Author Archives: Jon Evans
Only Messi Can Save Us Now
What's wrong with this picture? It's 2012, cheap broadband is ubiquitous in the developed world, and TV still isn't dead. In fact it's thriving. Sure, for the first time ever, Nielsen says more people watch videos on the Internet than on a TV--albeit barely--but if you look at how much time is spent on the two, there's no comparison: TV utterly dominates. Which explains why, again according to Nielsen, more money is spent on TV advertising than all other ad platforms combined.
A few doomsayers say the TV industry "may be starting to collapse" and that excessive production costs are its weak spot. Yeah, if only. Television as constituted today makes no sense at all; it's a kludged-up legacy system that's enormously painful and expensive to maintain. But TV's entrenched economic interests and cultural inertia are so pathological that even HBO GO wouldn't make sense as a standalone app--as HBO confirms--and the rumors of a brand-new Apple TV ecosystem were, alas, dead wrong. Sure, YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu are mighty powers in their own right, but if even nigh-omnipotent Apple has given up, what hope do they have?
Funny you should ask. I just happen to have an answer.
Notes From The Ebook Trenches
I keep a close and interested eye on the world of ebooks, and I'm pleased to report that it keeps getting weirder. British supermarket chain Sainsbury - who I worked for once, helping to program a new payroll system for a few months, until they scrapped the whole project - recently bought HMV's share in ebook hub Anobii for a whopping, er, one pound. (Americans: that's about $1.50.) Huh?
Meanwhile, HarperCollins announced its "HarperCollins 360" global publishing program, which at first I thought was them taking a page from the music industry's post-Napster '360 deals' -- but no; on sober second thought it has nothing to do with those except for name. Instead it's an attempt to make all of their English-language books available to all English-language readers. I know, I know: they're only doing this now? Just as ebook revenue exceeds that of hardcovers? Ah, publishing.
Meanwhiler, Startup Weekend founder and semi-vagabond Andrew Hyde Kickstartered, wrote, and self-published a travel book called "This Book Is About Travel," and then discovered that Amazon was marking up its digital delivery fees to the tune of an estimated 129,000%. Nice margin if you can get it.
But for the rest of us, well, not so much. Here are some cold hard numbers from Amazon for yours truly, for the first half of this month:
Notes From The Ebook Trenches
I keep a close and interested eye on the world of ebooks, and I'm pleased to report that it keeps getting weirder. British supermarket chain Sainsbury - who I worked for once, helping to program a new payroll system for a few months, until they scrapped the whole project - recently bought HMV's share in ebook hub Anobii for a whopping, er, one pound. (Americans: that's about $1.50.) Huh?
Meanwhile, HarperCollins announced its "HarperCollins 360" global publishing program, which at first I thought was them taking a page from the music industry's post-Napster '360 deals' -- but no; on sober second thought it has nothing to do with those except for name. Instead it's an attempt to make all of their English-language books available to all English-language readers. I know, I know: they're only doing this now? Just as ebook revenue exceeds that of hardcovers? Ah, publishing.
Meanwhiler, Startup Weekend founder and semi-vagabond Andrew Hyde Kickstartered, wrote, and self-published a travel book called "This Book Is About Travel," and then discovered that Amazon was marking up its digital delivery fees to the tune of an estimated 129,000%. Nice margin if you can get it.
But for the rest of us, well, not so much. Here are some cold hard numbers from Amazon for yours truly, for the first half of this month:
In Five Years, Most Africans Will Have Smartphones
Feature phones are not the future. Of course that verges on tautology; of course everyone will have a smartphone, until everyone has something smaller and better and even more integrated into the fabric of our lives, like Google Glasses or cybernetic jawbone/retinal implants or whatever Charles Stross dreams up next. But when, exactly?
I've spent a good chunk of my life wandering around and writing about the developing world, and as lots of folks have recently argued, that's still feature-phone territory, and will stay so for the foreseeable future. OK. Fair enough. But when precisely does the foreseeable future end? Because when the smartphone revolution hits the developing world, that's when things are going to get really interesting, because it will also be their computer revolution and Internet revolution, all at the same time.
I'm particularly interested in sub-Saharan Africa (and it seems I'm not the only one around here) but it's particularly hard to make predictions about sub-Saharan Africa, in large part because you still have to take all the statistics that come out of there with a sizable grain of salt. That said, here are a few interesting nuggets. Current smartphone penetration estimates range from 3% to 17%, but I'm most convinced by Samsung's estimate of ~7%, up from 5% last year. Doesn't sound like much, does it? But:
Bashing Facebook For All The Wrong Reasons
So Facebook's IPO was a disaster. Or maybe it wasn't. Yes, it was an utter fiasco. No, wait: "The debacle was not the IPO but all the whining by speculators who didn't make money." Nope, it was "the flop of the decade", the worst first week of any IPO in years. Au contraire: "What we have here is an investment banker acting ethically. And the whole financial press is atwitter about it." Nuh-uh: "The IPO discount is the cost of going public." Yadda, yadda, yadda, ad nauseum.
Why, what with all these furious alarums and excursions and outraged complains, Benchmark Capital's Bill Gurley was moved to compare Facebook to another company that immediately dropped below its high-profile IPO issue price and stayed there for weeks and weeks; that well-known loser called ... er ... Amazon.com. You may have heard of it.
