Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz » TAG: Column

October 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

DEMOfall: The good, bad, ugly

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A look back at the good, the bad and the ugly from the premier launchpad event

I'm just back from DEMOfall, the semi-annual conference that gives startup companies a chance to unveil new technology before an audience of venture capitalists and executives from the venture arm of some of the biggest high tech firms in the world. There are always lots of good and innovative new technologies to write about, but this year, two demonstrations blew me away.

One was not just good but flat out great. The other was one of those examples where you see what can happen when technology goes bad, (or, depending on your perspective, over to the dark side). The ugly part is that there were far too many companies that reminded me of those scary days leading up to the bursting of the high tech bubble.

First the good. No, great.

In a panel discussion entitled, The future through the eyes of young innovators, Michael Callahan, a twenty something innovator and founder of Ambient and a recent grad from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, demonstrated a communications technology that captures neurological information from the brain and translates it into speech using a device called Audeo.

The demonstration was truly amazing. Callahan stood before the audience and while keeping completely silent -- his lips never moved -- the computer said, "as you may notice, I am not visibly speaking." These words may someday become as memorable as Alexander Graham Bell's famous first words on his telephone, "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you."

Callahan's words were not prerecorded. They were the words he wanted to say but those words never passed through his lips.
The technology captures the process taking place in the brain as it sets up the vocal aperture (voice box) before the air from the lungs come up.

"It is not necessarily straight thought. It is a step above thinking but a step below speaking," said Callahan.

The audio technology, consisting of both hardware and software, captures that control signal from the brain and "does a bunch of sophisticated signal processing and turns that into speech," Callahan explained.

On the hardware side, Callahan said that the vocal signal from the brain to the voice box that the device needs to pick up is "about this big" (he placed two fingers about an inch apart).

Meanwhile, the noise from the body such as the heart beat, "is about this big," Callahan demonstrated again, holding his hands a few feet apart.

Comparing it to a needle in the haystack, Callahan explained that on the software side of things, what is needed is signal recognition from a number of different angles.

First applications will be for people with disabilities who are unable to talk.

However, as Ambient Corp., Callahan also will be looking for more mainstream markets. Two he mentioned are gaming and mobile communications.

All in all, it was a sight to behold. Watch the video.

Unfortunately, now I must go on to the bad.

The technology here is also amazing but I just hate the way it will be used. It comes from a startup called Pudding Media.

What Pudding's technology can do is monitor VoIP calls, IM chats and the like, listen in on the conversation and, by picking up key words, place advertisements in real time on screen as you communicate.

The technology is, predictably, opt in. So, if you are willing to expose part of your life, you get something for free -- in this case, the service being offered by a mobile carrier, a VoIP provider, or even a Web publisher, according to the company press release.

Say, for instance, you're talking about going to the movies with a friend. The technology will start displaying movies playing in the area on your screen.

Yes, it is pretty darn amazing but my bet is the first VC to invest in this technology will be a firm that calls itself In-Q-Tel, none other than the investment arm of the CIA.

Have fun.

And now we get to what was ugly about DEMO. Specifically, it was the echo of the old days when companies insisted that profits were unimportant and market share was everything, and so offered whatever service or product they had for free.

There were way too many companies jumping on the collaboration and social networking bandwagon, all of them promising users a free version of their service.

For investors, most of the presenters promised that users would be willing to pay for added services once they were hooked on the (typically) Web 2.0 collaboration, a la FaceBook or MySpace service.

I wrote a blog post on this and named a few names.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on October 2, 2007 03:00 AM

September 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft guns for Adobe rich Internet apps crown

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Flash and Flex owned rich Web application development until Silverlight came along

There is little doubt that RIAs (rich Internet applications) are here to stay. After all, the promise of desktop app functionality delivered through the Web is compelling.

But what remains to be seen is whether content providers, Web designers, and Web 2.0 application developers will suffer as a result of the development-platform and client-player fight brewing between Adobe and Microsoft.

My conclusion? Maybe, sort of, and it depends.

For the longest time, Adobe stood nearly alone, claiming 90-plus percent of the RIA development market. RIA developers simply used Flex on the back end and Flash on the front.

And then came Microsoft's announcement of Silverlight, a runtime meant to compete with Flash.

The truth is that there can be no definitive answer as to the problems a competing development platform from Microsoft will bring; it depends entirely on the angle you are viewing it from.

End-users, who will access RIAs through a browser, will likely have little to worry about. Browser leaders Microsoft IE and Mozilla Firefox will both offer a plug-in for each. Thus, no matter how the content was developed, your PC or Mac should in theory be able to seamlessly view and use it.

Unless, of course, the Silverlight plug-in from IE offers users of other Microsoft applications and components additional advantages. In other words, Silverlight, being a .Net-compatible technology, could offer better integration with other applications built on .Net.

Chris Swenson, director of software analysis at NPD Group, says that Microsoft actually has two development environments for Silverlight: Visual Studio and all of its Expression applications.

Designers will be able to create stuff in Expression, the results of which can then be imported into Visual Studio, allowing a unique and, some would say, first-time collaboration between developers and designers.

