Posts tagged soon
Why Petitions Won’t Change Apple’s Labor Practices Anytime Soon
Feb 1st
Not even 24 hours after Apple reported its jaw-dropping Q1 financial results, the company found itself as the target of some relentless investigative journalism by the New York Times. In particular, as part of an ongoing series about Apple, the Times published a detailed investigation of some of the tech giant’s biggest overseas suppliers, ugly labor abuses and all.
From deadly plant explosions and poisonous screen-cleaning chemicals to unsafe working conditions and long hours, the report was anything but forgiving. In response, there is a small but growing chorus of consumers asking Apple to do more about these issues. A petition demanding a more ethically-built iPhone 5 and other products is said to have amassed 40,000 signatories in its first 24 hours.
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Apple has already made some efforts to improve labor practices among its suppliers, something the Times article acknowledges. It has thoroughly audited its suppliers, in many cases pressuring them to change more egregious practices. This year, the company even published a list of its suppliers for the first time, in an effort to be more transparent. Still, as the Times report illustrates, many abuses persist.
The company, like others that make consumer electronics, remains in an awkward position as its quest to meet growing demand clashes with the ethical concerns that naturally arise when the manufacturing is done in countries that lack the U.S.’s labor laws. Apple has stated that achieving the level of efficiency they now boast simply wouldn’t be possible in the United States, where manufacturing has waned, labor is costly and regulations too strict to allow for lightning speed turnaround on last-minute changes. To stay competitive, it needs to keep its operations in places like China.
E-Signatures vs. Wallets: Which Votes Count More?
Forty thousand signatures may sound like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to 37 million. That’s how many iPhones Apple sold in its last quarter, in addition to more than 15 million iPads. The pressure from consumer and human rights groups may well ramp up in the coming weeks and months, but for the time being the number of people voicing their concern is only .07% of the number that bought iPads and iPhones in the last quarter. That’s not counting iPods and Macs.
To make a substantial impact, there would need to be an actual boycott of Apple products widespread enough to make a noticeable dent in their sales numbers. Some may decline to buy the iPhone 5, iPad 3 or iTV in protest, but probably not enough to make a difference.
Alternatively, the issue would need to turn into a much bigger PR problem for Apple, leading consumers to think twice or forcing the company to preempt an exodus by pressuring suppliers to shape up.
This isn’t to suggest that a concerted enough Web-fueled protest couldn’t generate the pressure required to encourage change. We saw it happen in more ways than one with the SOPA and PIPA debate. Still, this is Apple we’re talking about. Rather than asking citizens to phone their representatives, such a protest would be asking millions to break their addiction to some of the most popular consumer electronics products of all time. These are devices that have woven themselves deeply into our day-to-day lives.
If people were to flee Apple, where would they go? To one of Apple’s competitors? They’re not exactly innocent either.
What do you think? Are labor rights issues enough to cause you to reconsider buying devices like smartphones and tablets? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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Could Jailbreaking Your iPhone Become a Crime Soon?
Jan 25th
Whether or not jailbreaking or rooting one’s smartphone is a legal act isn’t something most of us in the U.S. have had to think about for some time. That’s because, in 2010, the U.S. Copyright Office declared that jailbreaking devices is not a violation of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Fine, said Apple, but it will still void your warranty and we bet it will screw up your phone.
Despite the company’s official disapproval, jailbreaking iOS is still big among a certain subset of users, as evidenced by the popularity of the A5 Absinthe tool that was released last Friday. But should people in the jailbreak community continue to rest easy, assured that freeing their devices will forever remain legal? Probably not.
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That’s because the notion that jailbreaking is legally acceptable wasn’t established by, say, a Supreme Court ruling and all of the weight of legal authority that that would entail. Instead, it was a directive from the U.S. Copyright Office. So the thing can expire. That could happen soon, warns the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The only way to ensure that this doesn’t happen, says the EFF, is for everyone to let the Copyright Office know that they would prefer to see jailbreaking remain legal, and why. There’s a comment form that lets them do that.
In addition to smartphones, the EFF wants the Copyright Office to add exemptions for tablets and video game consoles as well. Two years ago, the tablet market simply wasn’t what it is today, let alone the jailbreak community around it.
