Loose Wire — Click Here

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

Loose Wire — Click Here to Read Summary

By Jeremy Wagstaff
from the 21 February 2002 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review, (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

If you work for a corporation, institution or any set-up which considers a vision statement to be worthy of its resources, chances are you’ll be required to file regular reports on your comings, goings and sitting-still-and-doing-nothing sessions. And the chances are that no one will ever read these documents top to bottom. In fact, chances are that no one will read them at all. Heck, you probably don’t even read them. But they have to be done, or someone will notice and fire you.

But where does all this stuff go? In the old days we’d say with confidence, “landfill,” but in the digital age, no such luck. It all gets stored on some hard disk somewhere, no easier to find than its hard-copy forebears. Luckily, no one shows a pressing urge to want to find it, but what happens if they do? The sad truth is that all these zillions of e-mails, Word documents, Acrobat files, PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets we produce don’t build us a supply of wisdom; they just get lost. In the lingo of the information game, it’s called unstructured data and unlike its rich cousin, structured data, which gets sifted by sophisticated programs wearing tin hats called data miners, it sits idle and largely inaccessible, unnoticed.

But there are signs that software developers are taking a closer look at this forgotten corner of the information superhighway and figuring out ways of imposing order on this unruly mass.

Logik, from Coredge Software Inc. (www.coredge.com), will take a document, or a whole directory, or hard drive, and sift — or parse — the contents, extracting the most important phrases, or themes as Logik calls them. Logik also generates a summary of the document. It does all this remarkably well, giving you a sense of the document in question along with a list of themes, from names and concepts to phrases like “vision statement” — all in less time than it takes to say: “What exactly is a vision statement and why do we need one?”

This process is great for handling large numbers of documents that you might need to retrieve at some point, but may not have the time to read all the way through. A keyword search for a phrase or theme will throw up a list of files that include that phrase. And if you select one of those documents you get a summary. Logik will also translate documents between major European languages and Japanese. I was impressed by the intuitive, uncluttered feel of this software.

But while automatic summarizing is a great concept which has come a long way in recent years, it’s by no means the main function users want to see in programs that organize their documents for them. To me the most important part of the process is a simple one: Can I find the document I’m looking for quickly, and can I view it immediately? While users can view the original document in Logik, it opens in a new window, making it less seamless than the rest of the program’s functions.

Document Search

For this kind of feature — finding quickly and viewing — you need Enfish Corp’s (www.enfish.com) Find, which indexes your hard drive and lets you find anything from a single word to a complex Boolean string quickly. Another program that offers a similar feature is 80-20 Software’s Retriever (www.80-20.com/products/retriever/) though at present it doesn’t let you preview the whole document (future versions will).

For software that does straight summarizing, check out Copernic Technologies’ Summarizer (www.copernic.com/products/summarizer), which does a great job of abridging anything on the fly, whether it’s a Web page, a Microsoft document or next door’s cat.

These programs make digging up any document you mislaid — or keeping track of colleagues’ documents — a whole lot easier. None of them comes cheap, however-Retriever is $50, Summarizer is $60 and Enfish Find is $70, while the standard version of Logik sells for $150. But to me that’s a good thing: These companies are aiming at a more discerning market with deeper pockets — in fact at exactly the sort of guys who spend their days writing reports that their bosses will never read.

Column: the Sony Clie PEG-NX70V

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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Loose Wire: A Delight to Behold

By Jeremy Wagstaff
from the 19 December 2002 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review, (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Sony’s newest PDA casts a love-at-first sight spell with its stunning good looks and exciting multi-media features. But will you still love it tomorrow?

Sony has long mastered the art of ensuring you fall in love immediately with its products. I’m not sure how it does it, but when I set eyes on the very first VAIO notebook computer five years ago, I had to have it. With its smooth metallic finish and purple trimmings, it still looked good when I had to dump it years later. Since then, the love-at-first-sight syndrome is certainly true for Sony’s new personal digital assistant, or PDA, the Clie PEG-NX70V [$600]. Its magnesium casing, large screen and swivelling clamshell top are awe-inspiring, and you feel yourself instinctively reaching for your wallet. But would the love affair last?

I’m still in two minds about it. This is definitely Sony’s most ambitious PDA. It offers a very high-resolution screen [320 by 480 pixels, or dots, to be precise] that makes Palm’s look miserly, an MP3 player, a built-in keyboard and a voice recorder, as well as a camera, a video recorder, a 200 megahertz chip, the latest [version 5.0] Palm operating system and a slot for a wireless card to hook the device up to a wireless network. Extraordinary stuff for a gadget that weighs eight ounces and measures less than 3 inches wide by 5.5 inches long. At first blush, it’s the answer to all your prayers: It’s a fully fledged Palm-powered PDA, with all the bells and whistles your work requires, and it doubles as a modest but usable camera, will play back music and record interviews and meetings.

Now for the cautionary tale. First, Sony has a reputation for building sturdy and beautiful products [even if the product-naming department should be forced to name its offspring the way it choose names for its products, which are invariably nonsensical combinations of letters and numbers]. But computing, in my view, is still not Sony’s strong suit. The bundled programs to unlock all these features are a mixed bag and, after numerous requests to reboot my computer, I wasn’t quite sure what I had installed and what I hadn’t.

Another downer: In theory there’s enough that comes with the Clie to get you on the road, but you won’t get far without at least one widget that doesn’t come with it — a Memory Stick. These chewing-gum lookalikes are Sony’s proprietary memory cards that you see happy young people in Sony ads swapping between computers, MP3 players, cameras and video recorders. That the Clie doesn’t come with one [a] reflects Sony’s somewhat arrogant assumption that everyone is already bursting with Memory Sticks and [b] means that unless you are already a Sony convert you can’t make use of the most interesting features of the device. [The PEG-NX70V comes with 16 megabytes of memory but five megabytes of that is already taken up with Clie programs].

Bottom line: Expect to shell out $100 or so for another 128 megabytes of memory if you want to take photos, video, or use the audio features.

I encountered other snags that tested my passion for the PEG-NX70V, or Peggy V as I started calling her. Being in the entertainment business, Sony is still somewhat schizophrenic about the MP3 revolution — where folk can convert CDs and whatnot to a very slimmed-down, portable file format called MP3 — and it shows on the Clie.

MP3s have scared the living daylights out of the music industry because there’s nothing stopping anyone swapping their CD collection over the Internet with any Tom, Dick or Harry — for free. Not surprisingly, the bundled software for moving music onto Peggy V from your computer converts the MP3, or CD, into Sony’s own format called ATRAC3, which [you guessed it] limits what you can do with the music.

The result: A silly mess that will alienate users and further muddy the waters. Solution? Buried in the manual is a workaround, which basically allows you to move MP3 files directly onto the Memory Stick, which you can then listen to on Peggy V without restrictions.

My verdict: Aesthetically delightful, Peggy V might not be the companion she promises to be. Palm would do well to copy the Clie’s screen design, whereby the scribbling pane doubles as part of the screen itself, but overall the PEG-NX70V’s extra features aren’t quite as seductive as they first appear. It won’t stop me holding onto mine as long as I possibly can, but I’m not ditching my MP3 player, my voice recorder, or even my Palm Tungsten, for the time being.

Column: the problem with online music

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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Loose Wire: On-Line Music’s Jarring Notes

By Jeremy Wagstaff
from the 14 November 2002 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review, (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Big media’s flirtation with the Internet may be over soon after it began. At least that’s how it looks to a bunch of music enthusiasts who have been subscribing to an on-line service called EMusic (www.EMusic.com), which allows users to download songs in the compressed MP3 format for a flat monthly subscription fee (a princely $10 for most). The four-year-old service was going fine — about 65,000 users, 230,000 tracks available, revenues rising 30% in the first half of the year — until late October when several subscribers were told their accounts had been terminated, due, EMusic said, to “unusually excessive download activity.” In a nutshell, they got bumped because they downloaded more music than EMusic reckoned was fair. One or two have since been reinstated, but most haven’t, leaving a very sour taste in the mouth of EMusic’s once loyal fans.

This is all sad, and in my view unnecessary. EMusic has done a wonderful job in bridging the gap between the illegal world of Napster file-sharing and the old world of buying expensive CDs in a shop. But it has shot itself in the foot and raised fears that the entertainment giants behind such sites are no more committed now to distributing music over the Internet than they were pre-Napster.

For those of you not in the know, here’s some history: A few years back pimply youths discover MP3, a computer-file format which allows them to convert a CD into a size small enough to send over the Internet. Other youths discover ways to share such files with other users, suddenly making shops and the CD somewhat redundant. Lawyers swoop and Napster, despite being bought out by one of the big media giants, is now a redundant “work in progress” (www.napster.com).

Into the gap, among others, leapt EMusic (which started out as GoodNoise), with a sizeable stable of music for easy download. Deciding wisely not to tamper with the MP3 format via security features that may prevent users from doing what they want with the music they buy, the service quickly grew. Last year it was bought by Universal Music Group and later folded into the new Vivendi Universal Net USA Group, Inc., along with other music-oriented sites like www.rollingstone.com and www.MP3.com. So far, so good. EMusic has proved to be an excellent source of interesting, if not mainstream, music from classical to hip hop. In the past month I’ve become a big fan too, dipping into some great ambient and electronic stuff I otherwise would never have found, finally ditching those Dolly Parton records I’ve been listening to for years.

