Posts tagged Hints
AT&T CEO Randall Stevenson Blasts FCC, Hints At Higher Prices and Data Restrictions
Jan 26th
AT&T has a bone to pick with the Federal Communications Commission. In the mobile operator’s quarterly earnings call this morning, CEO Randall Stevenson blasted the FCC over its leadership in making additional spectrum available to carriers to handle the explosion of mobile data flowing through the operators’ pipes. Stevenson and AT&T are bitter after the FCC blew up its proposed acquisition of T-Mobile. Stevenson said that because of AT&T’s spectrum crunch it will be forced to raise prices and take additional actions against the highest data users.
Stevenson’s remarks come as AT&T announced that it sold 9.4 million smartphones including 7.6 million smartphones the the fourth quarter of 2011. AT&T has been crying about its spectrum paucity for several years now with the iPhone and other smartphones driving the company’s desperation. See Stevenson’s harsh message to the FCC below.
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Here are Stevenson’s pertinent comments during the scripted portion of AT&T’s earnings call. Since it was scripted, this message was something that Stevenson and AT&T thought quite a bit about before issuing the statements.
The No. 1 issue for us, and the industry I believe, continues to be spectrum. This industry continues to see just explosive mobile broadband growth. It provides one of the few bright spots in the U.S. economy but I think we all understand that this growth cannot continue without more spectrum being cleared and brought to market. Despite all the speeches from the FCC, we are still all waiting. The last significant spectrum auction was nearly five years ago now. This FCC has made it abundantly clear that they will not allow significant M&A to help bridge these delays in clearing up new spectrum. So, in absence of options, our company and others have taken the logical step to make smaller transactions to acquire the spectrum we need to meet demand.
But, even here we need the FCC’s action and leadership and unfortunately even the smallest and most routine spectrum deals are receiving intense scrutiny from this FCC, often times taking up to a year and sometimes longer for these to be approved.
Now, I hope I am wrong but it appears the FCC is intent on picking winners and losers rather than letting the markets work. A lot of recent comments and speeches by certain members of this FCC suggest that they and not congress should decide how spectrum auctions are conducted including who can participate and what the conditions should be for participating. Meanwhile we pile more and more regulatory uncertainty on top of an industry that is the foundation for a lot of today’s innovation, making it difficult for all of us to allocate and commit capital. In this industry we all know that capital investment equals jobs. So, the end result of this is that we have an industry that is just really stuck in creating real capacity.
We will certainly do our part to provide leadership on these issues but it is also clearly time for Congress and the FCC to step up. In the interim, this environment has clear implications for our business.
First, while our overall spectrum position is competitive, we’ve led the way in mobile data. Therefore our utilization rates are running very hot and demand continues to accelerate. So, we will continue to do a number of things. In a capacity constrained environment we will manage usage-based data plans, increased pricing and managing the speeds of the highest volume users. These are all logical and necessary steps to manage utilization. LTE deployment is also going to play a roll. We ended 2011 with 74 million LTE POPS covered and will accelerate that pace considerably in 2012 setting us up to complete deployment to 80% of the U.S. population in 2013. LTE does give us a 30%-40% lift in network efficiency but at current growth rates that equates to only a year’s growth in traffic. So, LTE is important but it is not the silver bullet in terms of capacity planning. What that means is that to meet customer demand we need to continue our spectrum push.
Note: Bold emphasis ReadWriteWeb.
What does this boil down to? AT&T says it needs more spectrum and is threatening the FCC that it will end up punishing users with data restrictions and higher prices if it does not get it. This message is relatively unchanged from the spin that AT&T used when trying to buy T-Mobile.
Steveson also said that AT&T no longer has plans for rolling out rural broadband. The spread of broadband to the far-flung reaches of the country is a big goal of the Obama administration and the FCC. AT&T said that it would be able to reach near 99% of the country with broadband if it was allowed to purchase T-Mobile. Now, it has little strategy outside of a vague notion of rolling rural broadband outside of building up its LTE network across the country. At that, LTE still will only be available to 80% of the U.S. population on AT&T’s network by 2013.