Video game consoles have been hacked and modded for years, but more recent tinkering with Microsoft’s Kinect in particular has brought the true potential of the technology to the forefront. Even though Microsoft itself has embraced Kinect-hacking, the EFF doesn’t want to let this kind of user-modification of game consoles slip through the legal cracks.
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AdWords Search and Display Networks Will Soon Get Impression Share Metrics
Jan 19th
Google will soon add impression share metrics for its search and display networks – a long awaited addition. Impression share is the percentage of impressions you received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.
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Why Apple Won’t Disrupt the Textbook Industry Anytime Soon
Jan 19th
Apple revolutionizes stuff. It’s practically conventional wisdom in the tech world that, even if they’re not first in the game or necessarily even the best, the Cupertino-based giant has a tendency to make a noticeable impact. They didn’t invent the MP3 player, smartphone or tablet, but they sure have redefined all of those products. Even if this tendency is strong, it’s not necessarily always how things play out. For an example, look no further than the Apple TV.
Today, the company set their sights on textbooks, an industry Steve Jobs himself described as being “ripe for digital destruction.” True as that may be, is what Apple planning to do in the space really all that disruptive?
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There’s no doubt that giving authors dead simple tools for publishing their own interactive e-books is a big deal. As Nieman Journalism Lab’s Joshua Benton so effectively outlined earlier this week, creating a “Garage Band for e-books” could do to book publishing what the advent of the blogging platform did for short-form self-publishing on the Web. And it’s also true that the immersive, interactive experience of learning from the kinds of digital textbooks Apple demoed today has far more potential than print ever did.
If the company’s efforts are going to help revolutionize textbooks and education, it’s going to be some time before that happens, and they’re not going to do it alone.
Costly and Not Cross-Platform
Apple released the second version of its iBooks app for iOS today, which includes access to the new textbook titles. One thing the company did not announce is that the app is coming to other platforms. Granted, the iPad is still the leader of the tablet market, but Android is slowly catching up and Amazon just released a device geared toward content consumption that costs less than half of the entry level iPad. And it’s growing fast.
Of course, Apple ultimately wants to sell more of its hardware, but if it really wants its textbook initiative to truly take off, it will have to develop apps for other platforms, just as Amazon has done with its Kindle apps.
Another barrier to widespread adoption of this model is the cost of the iPad. It starts at $500, which is not something every American family can afford, especially with an economy in flux. With hundreds of “pages” of content, 3D interactive graphics, embedded video and other bells and whistles, we have to imagine these books aren’t particularly light on file size. As the books accumulate over time, alongside other content stored on the iPad, the 16 GB entry level model may no longer cut it, making it an even more expensive investment.
Not Aimed at the College Market (and Did We Mention the iPad is Expensive?)
The cost issue might be mitigated somewhat if the initiative were not targeted exclusively at high school students.
At least for the time being, Apple’s digital textbooks are targeted primarily at high school students. That fact alone presents a few roadblocks to the initiative being truly disruptive. For one, not every high school student in the United States can afford a $500 tablet device. Apple may well end up dropping the price when they launch the iPad 3 in a few weeks, but even then we’re probably still talking about a several-hundred-dollar gadget. Many middle and upper class families can afford that, but kids in inner city schools and other low-income areas, some of which can barely afford enough paper textbooks, aren’t going to be learning from iPads anytime soon.
For college students, investing in an iPad or similar device to replace textbooks makes simple economic sense. A single semester’s worth of textbooks can easily approach the cost of an iPad. If the e-books available on the device are drastically less expensive than their paper counterparts, it would be foolish not to make the digital switch. Of course, how dramatically prices would drop remains to be seen.
Apple is Partnering With Big Publishers, Not Killing Them
College textbooks are enormously, obscenely profitable for the the companies that print them. In fact, they’ve come up with all kinds of creative ways of milking more money out of students. Textbooks about ancient history will be revised and re-issued every other semester and the company will package supplementary CD-ROM’s and other digital learning materials, using them as a justification to jack up the price.