However this recent move casts a heavy cloud over the service. EMusic appears caught between the scepticism of its owners and the natural desire of users to make the most of their subscription. Ahead lurk some difficult decisions: Reuters last month quoted sources in Universal as saying a verdict would soon be made on what music Web sites would be sold off and which would be kept, probably as part of some integrated Web site.

So what to do? I can quite understand that EMusic wants to protect its assets. EMusic public-relations chief Steve Curry says EMusic must pay royalties to both the music publisher/songwriter — via a flat-rate fee per track downloaded — and to the record label/performer — from what’s left in the pot after EMusic takes its cut. In short, he says, the business model will only work if it doesn’t spend too much on paying the former, leaving none for the latter. If one person downloads a lot of tracks, most of the money will be paid in flat-rate royalties. “That is why we’re very concerned about monitoring and preventing large-scale abuse of our service — to make sure members are keeping it to ‘personal use and enjoyment,’ not ‘I wonder how many tens of thousands of MP3s I can possibly download in a month.'”

Fair enough, but EMusic’s own press releases hardly discourage such practice. The most recent states that “EMusic is a revolutionary new music discovery service that allows fans to download as much MP3 music as they desire for as little as $9.99 a month.”

What’s unnecessary about this is that every subscriber to EMusic knows they could find the music free on file-sharing services like Grokster (www.grokster.com) and Kazaa (www.kazaa.com). But they choose to obey the law and cough up. To me this is proof positive that most Internet folk are reasonable and law-abiding and want the artists they listen to to get some money for their work. And most would probably be happy to cough up more if it meant EMusic survived.

If EMusic survives it’s going to be down to whether its owners reckon it’s going to make money in the long run. If it does make money it’s going to be because its fans continue to sing its praises to others, in turn feeding more subscriptions, and, most importantly, the readiness of artists and labels to contribute their catalogues to the EMusic library. None of this is going to happen if EMusic treats its users like potential shoplifters.

EMusic, change your subscription model (there are some excellent suggestions on the newsgroup at http://groups.yahoo.com/ group/emusic-discussion) so that heavy and light users are catered for, but don’t drive away the very people who have helped proselytize your service. Otherwise they’ll slink back to illegal file sharing and I’ll have to root around in the dumpster for my old Dolly Parton records.

Column: Love Online

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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Loose Wire: Looking for Love on the Net

By Jeremy Wagstaff

I’ve been suspicious about the benefits of linking computers and romance since the late 1970s, when as a gangly teen I joined an acting tour of New England schools. The stated purpose of the exercise was to bring refined English culture to the colonial heathen (although it wasn’t expressed so explicitly), but we young fellas were really only interested in using our posh English accents to melt tender American hearts. When, prior to departure, we were asked to fill out a computer punch-card form for a ball halfway through the tour where we were promised a bevy of girls matching our vital statistics, we felt sure the trip was going to be a runaway success.

Of course it wasn’t. Our first night on U.S. soil saw us thrown out of an ice cream parlour by a waitress unimpressed by our accents and empty wallets. And when it came to picking up my badge and list of matches at the ball, I quickly realized that I had been a little too honest in the questionnaire. As I wended my way through the room glancing at badge numbers, I couldn’t help noticing that all six of my matches looked like they were part-time shot-putters for the East German Olympic team. Torn between leaving and spending the evening in the toilet, I dumped my badge and tried to convince a couple of cheerleaders they were my matches. Needless to say they poured punch in my lap and I ended up in the campus shrubbery with a slightly moustachioed hammer-throwing exchange student from Leipzig.

Twenty years later, not much had changed. Single and newly returned to Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, I signed up for a dating service. For a fee, you got to submit your profile for others to peruse. You, in turn, could check out their profiles. In tiny cubicles in a dingy office subscribers flipped through brochures, trying to stifle gasps of horror at the gallery on offer. I cancelled my subscription when the only woman I could find who didn’t seem to have some significant drawback — a contagious disease, six previous husbands or Joan Collins hair — rebuffed my mediated approaches.

Now, on-line dating has taken off in a big way. I counted half a dozen new sites launched in the past two months alone. Most let you browse what’s on offer for free, but charge you, either via subscription or a credit system, if you want to contact anyone you like the look of.

Setting up your profile has got a lot more sophisticated than punching a card. At uDate (www.udate.com) you can fill in detailed forms right down to whether you eat Chinese food or read the Helsingborgs Dagblad. The British-based site boasts 11 million members and made $2 million profit last quarter. One new site, DateCam (www.datecam.com), lets you use Web cams — cameras hooked to your PC — to flirt on-line. That should make those awkward early exits easier: Instead of feigning food-poisoning to escape your undesirable date, you could just blame your modem.

Of course, there are downsides. In some circles there’s a stigma attached to folk who apparently have to resort to matchmaking services. Another problem is that you can’t be sure who you’re dealing with on-line, leaving you vulnerable to liars, stalkers, philanderers and criminals: Japan reported almost 800 crimes related to on-line dating sites in the first half of 2002, almost double last year’s figures.

Still the more people who sign up, the less stigma there’s going to be, and the more choice folks will have in selecting a partner. Indeed, sites such as Lavalife (www.lavalife.com) offer a huge array of choices, even in a place like Indonesia: I was particularly taken by a lady who’s opening line was “Come to mama, big boy!!!” Another lady cheerily confessed she has more shoes than she can count, and her picture seems to catch her in a moment of happy abandonment at the end of a lively evening.

So does all this work? Lavalife reckons so. A survey the company commissioned said that last month more than half of Americans believe they stand a better chance of meeting someone they like on-line than in a singles bar.

If you’re romantically sidelined, I’d recommend dipping a toe. UDate has the most options, but it’s untidy, and member profiles aren’t particularly illuminating. Lavalife is the best laid out, in my view, and they make it very easy to add photos, personalized text, and a more private Web page that only folk you invite in can view. I only ran into trouble when I tried to remove a photo of myself by the pool which, on reflection, was a bit too racy for the public section. As far as I can work out it’s still there, which probably explains why I haven’t had any responses yet. Even from Leipzig shot-putters.

Column: MP3 burning

By jeremy | November 24, 2011

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Loose Wire — Burning for An Eternal Flame

By Jeremy Wagstaff
from the 17 October 2002 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review, (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Those of you who spent your lovesick adolescence painstakingly making compilation tapes for your paramour, wasting hours hunched over a record deck deciding on a perfect segue to Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin exhaling their way through Je t’aime . . . Moi non plus, I’m happy to report that technological advances now make the process a less exacting experience. It’s nothing particularly revolutionary, but recent improvements in software and hardware have made compilation CDs something you can create at home, quickly and easily. Here’s how.

What you need are a CD writer, some music and some software. For Windows users I’d recommend Cakewalk’s new Pyro 2003 ($25 for a download version from www.cakewalk.com/ pyro), but you might also try Ahead’s Nero (about $40 from www.nero.com) or Roxio’s EasyCD Creator (about $90 from www.roxio.com).

First, the music. If you’re using CDs, programs like Pyro will convert them to a format that can be stored on a PC. These are either MP3 files or rival Windows Media Audio (WMA) files — a compressed format that loses a little of the original sound quality — or a wave file, which retains all the original range of sound, but makes for a whopping great file. Want to use your LPs, or a cassette? Pyro will handle those too, basically by having you plug the relevant machine — turntable, or tape player — into your PC, and playing the track so the PC can record it. Pyro can also remove any clicks, pops or other sound quirks that were either on the original, or which appeared during the transfer to PC.

Pyro does all this quite intuitively, which is why I’d recommend it over other more feature-heavy, but less user-friendly, programs. That’s not to say Pyro isn’t powerful; Cakewalk made their name in music-recording software for pros and Pyro is a spin-off from that technology, so you’re in good hands. Once the tracks are in a format that Pyro can deal with, you can view them graphically as waveforms, like the jagged signals on heart-monitoring equipment. This is great for arranging the order of songs, and sorting out how you want them to follow on from one another.

Once again, Pyro makes this very easy: Click and drag a horizontal line over the waveform to set the volume of each song, and drag the ends of the same line to alter fades in and out. Drag the song’s waveform to alter the gap between each song, or overlap them for that wild party feel. In my day you could only do this with two turntables, fiddly cassettes, a mixer and a lot of patience, and if you got it wrong the first time there wasn’t much you could do about it except curse Serge Gainsbourg.

Once you’re happy with sound levels, segues and the overall brilliance of your compilation, it’s time to burn it to CD. This is also pretty straightforward, though I ran into some minor problems, probably as a result of my CD burner more than Pyro. Pyro could have done better on the error message, which ventured little more than something like ‘You’ve got a problem, dude.’

On balance, though, this is an excellent way to make CDs and it’s not as time consuming as it sounds. If halfway through you decide to add a song from elsewhere, Pyro handles it without any kerfuffle. If I had any complaints, I’d like to see better contextual help, which though innovative is too patchy to be helpful.

Programs like Pyro also make sense for the growing number of folk downloading music off the Internet, whether it’s from the dark and illegal world of post-Napster file sharing, or the uncertain, but legal, world of on-line music subscription. If you haven’t tried the latter, I’d recommend Emusic (www.emusic.com), which, for a monthly fee of just $10, allows you to download an unlimited number of MP3s from its sizeable library. You won’t find everything you’re looking for, but it’s a great way to check out new stuff, or come across some forgotten favourites. This isn’t for hi-fi perfectionists, but it’s a worthy successor to the grab-bag tapes of old.

Finally, suggestions please for what song should follow Je T’aime. I’m considering Eric Carmen’s original of All By Myself, but I’m open to suggestions.