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From CES, A Few Hints About the Future of TV
Jan 12th
This year’s Consumer Electronics Show is getting ready to wrap up in Las Vegas tomorrow. There may not have been a single blockbuster product announcement, but when it comes to the future of television, CES is always good for a few hints about what to expect. By piecing together some of those clues, we can begin to see a picture of what the future holds.
There are a number of trends toward the future of television that are already well underway, some of which will be built upon in 2012. Web connectivity is increasingly standard on new TV sets, time-shifting content is becoming the norm and viewers are supplementing the TV experience using the “second screens” of smartphones and tablets. Nobody knows what Apple has in mind for the TV hardware industry, but consumers and industry incumbents alike have been conditioned to expect it to make a big impact.
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Whether or not Apple’s rumored iTV will end up revolutionizing the industry – or at least heightening consumers’ expectations – remains to be seen. In the meantime, television is already moving steadily into the future and a few emerging trends are worth noting.
Goodbye Remote Control, Hello Voice, Touch and Gesture Control
One of the biggest emerging trends in TV has nothing to do with content or hardware specs, but rather how we interact with it. In particularly, those interactions are set to become much more natural than pointing a remote at the screen and pressing buttons. Instead, our television sets, which will recognize our faces, will be controlled by our voices and hand gestures. Think Kinect and Siri, but built directly into smart TVs built by companies other than Microsoft and Apple.
One of those manufacturers is Samsung, whose new line of smart TV sets feature voice and gesture control, as well as facial recognition. In a video demo, the user asks the television to open a Web browser and then moves his hand to control the mouse cursor to navigate. The “click” paradigm of the desktop is replaced by the squeezing of one’s hand.
Ubuntu TV, the new offering from the makers of the popular Linux-based OS, also launched this week and uses gesture and touch controls for navigation through content. It will also pair with smartphones to allow touch based control and an enhanced screen screen experience.
The remote control isn’t as good as dead just yet. It will be quite some time before a majority of consumers adopt these state-of-the-art new devices, and by then we’ll probably be talking about even more mind-blowingly futuristic features that TV manufacturers will be working on.
Even with solutions as impressive as Samsung’s gesture control, there’s still good reason to keep a keyboard handy. Moving your hand to every individual letter on an on-screen keyboard and virtually squeezing it isn’t exactly as efficient as traditional typing. The remote that comes with the Boxee Box does a good job of packing a full QWERTY keyboard onto the back of a simple remote control.
TV: The Next Frontier For Application Developers
Another big trend coming out of CES this year has been the convergence of television with mobile platforms, as our own Dan Rowinksi detailed earlier this week. Ubuntu TV will further tie the smartphone to the TV and MobiTV announced an initiatve to bring its “TV Everywhere” initiative to even more screens.
Samsung’s new line of smart TVs will not only have futuristic user controls, but the platform that runs on it has a growing selection of applications thanks in large part to the open APIs and SDK that Samsung makes available to developers.
After a somewhat disappointing start, Google TV tried rebooting its efforts this week with the launch of new devices made by Sony, LG, Vizio and Lenovo. The platform brings various flavors of Android and many of its apps to bigger screens, with Lenovo’s new K91 TV sporting Ice Cream Sandwich.
The user interface of our television set is going to feel more and more like a mobile platform, complete with content and media apps, games and whatever else developers can dream up for larger screens. This is increasingly the case now thanks to Android, Google TV and platforms like Samsung’s, and the trend isn’t expected to stop once Apple launches a TV set that very well may offer a scaled up version of iOS.
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Hints About the Future of iOS UI Design Come From Apple’s New Hire
Dec 13th
When it comes to UI design, Apple’s iOS evolves pretty slowly. They rolled out one of the biggest enhancements to its mobile operating system this year with the launch of iOS 5. A radically redesigned notification system was the biggest visual overhaul and prior to that, there was the addition of folders in iOS 4.
Whenever the next big upgrade to iOS’s look and feel may be, a few hints about what might be included can be found in one of Apple’s latest hires. Jan-Michael Cart, a mass media arts student in Athens, Georgia announced that he was hired by the company as a design intern.
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Cart is best known for producing UI design concepts for iOS and posting them online. One of his ideas includes Lion-style multitouch swiping between applications, which works by holding down the Home button and swiping from side to side with three fingers. Other proofs of concept include improvements to the OS’s Notifications Center and a desktop client for iMessage, something that’s rumored to be in Apple’s pipeline.
Cart also put together a video prototype showing dynamic icons on the iOS home screen. The redesigned icons include fluid animations and live data about recent activity from within the app. For example, rather than a static red circle showing the number of notifications, the Facebook iOS app might show what kind of notifications they are. Are they mentions? Wall posts? Messages? Friend requests? Dynamic icons can provide more context while still maintaining a fluid and simplified design.
These ideas apparently have enough merit in the eyes of the company to warrant their bringing Cart on board to help execute a few of them. It’s not the first time Apple has hired people who have tinkered with their products and come up with viable ideas. The company famously hired known iOS jailbreaker Nicholas Allegra, also known as @Comex as an intern in August of this year.
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Google Confirms Hints Dropped About Dart ‘Structured’ VM
Sep 9th
Two conferences being held next month, one in Aarhus, Denmark on October 10 and another two weeks later in Portland, Oregon, are scheduled to feature Lars Bak, the designer of the V8 interpreter used in Google Chrome. In Aarhus, Bak will be joined by Gilad Bracha, a Google engineer and co-author of the original Java Language Specification and the creator of the Newspeak programming language, a derivative of Smalltalk.
The subject of their talks may have inadvertently been revealed by the GOTO Aarhus conference organizers: It’s a programming language being conceived at Google tentatively called Dart (maybe bearing no relation to the DART advertising platform run by Google subsidiary DoubleClick).
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Earlier today, when asked to verify the subject of these talks, Google spokespersons were hesitant to say yes. Later in the afternoon, one spokesperson went on the record to say, “We have no further details to share at this time,” before advising RWW that Bak and Bracha would indeed be speaking about Dart next month.
Like any other small fragment of disconnected news, the result of the revelation has been speculation, especially as to the meaning of the name of the keynote address at GOTO in Aarhus: “A new programming language for structured web programming.” Although the Web site of Iowa State University, which sponsors the SPLASH conference in Portland, did not refer to Dart by name, it did offer this bit of juicier detail about Bak’s subject matter:
Modern programming languages are often designed without considerations for the underlying execution engines. In many cases, this leads to systems that are slow, complicated, memory bloated, and therefore error prone. This talk will present a new structured web programming language where the underlying virtual machine has been designed along with the language. We will also discuss the results of this approach with respect to simplicity, scalability, and performance.
Both Bak and Bracha have extensive experience with three things in particular: 1) building tight, fast virtual machines, often for embedded systems; 2) the Java VM, to whose architecture both directly contributed; and 3) Smalltalk and their various dialects, Bracha having co-authored Newspeak.
In this excerpt from a research paper by Bracha and colleagues on the subject of Newspeak (PDF available here), we see where he’s taken note of architectural deficiencies in Java and attempted to resolve them in a more strongly object-oriented fashion using a Smalltalk derivative:
A typical example of ambient authority might be a class File with a constructor that takes a file name and returns an instance that can access a file in the local file system. This is a standard design, but in a situation where file system access must be restricted, requires authorization checks on every access.
Systems that combine security consciousness with pervasive ambient authority, such as Java, pay an exorbitant run time cost for such checks, since they may require a traversal of the entire call stack to ensure that no unauthorized caller, however indirect, might retrieve information about a file’s contents or even its existence. As a result, these checks are often disabled, completely undermining security.
An alternative approach is a sandbox model, where only operations deemed safe are provided. Java also supports sandboxing via class loaders. However, class loaders are complex and brittle; they can introduce interoperability problems because they create incompatible types, and they do not compose well.