To get its new initiative off the ground, Apple is partnering with major publishers like McGraw Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. For the high school market, perhaps those companies can afford to agree to a $15-per-book price tag. But when it comes to higher education, publishers are unlikely to allow a $180 biology print textbook be replaced with a $15 e-book. That would cut into their profits pretty dramatically. At the same time, interactive e-textbooks can’t be resold once they’re used, so perhaps the publishers can be convinced that their e-book revenues will be replenished on a semesterly basis without fail.
Interestingly, at the same time that Apple has unveiled major partnerships with textbooks publishers, it also unleashed what appears to be a powerful, easy-to-use publishing toolkit for producing those books. If independent authors manage to create enough competition, it’s possible that bigger publishers will have no choice but to play ball with Apple’s preferred pricing for textbooks.
Apple’s Not the Only Player
There’s little reason to doubt that a decade from now, the classroom and the tools in it will look very different from what students are accustomed to today. The textbook is indeed one of the educational tools that is most in need of a digital makeover. When paper textbooks are finally a thing of the past, it won’t have been Apple’s efforts alone that got us there.
For one, education is already being blown wide open by the Web. The mere concepts of “the lecture” and “the textbook” begin to look antiquated in light of things like Khan Academy, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, iTunes U and MIT’s Open Courseware.
Those examples are just the tip of the iceberg. You’d be hard-pressed to find a student in the U.S. today that isn’t already using the Internet to supplement their educational experience to some extent. Apple is well aware of the changes that are already underway. That’s why they’re doing this. That’s why their DIY publishing tools include the ability pull in pieces of the Web and incorporate HTML5 and JavaScript.
Apple is also not the first company to try to re-imagine the textbook for a digital world. The so-called “smartbooks” offered by e-textbook startup Inking are in some ways more advanced than what Apple is bringing to the table. Other companies already active in this space include Chegg and Kno, as Audrey Watters points out on Hack Education.
Indeed, Apple is anything but the first entrant into this space. Not that that’s stopped them in the past.
Lead textbook photo by Stephen Cummings. Phil Schiller photo courtesy of The Verge.
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Will Data Collection on User Behavior Be Forced to End Soon?
Jan 10th
Harvard Business Review ran three interesting short pieces in this month’s magazine, under the misleadingly timeless title “Tackling Business Problems.” The three essays are actually guest submissions from business radicals, the final of the three being from social media luminary Doc Searls.
Traditional Customer Relationship Management is dead meat, Searls argues. Companies should stop collecting data about their customers. Right now, before the customers revolt! This populist vision of revolt is balanced out a little by Searls’ vision of what’s likely to come next. You can get the picture from the title of his forthcoming book, The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. It seems crazy, but his view of what the future will bring with regard to customer data is fascinating to consider.
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Writing about the massive collection of consumer data, Searls writes:
“Customers naturally see this trend as a gross invasion of their privacy and are starting to resist providing accurate information–or any information at all.
But the main reason for vendors to quit this practice is not that it’s bad manners. It’s that businesses soon will no longer own the data anyway–customers will. And when that happens, vendors will end up reaping greater benefits than they do now.”
As someone fascinated by the possibilities for innovation, I am very hesitent when I read people cheering the revolt of users against the collection of their data. I hope that data collection will be done in a positive way and will lead to big wins for everyone.
It’s not clear that’s going to happen though. Behavioral marketing trailblazer and Tacoda founder Dave Morgan once told me that no one had yet found a way to articulate the value proposition of aggregate data analysis to end consumers because there wasn’t one yet. No one had really built it, people were generally focused on sleazy short term wins at the expense of the consumer. It is the job of startups to build something compelling, he says.
Searls believes this will happen when consumers are in control over their own data. He thinks that’s going to be a net win for the consumer and the companies that sell to them.
“Here’s why,” he writes. “When customers own and control their own data, demand will drive supply more efficiently than supply currently drives demand.”
By that he means that satisfaction of real consumer demand, demand felt my consumers in control in a market that strives to delight them, will be more efficient than demand that gets manufactured by manipulative advertising driven by supply that must be sold.
