming an amazing computer vision system for smart missiles would only be relevant to 20-40 customers. Delivering an amazing face recognition for  facebook generates access to 750 Million customers. The OCR domain is one example I already bogged about.

Sociological  – Open source software has allowed sharing of innovation and technology with zero cost of patents, licensing and removing many anti-competitive habits , either explicit or hidden that were common in past years. It also allows sharing of development costs across organizations. Younger generations are used to great user experience, and would not “go back” when entering Enterprise office. Cloud computing is also helping to build start-ups in 50 dollars.

The fact that Google and Amazon are hosting funding challenged public database of bioinformatics, that used to be funded by the government is rather  provocative.

To summarize, while there are still huge budgets in defense and commercial enterprises, there is strong trend driving innovation from the individual. Do you believe the trend is real?

The Internet is just starting – Google Art Project

The Internet is just starting. New amazing ideas are  still popping up every day. During my last visit to Amsterdam the Rijksmuseum was partially closed. Now I can tour it virtually with Google’s Art Project . This is really cool.  The resolution is amazing, so smallest details are visible.

Guess where is this picture from?

Night Watch Sample From Google Art

Right, this is the right nostril of Captain Frans Banning Cocq from Night Watch, by Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn.

And here is an eye opening close up.

Night Watch Eye Sample From Google Art

And here is how it was done

Related Articles

• Google Art Project: the 7 billion pixel masterpieces (telegraph.co.uk)
• Enjoy videos about some of the greatest artworks in the world (youtube-global.blogspot.com)

My first 24 hours with iPad (and Google)

Although I went to the iPad launch in San Francisco, I preferred my morning coffee over actually standing in line.  I did have the sense to buy some Apple shares at $196 as they went down a bit after the announcement ($345 today, in case you are not following ).

But the time has come.Instead of replacing my personal R61 Battery and fan, I decided to buy my spouse an iPad for her birthday (stop laughing, there was a dress involved as well).

The main problems with the R61 were :

• It is far too heavy (3.5KG with charger) to be mobile
• It has too many options (e.g File System,Control Panel) if you only want to surf the net (“Isn’t Google == Internet”)
• Wireless\3G Connectivity is annoying and complex on XP
• Strange Hard Drive problems that require System restore every so often

I’m trying the iPad for couple of days now, here are few early impressions:

• It is not easy to create\edit content. For example in wordpress.com I can not see the text for some reason (had to go back to my x61 to write this blog)
• Battery life seems great. I don’t have to charge it every minute like my iPhone
• Not sure if the Apps are really needed here. The screen is big enough that websites SHOULD work like on a normal PC
• I could not upload a document to Google docs. iPad has no “open file system”  and Google removed the option to upload by email. This is the sort of annoying “closed garden” effect we are starting to see. Grrrrr
• No Picasa app for iPhone or iPad. Similar problem to the above.
• The sync from my Itunes->iPhone to iPad was very impressive. I got all my data in sync nicely. I did ran our of disk space on my PC because Apple creates a second “optimized’ copy of every photo, but it was not so hard to solve.

Wordpress Problem on iPad

• The iPhone’s apps don’t move so well into iPad (they are small with lousy resolution) but in some cases it’s good enough with 2X size.
• It does not burn my lap like the thinkpad. Cool and tender.
• When things go wrong it is hard to understand why. I was not able to play youtube movies because of a router problem, but the error messages were quite cryptic.
• I love the photos and movies color and details
• Why does Google show the mobile version for iPad ? It’s much more limited.
• Not sure on how to close tabs in Safari. I’m sure there is an easier way than the one I’m using
• For some reason the @ sign is not part of the virtual keyboard default when filling out forms. iPhone is better here.
• GPS is very cool. I assume there is no Compass
• Rhapsody is working.It basically means I can hear every song ever recorded, if it is not in Hebrew.
• Hebrew support is impressive

Lady Ga-Ga or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Facebook

The western world ended quite suddenly.

The news, and pictures, about Lady Ga-Ga actually being a man, were first reported by Steve Jobs as he presented Apple’s new iPlot gadget at a secret location.

127 journalists immediately tweeted the story , and it was soon re-tweeted by 13,068 followers.

The tweets were automatically converted 1675,042  LinkedIn notification which turned into automatic 300,000 WordPress Updates.

Than Google picked the news up and sent alerts to 1,020,068 Lady Ga-Ga followers and 1,002,900,3 day traders.

However, the big problem started as the new automatic “Google Alert” to “FaceBook comments” mechanism kicked in.

Since Facebook comments are automatically generting Tweeter alerts ,a vicious positive feedback cycle was created.

Tweeter->LinkedIn->WordPress->Google->Facebook->Tweeter.

Soon, 95% of the computing power of the western world was targeted at breaking the (false) news to the same people again and again.

When New York  lost its electric power, due to the high consumption by data center. Google decided to cancel Google wave and create a super algorithm to solve the problem.

They took five of their Nobel prize winners, who have been working on JavaScript optimizations, and asked them to solve the problem.