For his part, Bak played a role in the development of the Resilient virtual machine for embedded systems, which is also based on Smalltalk. In this excerpt, Bak and his colleagues explain why they chose Smalltalk, and to some extent, why they perceive it as superior to Java:
The Resilient programming language is a dialect of Smalltalk designed for simplicity, compactness, and performance. Smalltalk was chosen for several reasons: Smalltalk is a simple, dynamically typed, object-oriented programming language; everything is an object and behavior is described as message sends between objects; Smalltalk has proven ideal for supporting incremental program modification in that a programmer can freely modify a program without the need for recompiling and restarting the application; and most Smalltalk systems use a snapshot model allowing the same program execution to survive for years.
The Dart project (if that is indeed the final name) may be an effort to embed a different class of program interpreter and virtual machine into Google Chrome, and distribute that to desktops for free. If it’s based around Smalltalk, like Bak and Bracha’s backgrounds suggest, then its security mechanism may not be sandbox-based at all, but rather acquiring authority or permission directly from the operating system to manipulate the file system, and do other volatile jobs.
While it’s conceivable that Google might make Dart an optional download, new languages without established software bases find it difficult to succeed even when they’re distributed for free. Plugging Dart into Chrome may give new programmers an automatic base of semi-willing participants.
But what exactly would Dart be? “Structured Web programming” has recently thrived around JavaScript, which has made headway on the server side as well as the client. Though JavaScript is only related to Java by name, its style is looser and more procedural. Smalltalk is strongly object-oriented, and its message-passing metaphor, while logical, contrasts with the more free-spirited approach exhibited not just by JS, but by scripters using Ruby, Python, and the most used programming language in the world today, PHP. Microsoft tried to unseat JavaScript as the functionality provider for Web browsers, and failed miserably with VBScript. But that failure was more due to poor security and lackluster implementation than poor language design.
Still, it’s difficult to imagine today’s realm of Web developers immediately embracing a strongly-OO language, especially when the need for any new language is arguably low. This revelation on October 10 could simply go down as another of Google’s many “ongoing” experiments.
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OverDrive Hints That Kindle Library Lending is Coming in September
Aug 3rd
The CEO of OverDrive, which distributes e-books and audiobooks to libraries, has dropped a pretty obvious hint that the Kindle will join other major e-readers in public libraries in September. EarlyWord reports that Steve Potash looked “like a kid with a delicious secret” at OverDrive’s Digipalooza conference last weekend, saying that he was “not allowed to announce a date ye[t],” but he included this blunt clue in his “Crystal Ball Report” during the final session:
Streamlining (both downloading and ordering)
Explosion (we have gone from two reading devices to 85 and more are coming)
Premium (the library catalog as the most premium, value-added site on the Web)
Traffic (enormous growth coming by year’s end)
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OverDrive’s WIN platform for library lending is up and ready to support Kindle, but Amazon has been cautious about rolling out Kindle lending to libraries, even as Nook, Sony Reader, and Kobo e-books are already available.
Amazon has generally been slow to allow lending on the Kindle, and they’ve also been cautious about the branding. But Potash’s hint seems to indicate that library lending for Kindle has almost arrived, and none too soon for the e-book release of Harry Potter.
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Foursquare Hints At Evolution After Getting $20 Million
Jun 30th
After a protracted set of M&A discussions with Yahoo and Facebook (and perhaps others), Foursquare announced that it had secured $20 million in funding from several VCs: Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. CEO Dennis Crowley discussed the funding and how it would be used in his blog post:
With this new round [...]
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Take A Few Blogging Hints From Keynote Speakers
May 26th
What if your writing could have the captivating influence of a keynote speaker? Writing is little more than presenting with words, after all. It could be that writers aren’t learning from the speakers who captivate so well.
Earlier this month, I attended presentations by Chris Brogan, Mitch Joel, and Julien Smith when they came to town. If you aren’t familiar with them, they frequently headline for blogging/media conferences so naturally I was just as interested in how they presented as in what they presented.
