Rafe's Blog

Peerflix for books

If you like the peer-to-peer DVD trading system that Peerflix has set up (which I covered in a column, Building the Cashless Economy), and want to see if the model can apply to other types of goods, check out Bookins, the P2P exchange system for books. Just like Peerflix, Bookins lets consumer extract value from goods that are no longer wanted.

Personally, I think trading DVDs is a better bet: DVDs are much cheaper and faster to ship; there is a smaller universe of titles; and, as my wife says, handling somebody’s used DVD isn’t as "icky" as a used book can be.  Plus, Bookins charges $3.99 per trade, vs. Peerflix’s $0.99.

On the plus side, Bookins’ $3.99 charge does include postage, which prints on the shipping label (cool). And since this bar-coded postage is tracked by the Postal Service, users don’t have to tell the system when they mail a book; as soon as it hits the post office, Bookins knows.

So now we have Peerflix, a DVD-to-DVD trading system, and Bookins, a book-to-book trading system. It begs the question: Why can’t we exchange DVDs for books? Or books for PlayStation games? Or games for pots and pans? And how far can trading systems go before they have to adopt some universally-accepted medium for value exchange? Oh, wait, we already have that. It’s called money.

Quoted

I was interviewed for a story in the New Jersey Star-Ledger ledger about technologies for the small business: Back in the Swing: The latest tools of the trade. I got in one tip (use your digital camera to record whiteboards, instead of trying to scribble everything down) and one cute quote that I've been using in speeches (see the last paragraph).

Interesting new geolocation technologies

I'm covering the "peer-to-peer" location technology from Navizon in my next Rafe's Radar column. Peer-to-peer is in quotes here since Navizon's system relies on users to record the locations of WiFi access points and cellular towers, but isn't strictly P2P, as it has been pitched. It's still very interesting.

I'm also curious about a company called GeoVector, that goes to the next step and apparently can determine not just where your handheld device is, but what it is pointing at. My attempts to contact the company have not been successful (this almost never happens). If anybody reading this knows people at GeoVector, feel free to point them in my direction: [email protected].

Hardware is a dead end

I gave a talk on Tuesday for the attendees of the Gartner Small Business Vision event. My topic: Emerging technologies for small businesses. To prepare for the talk I wrote a column, which recently ran on CNET.

After I wrote the column, I continued to work on the talk, and it ended up going in a different direction. As I was preparing my notes, I realized that I had collected a list of hardware and software product categories that I consider important for businesses to adopt, but that none of these products could truly move a business forward. These tools- - smart phones, laptops, etc. -- are productivity enhancers.  They're important. But from a business perspective, not exciting.

On the other hand, emerging online trends and technologies are business enhancers. Blogs, video, community, search engine optimization -- these are technologies that, if employed wisely, can really improve a business by opening new avenues of marketing, sales, and most importantly, communication between a business and its customers.

It all reminds me of what I learned way back in 1992, when I edited Corporate Computing magazine: There is no fundamental business problem that new hardware can solve.  But it's equally clear to me that most small businesses barely have a pulse when it comes to using the Internet to improve their prospects.

Gadget of the Day: Matrix Orbital MX610

Because I like to tinker and because my wife is out of town, I just bought and installed a Matrix Orbital MX610 LED display for my computer. The MX610 is a configurable 2-line display that shows you exactly nothing that you can't otherwise show on your PC's monitor. But man, is it cool. I've got mine cycling through real-world data like the time, weather, and stock quotes, as well as system information like my CPU's temperature and network bandwidth.

The coolest thing about this MX610 is the third-party software that comes with it: LCDC. It lets you configure the display to show just what you want, and how. It can also respond to events on your PC. For example, mine automatically flips to the CPU temperature display when it gets hot; it would be easy to do something similar with stock quotes. There are several free plug-ins available to display things that aren't bundled with the system. For example, there's one to display Caller ID information (assuming you have a modem that can capture it).

More advanced users can use the MX610 and LCDC to control system fans, and to turn on other devices (mostly lights, but also relays) when events occur -- for example, when new email comes in.

The gizmo is designed to mount in a 5.25" drive bay in your PC, but I put mine in an external enclosure since my system is on the floor and I didn’t want to have to crane my next to see it. I'm actually using it as a riser for one of my monitors.

Next up on my tinker list: I want this thing to display RSS feeds. A plugin for this comes with LCDC, and I look forward to setting it up. I just need to take a dinner break first.

Spring forward, fall apart

I was on vacation in Hawaii for two weeks, where I got reacquainted with the idea of "island time."  On island time, things happen at the relaxed pace of a gentle warm breeze. It's best not to mess with island time -- you'll just harsh your own mellow.

But now the Bush administration wants to mess with all our time, by changing the schedule of when daylight savings time starts and ends. This is supposed to save energy. Which it may well do -- but at the cost of making some our clocks wonky.