Why is anyone paying attention to the this ultimately meaningless pageant? Probably because Selling Software That Kills
The government of Syria uses made-in-California technology from BlueCoat Systems to censor the Internet and spy on its pro-democracy activists (who are regularly arrested and tortured, not to mention slaughtered wholesale.) McAfee and Nokia Siemens have done the same in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Amesys of France and FinFisher of the UK aided brutal dictators in Egypt and Libya. Sweden's Teliasonera allegedly took up the same cudgel in Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan.
Meanwhile, back in the USSA, Bain Capital recently bought a Chinese video-surveillance company reportedly "used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents," and Cisco "has marketed its routers to China specifically as a tool of repression." You can't help but be impressed by how globalized the oppression-technology industry has become.
So what privacy/surveillance story caused an eruption of outrage this week? Yes, you guessed it: SceneTap, a startup that uses facial-recognition software to (anonymously)track demographics at bars and clubs in major American cities in real time. Forget the dissidents risking their lives for democracy: what matters is that the hipsters are creeped out!
In Which The Maker Faire Restores Your Humble Correspondent’s Faith In Humanity
A life-size fire-breathing dragon. A fully robotic calliope band. A full-scale flight simulator built by teenagers. An entire herd of homemade R2-D2s. Electric cars, steampunk fashion, a robot petting zoo, a piano made of bananas, and a cardboard Trojan Horse. Plus a zillion different interactive attractions, classes, and events for kids of all ages. Yes, the Maker Faire is back in town, and only just in time.
It was exactly the tonic I needed after my inability to get excited about the Facebook IPO and my ongoing sense that most of the Valley is focused on building meaningless mobile/social/local/scrapbooking sugar water. This was a place full of people building real, tangible things for the sake of sheer awesomeness. Oh--and while they're at it, almost as a side effect, hidden behind their Burning-Man-esque decor is a community and technology ready to turn the whole planet on its ear.
The maker movement has hit an interesting flux point; its amateurs and enthusiasts, much like the computer geeks of the 1970s and 1980s, now stand on the verge of watching their hobby erupt into big business that will reshape the way people everywhere live. Do I sound hyperbolic? Don't just take my word for it; listen to the mighty Economist, which in its British understated fashion recently called digital manufacturing no less than "The third industrial revolution."
No Shortcuts, No Mercy: The Bloodsport Of Recruitment
One year ago I wrote an article called "Why The New Guy Can't Code," about how the industry-standard process for hiring software engineers is broken, shortsighted, and counterproductive. It remains my most-read TC post. Of course, I was far from the first to say so, and even farther from the last; every few weeks a similar rant bubbles onto the home page of Hacker News.
And yet recruiting remains broken. When I wrote that post I imagined that in the subsequent year some sharp startup would come along and turn the game on its ear -- but no. A few have tried: Gitalytics, which tries to use Github data to identify good engineers; Gild, which acquired Coderloop last year and is still going strong; and especially StackOverflow Careers, which leverages the software world's most indispensable site to match employers and employees. But I think it's fair to say that all the contenders so far serve as adjuncts to the traditional recruiting process, rather than replacing it with something disruptively new.
All of which adds up to today's very weird situation: there's a desperate talent shortage across the industry, but at the same time, employers are so terrified by the prospect of ever hiring a subpar engineer that the recruiting process has become increasingly gruelling and time-consuming, even though there's little evidence that the standard interview gauntlet identifies good engineers.
Of late I'm getting more involved with recruiting myself. (My day job is at the software development shop HappyFunCorp; we're hiring.) And, pending the arrival of that hypothetical revolutionary recruiting startup, I have a modest proposal: stop worrying so much about hiring, and start putting your HR energies into firing.
Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Xobot
Poor old Android is having a bad year. (Especially compared to last year.) Apple's iPhone is soaring in China, and apparently overtaking Android in the crucial American market. Oracle's lawsuit against Google has led to several rather awkward claims, eg that the word 'license' in the phrase "we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need" referred to "not a license from anybody", a kind of license with which I was previously entirely unfamiliar. CEO Larry Page's own testimony was labelled as evasive: "His denial of knowledge and recollection contrasts with evidence," wrote Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents.
What a headache. Way back in 2005, Android head honcho Andy Rubin wrote in a prescient email:
“If Sun doesn’t want to work with us, we have two options: 1) Abandon our work and adopt MSFT CLR VM and C# language – or – 2) Do Java anyway and defend our decision, perhaps making enemies along the way.”Just imagine if they'd taken the first road. It's not widely understood in the industry that Microsoft's .NET infrastructure is more open than Java in many ways; it and its flagship language C# are ISO and ECMA standards, available to anyone and everyone, legally bulletproofed by the Microsoft Community Promise. Imagine if the Android OS ran on an entirely different technical architecture. Wait, no. Don't imagine it: examine it. Like a vision from a parallel universe, it now exists.
Interview: John Robb
John Robb is an astronautical engineer turned US Air Force Special Operations pilot turned Forrester lead analyst turned startup CTO/COO turned military theorist and author, to oversimplify. His writing has heavily influenced my own (eg you'll find his phrase "open source insurgency" several times in my novel Swarm.) He blogs at Global Guerrillas and edits Resilient Communities.
Q: Your writing has focused on three themes: global guerrillas, resilient communities, and, more recently, drone disruption. Could you give the quick nutshell summaries of each of those?
Sure. The general theme of my work is to be at the center of the information flow in the place the world is changing the fastest. I did that four times (tier 1 spec ops, the Internet, Internet Finance, blogging) in the past. I think these topics are where the change is happening fastest now: