The fifth horseman never gets invited to the good parties Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

This article was originally posted on Google+.

Yesterday +MG Siegler argued on +TechCrunch that Samsung is the fifth horseman of technology, filling in for the ailing Microsoft, when the four horsemen: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google go riding.

I have to disagree with the underlying assumptions. We're at yet another tipping point in technology. A few years ago we moved from the beige box to the black rectangle, but the black rectangle won't be with us for as long as the beige box.

That black rectangle, the ubiquitous form factor of today's smart phone, is a transition device and it's going to disappear quickly as the speed of technological change is accelerating rapidly. Of the four horsemen only Google seems to be working on alternatives with +Project Glass. It's possible the others, including Samsung, have working hardware, but the successor to today's smart phone is going to be all about context and user interaction.

I've stood up in front of audiences before and argued that our smart phones have our lives on them, the next generation of mobile technology is going to stand between us and our lives and add context. It's hard to do that without a lot of information about the user.

It's also going to be a big leap for the horsemen to make. Despite getting into hardware recently Amazon is about selling content, Facebook has never done hardware and I don't think have this sort of paradigm shift in their corporate bones, Apple has, but without Steve Jobs I don't think they'll have the guts to kill the iPhone and innovate. Samsung, the fifth horsemen that never gets invited to the good parties, is a box shifter. They know hardware, but they don't know design, and they don't know anything about their end users. Their customers are other companies, like Amazon, not you and me, the eventual consumers.

So out of all of them Google  seems to be the only one positioned to move forward, and it'll be a big leap for them even so. The developer release of +Project Glass later this year is going to be crucial. If I had the money to lose making a wager, I'd wager that it'll be some startup you or I haven't heard of yet that makes the leap to the next ubiquitous form factor.

Either way, it's going to be an interesting year...

New for the iPhone, AWS Calculate Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Following on from my previous iPhone application which allows you to monitor the status of various cloud computing backend services, and continuing with the Cloud Computing themed applications. I'd like to announce the release of my next iPhone application onto the App Store...


AWS Calc for the iPhone 3G and iPod touch.
Cloud Computing makes it easy to build applications that run reliably, even under heavy loads. But the larger the load, the higher your cost.

The AWS Calc application allows you to estimate your monthly costs based on your current Amazon Web Services (AWS) usage levels, and then lets you estimate how much a sudden usage spike could cost.

The dark side of the cloud Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

More than ever these days I'm living in the cloud. Google has my mail, Apple has my calendar, del.icio.us has my bookmarks, Flickr has my photographs, and Amazon S3 has my files.

Day-to-day I rely on a lot of cloud infrastructure, and while I'm old enough to remember having to wade though card catalogues, and still know five fun things to do with microfiche, I no longer go to the library when I need a journal article. NASA's ADS and Cornell's pre-print archive provide instant semantically tagged access to both the historic and latest literature. I haven't physically set foot in a library in several years now.

I've moved away from my old arrangement, where I had a desktop machine in the office, and then a laptop for traveling. My main machine is now one of the new 13-inch Aluminium Macbooks, when I'm in the office I hook this up to one of Apple's new LED displays; off of which hangs several 500GB disks for backup and scratch space, a full sized keyboard, and a mouse. So whether I'm on a plane, a train, or siting in my office, everything is just the same. The screen gets a bit bigger or smaller, and my desktop background changes, but that's about it.

That said when I'm travelling long haul, rather than lugging my Macbook around, I've even started to leave that behind. I'm using my Dell mini 9 netbook as a thin client to the cloud and, at least for short trips, this seems to be going fairly well.

I'm on tender-hooks to see whether Apple is going to venture into the netbook territory, after all, I've been waiting for a replacement for my old 12-inch Powerbook for a long time now. However if an officially sanctioned Apple netbook doesn't show up in the next few months I might get round to installing OSX on my mini9. Then again, I might not. It's surprising how tolerable Windows XP turns out to be, at least if all you're using it as is a platform to run Google Chrome and some web applications.

But there is a dark side of the cloud, it isn't always there, and here I'm not talking about the offline problem. After all, that what Gears is there to fix...

Recently I had my AdSense account shut down. Totally ignoring the loss in future revenue, Google also locked me away from my data. The information about what ads sold, on which page, when. I'm paranoid about backups, and expect other people to be too, but that isn't data I had elsewhere. While I could have exported it, I didn't. Mainly because it would be fairly hard to analyse outside of Google's own infrastructure.

Google also hosts my email and my blog, and its RSS feed now that they've acquired Feedburner. Which puts them locking me away from my own data in a very different light. Blogger doesn't have an export function, and it's not alone. With Yahoo in trouble I've started to worry about all the pictures I have hosted on Flickr. They also don't have any way to back up your content.

To be clear, I'm not just talking about the raw content. Especially in the case of Flickr the meta-data attached to the content; the date, time, geo-location and associated tags are as equally important as the content itself. If you can't export the content with the meta-data attached, it's hardly worth doing. Even worse, there are services where taking your own data out of the context of the service makes it worthless. Exporting my data from Twitter, taking it out of the Twitter timeline, is fairly pointless.

Which of course brings me to the well trodden path of data portability. My calendar, address book and email are all portable because they are in standard formats. I can easily migrate between services, and some of those services even encourage me to do so...