Customers not only will collect and manage their own data but will be equipped with tools for declaring their intentions directly to the whole marketplace, without having to flit from store to store or website to website looking for what they want.”
That does sound more efficient, but it’s sounding more far-out too.
In this ‘intention economy,’ customers will determine the products they want, the prices they pay, and the terms of engagement they require. Those terms will include both permissions and restrictions regarding the use of their data.”
And I suppose dogs will be friends with cats, lions will kick it with lambs, etc. I don’t know.
This is reminiscent of the Lean Startup philosophy, which emphasizes building products that serve demonstrated market needs, in response to working closely with customers.
That works, so many this will too. What will it look like? Understanding that better could make the whole thing feel more real.
Will users opt-in to participating in bucket targetted advertisements on Facebook? Is that an example of what Searls is discussing? Surely if I choose not to offer up an introduction to myself for conversation, vendors will instead continue to shout at me as I walk by them in the market.
There has certainly never been as much data recorded about each of us and our lives as there is today and will be tomorrow – but will that really be able to change the directionality of power projections between consumer and producer? That’s a very, very tall order. I can imagine the dynamic changing, of course. A radically changed dynamic between the individual and the market seems like something the web would be capable of facilitating. It already has in many ways – but can the consumer really ever be in control? I’m not so sure.
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Google Augmented Reality Glasses Could Come Soon, What Would They Mean?
Dec 19th
Would you look at the world through Google Glasses? If you did, what would you see? That may be an option soon, if a reliable report today that the company is in “late prototype stages” on just such a product, proves accurate.
The Wow factor is clear – but what would fashionable cloud (connected) glasses really mean? How might they change what it means to be human and to live in this world? Make no mistake, they certainly could have a deep impact for those who wear them – and possibly for those who are seen through them as well. There’s no better time than now to begin considering it all. The best way to start is to recognize those who have already begun before us; in this case science fiction author Vernor Vinge is a key source of illumination.
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Above: TV Glasses
Hints and Clues
Hot in the news today is a report from Nick Bilton of the New York Times that Google is developing wearable computers in the secret Google X Lab that Bilton wrote about last month. That prompted Google specialist Seth Weintraub, now at Fortune and formerly of Computerworld, to call the news “an open secret among some in the Google community.”
Weintraub asserts the following based on his previous reporting and one unnamed source he cites today:
[Google is] “in late prototype stages of wearable glasses that look similar to thick-rimmed glasses that ‘normal people’ wear. However, these provide a display with a heads up computer interface. There are a few buttons on the arms of the glasses, but otherwise, they could be mistaken for normal glasses.
“…In addition, we have heard that this device is not an ‘Android peripheral’ as the NYT stated. According to our source, it communicates directly with the Cloud over IP.
“…We do not have a release date for this new device, but we know that Google Co-founder Sergey Brin is closely associated with the project and it will be Google-branded hardware.”
From battery power to proper contextual understanding of a user’s location to price to form factor – there are a lot of problems that Google is going to have to solve beyond the imagery and signal reception. Cellular devices are now so small and so cheap that connectivity is probably one of the easier problems the secret team is working on.
What Could it Mean?
The how-and-wow is certainly interesting, but questions of use cases and implications are important too.
Sci-fi authors and artists have been talking about this future for years.
New media choreographer Johannes Birringer has said he looks forward to a future where cloud glasses can be used in art “to enhance and enrich the performer and audience experience with the media.”
Mike Kuniavsky, co-founder of smart connected device design firm ThingM, invokes science fiction writer Vernor Vinge’s ideas when it comes to widespread Heads Up Displays:
“I think that [Vinge's] idea of consensual imaging among belief circles is interesting. I consider it a kind of physical manifestation of software skinning, mixed with ideas shared among members of a social-network (as a blogroll is, for example).
The implications of this both excite and scare me: it would be totally cool to overlay a trusted source’s view of a given scene on mine, but I feel people already ignore the complexity of reality too much and tend to live on parallel planes that exclude ideas that challenge theirs.
I don’t want Orrin Hatch’s world skin (though I’d try it on to see what it looks like), and I don’t think he wants mine.”
