Some folk have suggested that because Sony is behind the new version of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo all the product placements are Vaio:
This would be a slap in the face of the original novel and the Swedish version, which stuck pretty closely to the text.
But I’m not sure. Here’s another picture from a Guardian piece:
which looks pretty Apple-ish to me.
This is a slightly longer version of a piece I’ve recorded for the BBC World Service
I’ve long dreamed of an Internet of things, where all the stuff in my life speaks to each other instead of me having to the talking. The vision is relatively simple: each gadget is assigned an Internet address and so can communicate with each other, and with a central hub (my, or my computer, or smartphone, or whatever.)
The most obvious one is electricity. Attach a sensor to your fusebox and then you can see which or your myriad appliances is inflating your electricity bill. Great idea! Well sort of. I found a Singapore-based company that was selling them, and asked to try one out. It was a nice, sleek device that promised to connect to my computer via WiFi and give me a breakdown of my electricity consumption. Woohoo.
Only it never worked. Turns out the device needed to be connected to the junction box by a pro called Ken, who tried a couple of times and then just sort of disappeared. I don’t mean he was electrocuted or vaporized, he just didn’t come back. The owner of the company said he didn’t really sell them anymore. Now the device is sitting in a cupboard.
Turns out that Cisco, Microsoft and Google tried the same thing. The tech website Gigaom reports that all three have abandoned their energy consumption projects. Sleek-looking devices but it turns out folk aren’t really interested in saving money. Or rather, they don’t want to shell out a few hundred bucks to be reminded their power bills are too high.
This might suggest that the Internet of things is dead. But that’d be wrong. The problem is that we’re not thinking straight. We need to come up with ways to apply to the web of things the same principles that made Apple tons of cash. And that means apps.
The Internet of things relies on sensors. Motion sensors which tell whether the device is moving, which direction it’s pointing in, whether it’s vibrating, its rotational angle, its exact position, its orientation. Then there are sensors to measure force, pressure, strain, temperature, humidity and light.
The iPhone has nearly all these. An infrared sensor can tell that your head is next to the phone so it can turn off the screen and stop you cancelling the call with your earlobe. (The new version can even tell how far away you from the phone so it can activate its voice assistant Siri.)
But what makes all this powerful is the ecosystem of third party applications that have been developed for the iPhone. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of sensors. There are 1000s of apps that make use of the iPhone’s sensors–most of them without us really thinking about it.
This is the way the Internet of things needs to go. We need to stop thinking boring things like “power conservation” and just let the market figure it out. Right now I want a sensor that can tell me when the dryer is spinning out of control, which it tends to do, because then it starts moving around the room. Or help me find my keys.
In short, the Internet of things needs to commoditize the sensors and decentralize the apps that make those sensors work. Make it easy for us to figure out what we want to do with all this amazing technology and either give us a simple interface for us to do it ourselves, or make a software kit that lets programmy people to do it for us.
Which is why some people are pretty excited about Twine, a bunch of guys from MIT who are working on a two and a half inch rubber square which connects to WiFi and will let you program it via a very simple interface. Some examples: hang it around your infant’s neck and get it to send you a tweet every time it moves.
It may not be rocket science, but if you’ve got an infant-wandering problem it could be just what you needed.
The BBC World Service Business Daily version of my piece on The Web of Things to Come (The Business Daily podcast is here.)
To listen to Business Daily on the radio, tune into BBC World Service at the following times, or click here.
Australasia: Mon-Fri 0141*, 0741
East Asia: Mon-Fri 0041, 1441
South Asia: Tue-Fri 0141*, Mon-Fri 0741
East Africa: Mon-Fri 1941
West Africa: Mon-Fri 1541*
Middle East: Mon-Fri 0141*, 1141*
Europe: Mon-Fri 0741, 2132
Americas: Tue-Fri 0141*, Mon-Fri 0741, 1041, 2132
Thanks to the BBC for allowing me to reproduce it as a podcast.
Cleaning house of the many services which drain my bank account monthly without me noticing, I observed what I have decided to call the Cancellation Ease and Sleaze Scale in action.
At one end there’s Questia, the online research portal, where cancelling is relatively straightforward. Click on a link called “Account information” and there’s a clear link to “Cancel your subscription plan:”
The text then reads:
Apart from the rather odd “Cancel” button at the bottom of this (Cancel the account? Cancel the transaction? No other options available?) that’s pretty much it.