"Microsoft has a huge installed based of Visual Studio users who would never touch [Adobe Flex]," Swenson says. And because Microsoft has imported it to the .Net platform, you can run it in both Windows and Mac through Silverlight.

While this could result in lock-in, Roger Kay, founder of Endpoint Technologies, says that, in general, integration is better for consumers but worse for competitors.

"Apple, which is not being charged as a monopoly, integrates everything," Kay pointed out.

It is true that integrating all components using the same platform offers end-users and IT a simplified approach. Rather than having to figure out an infinite number of pathways through heterogeneous technologies, integration presumably means all of the platform's components have been tested to ensure that they work with one another.

In the long run, integration could result in de facto monopoly, stifling innovation.

Is this the path Microsoft will go down? It wouldn't be the first time.

One thing is certain, from the folks I spoke with: Silverlight is an excellent technology.

Rob Enderle, principal at Enderle Group, called Silverlight, "super-Flash."

I also spoke with a very large company (not Adobe) that claimed Microsoft was trying to usurp the Internet with Silverlight but admitted that the technology is a powerful, exceptionally good RIA player that is "visually compelling" with the ability to render 3-D graphics and full-motion video.

The good news for the end-user, however, is a double-edged sword for IT.

Remember: Most Web sites are designed to drive commerce. If, as a consumer, you like the solution that Silverlight offers, IT will have to respond.

"In a contest between IT and line-of-business executives, line wins," Enderle says.

So if the line organization says Flash can't do what we want done, IT will have to redo it for Silverlight.

And while Adobe never has and never will own the entire vertical stack for RIAs, Microsoft does and can offer it to IT. They can put it all together in a nice package.

IT may worry about lock-in, but if it drives revenue, then IT will be beholden to Microsoft. There is no way around it.

End of story.

Actually, there is a lot more to this story. And here's a tease: .Net runs on top of a CLR (Common Language Runtime). It's not in Silverlight 1.0 but is promised next year in Version 1.1.

Silverlight 1.1 will include, in the package and the browser, the CLR and a large subset of .Net class libraries, perhaps with the code complied in C#. What will then be running inside the browser will basically be a .Net application.

Where that will lead raises issues worth discussing.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 18, 2007 03:00 AM

February 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

High tech's consumer envy

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Will the enterprise be neglected while vendors court the masses in search of the really big bucks?

If anything convinced me that the 20th century ethic of high-tech companies being technology-driven is over, it was a panel discussion held during the recent DEMO 2007 conference. So if you're the type who mocks the marketing guys and prefers to hear from the tech guys, you're making a big mistake. Like it or not, in the 21st century the marketing guys will rule the roost.

Rob Pait, director of global consumer electronics marketing at Seagate Technology, said Seagate is transitioning into a company that answers the needs of the digital generation. Thus the company's introduction of a 20GB business-card-size hard drive with the consumer-friendly name "DAVE," as opposed to a scary genius name like "Newton."

Answering the needs of the digital generation was Pait's way of saying Seagate wants to be a CE (consumer electronics) company. Obviously, Seagate saw what Apple did with the iPod and decided it wanted some of that. Pait said, in fact, that we could think of the iPod as a hard disk in hot pants.

You might say Seagate has CE envy.

While iPod technology is nothing new, Pait added, Apple has been able to wrap the consumer experience around that technology. No kidding. That's the difference between CE companies and high-tech companies.

It's called marketing. And marketing is everything from product design to pricing to distribution and finally advertising.

And then, in what could be described as an oxymoron, Enrique Salem, group president of consumer business at Symantec, echoed a similar theme around wanting to capture a mass market: "A lot of what we are doing today --the drive to embrace the Web sphere and Web 2.0 -- is something we have been doing for a long time."

How can you be driving to do something now and yet claim you’ve been doing it for a long time?

Robert Brewin, CTO of software at Sun, added a warning, saying you can't change company culture overnight. "You need to live the life," he said.

Sounds good, but can older high-tech companies adopt the CE lifestyle?

InfoWorld's editor in chief, Steve Fox, asked Pait for a date when the rotating hard disk would disappear in favor of solid-state memory. Despite the fact that Seagate wants to live the CE life, Pait's response was telling:

"Never," Pait said, adding that to think solid-state storage would ever replace the hard-disk drive was like believing "we will have starships someday, too."

What I gleaned from the panelists that night was that, as high tech is lured to the mass market, enterprise customers will play second fiddle. But the corporate culture and the special kind of marketing genius that is almost exclusively owned by the Panasonics, Samsungs, and Sonys of the world is not easily transferred to traditional high-tech companies.

Even the mighty iPod is thus far a one-trick pony for Apple. It remains to be seen whether lightning will strike twice, with the iPhone.

To think that a high-tech company can just switch and come up with a mass-market moneymaker is pure fantasy. But until all the high-tech CE wannabes learn this lesson, the hard way I am afraid, the enterprise is in for some neglect.

Rest assured, though, many of these companies will come crawling back, wherein the new CEO, whoever he or she might be, will talk about returning to the fundamentals. I, for one, haven't forgotten those ridiculous 2002 Hewlett-Packard ads about the garage.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 6, 2007 03:00 AM