Google Geniuses quickly realized the problem is similar to solving the “ipartite graphs with no induced cycle of length > 6″  problem, but just when they were ready to solve it, the network on their Android t-Mobile crashed. The only person to hear about Amazon’s EC2 explosion  was President Obama, with his secure Blackberry.

As San Francisco,Tel Aviv, Rome and London lost all electric power the mob started rioting the food supplies. Unfortunately they starved after two days because all of the food was organic.

Luckily , China was saved, as Google decided to block them, or vice versa.

Is Bing Self Aware?

Strangely , looking for the word “Bing” in Microsoft’s new search engine,Bing,  gives one the useful hint “Keelbilled toucan in a rainforest in central Mexico”.

I would have thought that is the first thing their QA team would check.  I hear good things on Bing, so this may well be just an anecdote.

Searching Bing in Bing

Compare that with searching in Bing for “Google”- the result is “Develops Internet search technology.” That makes much more sense:).  Isn’t it Ironic when a search engine does not know what it is doing, but does now what the competition does ?

Search Google on Bing

Doing the opposite ( Searching for “Google” on Google and “Bing” in Google , is also interesting.

Did you know that “Google Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images”. “Usenet” ? really ? hos about it BBS ?

Search Google in Google

Search Bing on Google

Is Optimism a Fact of Life in Israel?

Here are a few quick facts to convince anyone that life is getting better.

Try this cool life expectancy tool from Google to see.

1. People are living longer. If you are born in Israel today you’ll live ten years longer than if you were born in 1960. 20 years if your are born in Haiti. 37 years in China !
2. Israel is one of the countries with longest life expectancy. 81 years. even better for women.
3. Life expectancy gaps between rich countries and poor countries are narrowing.
4. Hilary Swank won two Oscars for  “Million Dollar Baby” and “Boys Don’t Cry” after horrible failures in 90210 and “The next Karate Kid”
5. The number of traffic accidents in Israel has decreased by 35% in the last 12 years.

Life Expectancy is Getting Longer

Accidents Chart in Israel

The New Karate Kid - Swank

Building a Startup in $50.Ten Tips and Tools.

I’m sorry, but you can’t really build a start-up in $50, contrary what some people might claim. The reason is that startups are still powered by people, and people need to eat. Surprisingly, some of them even  like to eat well.

What can be done, is getting great tools in and services to help get the work done. Some of which can be dirt cheap.

Here are some must have tools of the trade  we tried,some with success and some with failures.

Old tools and spanners,Taken from FreeFoto.Com

1. Email – Google Apps. Cost : $0.

We have been using branded Gmail for our corporate email and calendering.

Compared with an exchange based solution – there is no hardware, no administration, huge mailboxes, built in anti-spam and anti-virus.

I think all start-up should go this way. Actually I think all companies should go this way.

The calendering solution is much better than I got working for a the bug corporate.

Performance and reliability are much better than we would get from any internal solution.

Some use it with outlook  (e.g. myself) and many just use the web based interface.

Only recently we moved to the professional version, to get some extra features and it is still very affordable ( $50 per user per year ).

The main downsides are that outlook integration is not perfect yet. the new tool should help, but we are still testing.

It seems that support is still not at the level corporate accounts expect.Other than – great.

2. Screen Capture – snagit. Cost : 49.5 per person.

I use it every day. Version 8 was slightly better than version 9, but it is still amazingly useful for product management,blogging, QA and marketing.

SnagIt Capture UI

3. Configuration Management – SVN+Trac. Cost : $600 for a server, $0 for software.

I really love this solution. what a great combination. So much better than my $1,000,000 a year ClearCase+ClearQuest previous product.

It gives the manager a complete, integrated view, on the version and the query screens are blissfully easy.

The tickets and the change-sets are cross linked and easily referencable . Just the way it is supposed to be.

There are hosted versions as well, but I like my source code in house.

The embedded wiki is also used by the the developers for the more detailed technical documentation.

4. Development Environemnt – Visual Studio.Net 2008.

Can’t beat Microsoft with their own game. you can get away with the high price using various start-up specific bundles.

5. Knowledge management – Grouphub AKA Basecamp AKA 37signals. Cost 49.95$ per month.

Start-ups need knowledge management as well. Basecamp is great and once they get the search right it would be even better.

We use it to document almost everything we do in the company.It is effortless to administrator.

It is not “amazing” for full blown project management (we like TRAC for R&D), but can be a fair substitute for simple projects.

It is quite rewarding when working with contractors and freelancers. The guys that run it have a great sense of humor.

Here is an example from a recent basecamp customer survey:

Basecamp Dating Survey, Funny Question

6. Web Analytics – Clicky Google Analytics. $20 per month and 0$ per month.

Personally, I think Clicky is much cooler tool and easier to use. Google Analytics had some overhaul lately so now it is no longer the only-bad-application-from-google.

Clicky web Analytics

7. Recruiting – Linkedin and Facebook. Cost : $200 per posting. $0.5 per click.

We had great success with LinkedIn (recruited 4 people so far).

It seems to work better in US than in Israel and better for sales than developers.

Facebook is not working so far , we get tons of impressions, but no real quality candidates.

8.  Productivity Suite – Microsoft Office + Google Docs.

It is still very hard to beat Microsoft here. Outlook,  PowerPoint and Word are used everyday by everyone.

Office 2007 is much better than 2003. Get over  the fact that they moved your icons

However, for simple worksheets we start using Google Docs more and more  and the sharing capabilities are great.

There are nice integration points with the other Google apps.

I personally use google desktop to combine search across outlook, gmail and documents. Unfortunately it misses a lot of items for unknown reasons.

Google Docs sharing

9. Voice and communication – PSTN,Skype, DimDIm, Asterisk.: $10 per person per month.

We didn’t find the silver bullet here yet. Probably the best thing would be good old fashion PSTN ( Or PSTN like VOIP service).

Skype is great, when it works, but sometimes it does not.

Asterisk does not work for us, as I wrote in another post.

DimDim is a great, free, conferencing service.

10. Feedback from customers : Kampyle, Zoomerang. Cost :20$ a month.

Kampyle is a very nice tool from an Israeli company that allows us to get feedback from user of our application.

We tried Zoomerang once for a customer survey and overall it was OK.

Kampyle Feedback Window

Comparing San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Humus and Maple

• Google works better in San Francisco. All the newest services are available and it even seems that QA is done on local addresses, which sort of makes sense.

• Buses are really nice and cheap for $1.5 , and you can use Google the calculate the best path. It even suggests the savings of public travel compared to private cars. Everyone is extra kind to people with special needs, which is something Tel Aviv should adopt.

Google Public Transit Map San Francisco

• There are public cars that can be used on pay-per-use base.
• There are NO women clothes at all in the big Diesel shop on Castro. In Tel Aviv it is quite the opposite.
• The cashier in Safeway would not sell me wine without a passport proving I’m actually 35 years old. After spending two hours in the line it was quite annoying. They had an 88-cents-for-toilet-paper campaign that day…
• Almost every restaurant has a big Sign that says “According to California law we must inform you this building contains hazardous materials that might cause cancer, birth defects etc” . What a great way to start a dinner. Why don’t they just shut them down , if it is really that dangerous ?
• The Humus in Tel Aviv is much Better, and you can’t even compare the Pita

Humus in San Francisco

• Pure Organic Maple syrup, on the other hand, is a great invention, almost as big as the French Toast Customized Challah
• 

  Pure Maple Syrup Image

• Most SF restaurants serve dry, cold bread for starters (But not “Catch” in Castro). In Tel Aviv warm, freshly baked bread is the norm.
• In Tel Aviv the becomes the lettuce becomes stale in four days. Through some secret kind of magic the lettuce stays fresh for a Month.

Fresh Crisp lettuce - For a Month !

While Tel Aviv is Much more energetic, it is hard to argue that San Francisco is much prettier.

San Francisco in The Rain

Making Money from LinkedIn – the Corporate Phonebook and the Wall Street Analyst

LinkedIn is finally starting to use the ton of information it is holding. A new cool feature called “Company Profile”, allows anyone to see “hidden”, “private”, companies’ data that was never available before. I believe this data can be much more informative than expensive Wall Street analysts’ reports or boring, half fabricated financial reports.

You just type in a name of a company and get the following information:

• New promotions
• New hires
• Which universities they hire from
• Which companies do people leave to
• Median age of employees
• Recent title changes
• Gender distribution

The information can be used in numerous ways. For example, the turnover rate of employees can be a superb indicator for  business success. This number is usually not reported by either public or private companies. With the help of LinkedIn such information can now be obtained with high levels of confidence.

One can also see what the trends among employees are. Assuming that employees have the best internal information on how the business is doing, watching their decisions can be quite remarkable.

Looking above we can see Microsoft employees are moving to Google, Amazon and Yahoo! (last one might become a funny move). Some Google employees are moving to FaceBook. Off course, there is lot of data still missing to get accurate conclusions. For example, it is quite possible that in absolute numbers a lot less people are leaving Google than joining.

The most common titles are also fascinating. Microsoft’s top title is Program Manager; While Google’s top title is Software Engineer. This tells you a lot about the culture and strategy each one is taking.

We can also note Google has younger employees (29 Vs 33 for Microsoft) and a lot more Women (38% vs. 30% for Microsoft).

All this data reminds me of an argument I had with an MIS manager in a large enterprise. He insisted that the internal phonebook would not avialble be in a downloadable format (EXCEL, Text, Outlook) . He wanted the phone book to be available in online web only version. When I claimed it makes the sales people life very difficult, he said that “we don’t want our employee contact information moving around the globe”.  

Not only LinkedIn provides all this information, it actually follows past and future employees. The funniest part is the information LinkedIn provides is more complete, more updated and easier to find with internal MIS applications, which are cumbersome and contain multiple errors.

All in all,IMO, more information brings better decision making for the ones who are fast enough to adopt the new tools for their usage.