Manymoon, the task and project management service, has no obvious link (I would say obvious would be in your account page.) Instead you have to type a question into the support page and then you have to submit a support request. You’ll then get an email saying they’ll get back to you in 24 hours.
Then there’s dodgy end of the scale. Efax, an online faxing service that is owned by j2 Global Communications, Inc, won’t let you cancel online. Or, apparently, by fax. You have to phone them. And not just a 24 global number: at least in my case, I have to call a UK number during UK work hours.
Needless to say, you won’t find any of this information easily accessible. It’s buried in a faq:
Should you wish to cancel your account, please call Customer Support, at 0870-711-2211 (Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm GMT). Please note that your account will remain active until your cancellation request is confirmed.
To be fair, I was able to find an alternative number to call, a Singapore (local) number which fed through to a Hong Kong office, where I was able to get through to a real person called Fanny relatively quickly. Apart from the usual hoopla of offering me free subscription for a couple of months, it was relatively painless to cancel the service and she was pretty nice about it.
Not painless enough though: It wastes 15 minutes of my day and these kinds of tactics are no longer acceptable in an age of instant purchases. We can now buy apps, magazines, movies and books online at a single click, so we now need the same, or similar, options for unsubscribing to services we no longer want.
It’s sad to see that online services don’t get this yet. They leverage the ease of payments we now have to hook us, but then try old, tired and possibly illegal tactics to lock us in.
The trick, of course, is to use something like PayPal. Then you can just cancel your payments whenever you like. The sad truth is that banks haven’t yet, to my knowledge, woken up to this empowerment. When I signed up for a AT&T WiFi service in the U.S. that didn’t work, I had to make several calls to their hopeless customer services system because my bank wouldn’t cancel the monthly charges from my credit card.
In the end, unable to cancel the service or get the money refunded for a service that didn’t work, I gave up on AT&T and emailed them an ultimatum: Face the Wrath of the Wire or cooperate. Suddenly they got all nice and were suddenly able to do everything by email.
So. Sad fact is we sometimes need to get a little rough with these guys. If we were smart we would check what the cancellation procedure is before we sign up for stuff, but we don’t. We should tho.
A few years ago I wrote about sometimes your product is useful to people in ways you didn’t know—and that you’d be smart to recognise that and capitalize on itn (What Your Product Does You Might Not Know About, 2007).
One of the examples I cited was ZoneAlarm, a very popular firewall that was bought by Check Point. The point I made with their product was how useful the Windows system tray icon was in that it doubled as a network activity monitor. The logo, in short, would switch to a twin gauge when there was traffic. Really useful: it wasn’t directly related to the actual function of the firewall, but for most people that’s academic. If the firewall’s up and running and traffic is showing through it, everything must be good.
The dual-purpose icon was a confidence-boosting measure, a symbol that the purpose of the product—to keep the network safe—was actually being fulfilled.
Not any more. A message on the ZoneAlarm User Community forum indicates that as of March this year the icon will not double as a network monitor. In response to questions from users a moderator wrote:
Its not going to be fixed in fact its going to be removed from up comming [sic] ZA version 10
So this will be a non issue going forward.
ZoneAlarm is not in the buiness [sic] of showing internet activity.
Forum Moderator
So there you have it. A spellchecker-challenged moderator tells it as it is. Zone Alarm is now just another firewall, with nothing to differentiate it and nothing to offer the user who’s not sure whether everything is good in Internet-land. Somebody who didn’t understand the product and the user saved a few bucks by cutting the one feature that made a difference to the user.
Check Point hasn’t covered itself in glory, it has to be said. I reckon one can directly connect the fall in interest in their product with the purchase by Check Point of Zone Labs in December 2003 (for $200 million). Here’s what a graph of search volume looks like for zonealarm since the time of the purchase. Impressive, eh?
Of course, this also has something to do with the introduction of Windows’ own firewall, which came out with XP SP2 in, er, 2004. So good timing for Zone Labs but not so great for Check Point.
Which is why they should have figured out that the one thing that separated Zone Alarm from other firewalls was the dual purpose icon. So yes, you are in the business of showing Internet activity. Or were.
(PS Another gripe: I tried the Pro version on trial and found that as soon as the trial was over, the firewall closed down. It didn’t revert to the free version; it just left my computer unprotected. “Your computer is unprotected,” it said. Thanks a bunch!)