(By the way, I'm writing about this by way of putting thoughts together for a CBS LA appearance I'm supposed to do this afternoon.)

Now, as I see it, there are three kinds of clocks we have to worry about, and only one kind is truly vulnerable:

1. Clocks that update themselves. That is, clocks on computers, clocks that get signals from NIST. These can all be reprogrammed. It will cost money, but it's doable, and certainly nowhere near a big deal as the Y2K problem.  As long as the programming is done right and on time (ok, a big if), we shouldn't see airplanes landing on top of each other. Certainly services companies (like energy and phone companies) will be highly motivated to make the change, so they don't miss-bill people.

2. Clocks that we update ourselves. In other words, the clock on your old microwave, the clock in your car, and your wristwatch. You'll just have to re-set them on a different day. Big deal. This is a public communications (marketing) problem more than anything else.

3. Clocks that think they know when daylight time starts and ends… but are wrong.  This is the biggest problem. There are some clocks now that are hard-coded to flip from standard to daylight time automatically, like some VCRs. These are going to cause people some grief. 

The whole idea of time being kept locally is rather arcane anyway. Since so much that we and our machines do these days has to be coordinated with others, the best way to keep good track of time is to get the time from a central time server. Which is what Windows PCs do every time they log in, modern VCRs do when they get a PBS signal (which carries time information), and more and more desk clocks, wall clocks, and wristwatches do when they get a timing signal over the air.  (The only issue with self-setting clocks is that some only receive data on the minute and second, to fine-tune what time they display. If the start and end of DST changes, they still might not know.)

I think the effect of this news, regardless of the outcome, will be a slight acceleration of the idea that the correct time isn't what you have on your wrist -- that's just the presumed time (even though today's quartz clocks are frighteningly accurate). Rather, we're going to become more accustomed to clocks that set themselves, using data from centralized, government-certified time authorities. So, what time is it? It's what time The Man says it is.

To infinity, and beyond

My last tech meeting before a much-needed vacation (which will explain my online absence for the next two weeks) was the "Immersive Space Reception," a party for the all-new digital planetarium at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.

The planetarium half-dome is the same as it ever was, but they've added six DLP projectors fed by their own computers and new software. The projectors are 1400 x 1048 pixels each; five are used to cover the horizon ring and the sixth fills in the space left at the roof. The effect is seamless and amazing. This planetarium can go anywhere in the universe there's data on, and it can do it at the whim of the planetarium operator. During the demo, senior astronomer Ryan Diduck, and Sky-Skan president Steve Savage (his company made the software), "drove" us from Earth orbit, around our solar system and the galaxy, and to the edge of the known universe. What we didn't see, which Chabot executive director Alex Barnett says they're working on for the next step, is a trip in the other direction: Into biology and atomic structure.

Coincidentally, a few days prior I was experimenting with Celestia, a free universe explorer that runs on a PC (think of it as Google Earth, but pointing in the other direction). On the way to the planetarium, I was wondering: With all the computing and graphics power available on our desktops now, and all the data that you can stream over the Internet, who needs a planetarium?  Somebody at the event described it this way: Your PC, the Internet, your books -- think of that, collectively, as your bible of astronomy.  The planetarium is the church. It's where you go to be taught, to experience the wonder with others, and to feel the awe of the universe in a setting that you can't duplicate at home. Amen to that.

I want this keyboard

On this keyboard, every keycap is an OLED screen. It looks like just a design fantasy, but it makes perfect sense. Imagine if your key labels changed to tell you, when you were running Word, what formatting codes were hidden in each key; or, when you were playing Half-Life, which keys did what.  I'm sure someone out there is working on this.  Like I said, I want it.

Either that or the completely blank Ray Charles keyboard.

Evolutionary mistakes in technology

Technology evolves. Good technologies and products usually survive; poor ones usually go extinct. But not all of the technologies and tech products that have swirled down the drain of the tech gene pool deserved their fate. I wrote the Top Ten Tech we Miss for CNET, covering some ideas that we thought we'd have with us forever, but that unfortunately have gone the way of the dodo. Here's a preview: Spacemen. Kozmo. LPs. The Concorde.

The need for speed

While I'm busy pimping my columns, here's another one that just posted: Silly Upgrades, my latest Works for Me column on CNET. There's a lot of reader feedback on it, which I like.  But I initially thought people hated this column, since I got some early emails on it telling me that my ideas about fast cars being wasteful were not welcomed. I'll say it to the world: First, it was a joke. Kind of. I love cars. One of the highlights of my life was being driven around Infineon raceway by Mario Andretti in a Porsche GT3. That taught me a thing or two about driving fast. 1: It's fun. 2: Dude, it's incredibly scary.