Other content is not as portable, and that is of course because there aren't any standards to make it portable. How would you go about writing the export service for Flickr, or Blogger? Especially one that made sure it exported all the meta-data in a decently digestible format. Who would implement code to read from the format. Could the network even support thousands of users making a run on Flickr, for instance, and grabbing all their archived pictures?

This is a problem we're all going to face as our lives, and the data trail we generate, move into the cloud. Because that's our data I'm talking about. It doesn't belong to the companies that host it. They may be providing the services that display it, but the data is ours. They really need to remember that...

The Amazon Kindle? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'll admit it up front, I'm amongst the faithful. The small library my wife and I have accumulated over the years takes up most of the sitting room, and it's over-spilling the bookcases yet again. It's almost time to buy yet another bookcase and jam it into the room somehow. So I'd quite like a sleek, paperback sized, ebook reader that actually works as advertised, but it's been a long wait.

CREDIT: Engadget

The Amazon Kindle
But I don't think the Amazon Kindle (via Engadget and Read/Write Web) is it. A good deal of what people enjoy about books, the thing that makes it actually enjoyable to read a book as opposed to a chore, is the way the book feels in your hand. Effectively the user interface is the thing that makes book useable. Unfortunately, you just have to look at the Kindle to know this will never replace the paper back.

Technically the book reader might push the right buttons, but you'll never get people who buy books to buy this thing. Not only is the thing not ergonomic, it's just plain ugly to look at...

First launch for Blue Origin Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

You have to give it to Jeff Bezos, he's managed a top flight skunk works project and kept it out of the media to an astonishing degree. Despite the relative secrecy surrounding places like Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic, or for different reasons Bigelow Aerospace, I've got an educated outsiders idea of what's probably happening on the inside. Of course places like Armadillo Aerosapce are running with a fairly open business model to begin with, but not Bezos' Blue Origin.

CREDIT: Blue Origin

Blue Origin's Goddard vehicle, the first sub-scale development vehicle in the New Shepard programme, coming out of the "barn" before its launch from Van Horn, west Texas, early in the morning of November 13, 2006.

On the 7th of November last year the FAA issued a NOTAM for a series of test flights by Blue Origin between 10th to the 13th of November. While the first test was reported to have taken place on the 13th, at 6:30 am local time (12:30 UTC), very little was actually known as to what happened other than the test flight was judged successful, and the vehicle had reached an altitude of 285 ft.

So the story on BBC news today which gave the first details I've seen of the test flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard, a vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle, came as a surprise.



Video of the initial test flight
They're a lot further on than I, or I guess a lot of other people, thought they were. They seem to have replicated a good deal of the work done by McDonnell Douglas on the DC-X programme and might even have push beyond that, perhaps we should have expected this as the rumour is that several of the engineers who worked on the DC-X have since been hired by Blue Origin.

It really looks like Blue Origin is pushing the boundaries, and this certainly re-enforces the idea that all the interesting work on reusable spacecraft is happening in the private sector these days. My only regret is that both on the skills they need, and my obvious problems with ITAR since I'm not a U.S. citizen or resident alien, they wouldn't be interested in yet another software person. Even one with a somewhat exotic skill set...

Update: There is a good article over at MSNBC covering the flight, and they've come pretty much to the same conclusion I did. That Bezos' has only released this footage so that he can recruit some new people with heavy lifter experience. He's looking for people with experience with Delta IV or Atlas V, and those aren't small vehicles. Blue Origin isn't in the sub-orbital business like Scaled Composites and Branson, no matter what Bezos is saying right now they're playing a longer game and working towards an full blown single stage to orbit lifter.

Update: I'm in good company, as it looks like John Carmack thinks that this might be a sub-scale prototype of a SSTO vehicle as well,

When we saw the weight listed in the papers filed with the FAA, I thought that the only reason to build a suborbital vehicle that large would be if you intended to also boost upper stages for orbital work, but it doesn't look like the shown design would be appropriate for that. Maybe it is a subscale version of an SSTO, or a nearly-SSTO upper stage intended to be boosted by an even larger straight-up-straight-down VTVL. - John Carmack, Armadillo Aerosapce

Update: John Carmack's comments on the Blue Origin test have got me thinking. Unlike Blue Origin's Goddard, Armadillo's Pixel and Texel don't have an aeroshell. I'm wondering why that is? We know that Blue Origin's FAA permit allows them to go higher than Armadillo, but how high? I guess I need to dig out the permits and compare them, but I'm thinking the aeroshell is significant. Perhaps not technically, but it shows that the two companies are taking very different approaches to the business, if that wasn't immediately obvious from the way they approach publicity. It'd be hard to find a more open approach to prototyping than John's in-depth discussion of the design work going on at Armadillo after all. But ignoring that you can tell a lot about Pixel's design by looking at pictures, but there is very little you can get out of the pictures of Blue Origin's Goddard. So my bet is that Blue Origin will retreat back into their "cone of silence", as Carmack puts it, after they manage to recruit the people they need and it'll be a while before we hear from them again...

Update: I just dug up the environmental impact statement (19.5MB, PDF) from the FAA's web site. I'm not going to trawl through the 200+ pages in too much detail, but it does confirms its use of a high-test peroxide mono-propellant which is something I was wondering about as the burn looked way too clean to be a bi-propellant.