All I can say is that these guys are like the Johnny Appleseeds of ideas. They’re like Bob Ross painting “happy little trees” (replace ‘trees’ with ‘epiphanies’ and give Bob an energy drink). They make it look easy and people can’t criticize them because they’re too busy being motivated and inspired. Is that what you’re doing with your writing?
I want to examine how they presented. I’m not going to tell you how you should work with these details to change your writing style because you’ll get exactly what you need with some thoughtful analysis and introspection. (And you’re more likely to change if you believe you thought of it yourself) Let the brains start storming.
PowerPoint
Each of the speakers used PowerPoint. They didn’t try for any groundbreaking presentation format because they were comfortable with PowerPoint. It was, however, obvious that the PowerPoint deck was a tool and not a centerpiece for the presentations because (1) the slides were extremely light on text, (2) used no bullet points, and (3) didn’t use any sort of branded template, even though that would have been easy.
They rarely looked at their slides and never pointed to them. They kept the focus on themselves, as if to said, “I’m prepared. That PowerPoint is my slave. I am not slave to PowerPoint.” Big difference.
If you looked at their slides, you’d find no coherently predictable path from one slide to the next. They weren’t teaching a cooking show – they were teaching the most important, powerful points they had to make in front of our audience. Another big difference in format.
Images
As previously mentioned, their slides were text-light and picture-heavy.
At least 80% of the slides in each deck was nothing but a full-sized picture; a representation – something like whispering sheep, a burning ship, or a lemonade stand.
The images helped both represent and guide the narrative. Not all images were a perfect fit for the topic or talking point, but each image was captivating. It felt like the pictures were picked before the script was written.
Personal Storytelling
I’d formulize their storytelling frequency as a ratio:
3:2:1 (3X Past Experience Stories : 2X Current Experience : 1X Future Plans)
They purposely only told the best stories.
Again, it felt like they picked their best stories up-front, then created the content around them, rather than making a point, then offering a supporting story.
Business Examples
They used plenty of case studies, but used them in a unique way. Their business examples were great examples and I hadn’t heard most of them. They all flowed more like stories than case studies, making them all the more compelling. It’s hard to treat the story of a homeless man who does his own A/B testing when panhandling as just another case study.
Bonus: Chris Brogan shared his drop location for many of the case studies he runs across that he wants to reference later: http://delicious.com/chrisbrogan/casestudy
Quotes
These speakers, like all keynoters, are quoted all the time. Part of the reason they’re so “quotable” is that they quote a lot of other people.
To be more specific, they each quoted plenty of well-known media figures from memory (or at least we couldn’t tell the difference). Their incessant name-dropping did well to lend to their credibility and more importantly, their connectedness.
Occasionally, they turned a quote into a slide, but this was rare, and reserved for something monumental or too long to recount.
Stats
I was most impressed with the speakers’ use of statistics. Numbers are critical for almost any presentation because there are usually “number people” in the audience who need something to drool over.
When Chris, Joel, and Julien used stats, they hand-picked the very best stats – ones that started a buzz of instant chatter, regardless of the context. For example:
80 percent of first brand interactions occur in search results.
They gave most stats their own big, bold slide for emphasis. They didn’t pack multiple figures on the same slide.
Memory
They didn’t need the slides because they’ve presented so often, but it was still refreshing to see their lack of reliance on notes or the PowerPoint. They relied on their passion in the moment and took advantage of their ability to change direction and incorporate new material on the fly.
In addition to their general memorization of the pitch, they each had excellent short-term memory for people, places, conversations, and other things they had experienced during their brief time in our city. This made it easy for them to connect their messages to locals and their businesses. It earned trust and respect and probably some zealous advocates in those people they mentioned by name during their presentations. Chris Brogan demanded that we not be afraid to talk about other people just because we’re trying to drive interest to our own projects. It could be the best thing we do for ourselves.
If you’re at the end of the post and still wondering how it all applies to your writing and blogging, take another look. The way writers connect with readers is the same way that speakers connect with audiences. If you want to improve your writing, look to the speakers for some answers.
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Take A Few Blogging Hints From Keynote Speakers
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