Above: Pixel Pour, street art installation by Kelly Goeller, via Near Future Laboratory
Architect and urban futurist Dr. Cindy Frewen Wuellner references Vinge as well in imagining how devices like this could change the way people experience the cities they traverse.
“The social city..where IRL [In Real Life] meets virtual, means people/you are the manipulators. The dumb city gets smart and social. The explosion of mobile phones brings the internet into the streets.
“Augmented realities give maps, twitter, sensors, and layers of information. It’s transformational. NYC phantom city tour, don’t miss that. Heads up display like Vinge’s Rainbows End. For architecture and cities, the implications are huge.”
Urban Futures, Language of #Architecture: How will you change 21st c #cities?
“Ways of revealing the linkages between 1st Life actions and consequences can be made sensible in ways that have been previously impossible. “
Artist and mobile technologist Julian Bleecker riffs on Vinge’s talk five years ago at the Austin Game Conference.
Bleecker imagines a truly meaningful augmentation of reality…
Ways of revealing the linkages between 1st Life actions and consequences can be made sensible in ways that have been previously impossible.
New forms of networked interaction, participation & engagement that are not just about lightweight atoms & bits, RSS, and WoW raids, but about heavyweight action, the consequences of supra-atomic activities such as driving cars that are too big.
If I could have a heads up display akin to what WoW heavyweights have, but indicative of the relationships amongst a whole matrix of parameters that relate to my 1st Life actions..now that would be really significant.”
In other words, Bleecker imagines the Cloud Glasses not displaying imaginary visions – but making things that have always been real, visible.
It’s hard to imagine a more valiant calling for Augmented Reality than that.
No doubt most people will use their Google Cloud Glasses to play Angry Birds in an empty room (better that than Farmville!), or will wear them while wearing nothing else, but that’s not the reason why any of these technologies are built and they don’t represent any kind of limit to what’s possible.
You may not want to visit StopHumanTraffic.com with your Cloud Glasses and your location turned on, but there are a whole lot of things good and bad that go on in the very same streets we all walk down every day that we don’t see.
We may see the price of speed and altitude-displaying Heads Up Ski Goggles drop over time and it’s not hard to imagine tourists wearing glasses given to them by visitors bureaus in major cities around the world.
But a SOPA’d future could also prohibit looking at copyrighted materials through your Cloud Glasses. There might have to be a splintered web that Cloud Glasses tie into in order to view things outside official channels. What would be on each side of that line? It’s provocative to consider. Here comes the future, ready or not.
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Google+ Check-in Offers Coming Soon
Dec 14th
Google is integrating additional mobile and Offers features with the Google+ social network. Upcoming features will allow check-in based offers, incentivizing Plus shout-outs for local businesses – but stepping on the toes of other Google se…
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SMX West Super Early Bird Rates Expire Soon – Register Now, Save $400
Dec 6th
February 28 – March 1 in San Jose, CA Attend SMX West and get expert insights and real-world-proven tactics that yield results instantly. Programmed by the editorial team of Search Engine Land, the multi-track agenda will feature 60+ tactic-packed sessions on SEO, paid search, social media…
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Coming Soon to a Coffee Shop Near You: NFC-Powered Foursquare Check-ins
Nov 28th
If you think whipping out your phone, searching for a venue and then tapping the “Check In” button on Foursquare is a tiresome waste of several seconds, you’re in luck. Like so many other things in life, the Foursquare check-in promises to be simplified by NFC technology, allowing us to simply wave our phones to automatically check into a venue.
Of course, mainstream adoption of NFC is at least a few years away, but owners of Symbian-powered phones can get started thanks to a new update to the Foursquare app for the platform.
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To enable NFC-powered check-ins, establishments need to display a sign or poster containing an NFC tag that points to their venue’s Foursquare listing URL. Nokia’s developer blog has some resources on getting started with NFC tags.
Signs like this not only enable people to check-in with less effort, but can also provide a visual, real-world call to action. For non-power users of location services like Foursquare, it can be pretty easy to simply forget to check in to a restaurant or other local business. Having that sign hanging there can provide a mental trigger. Business owners can also use the opportunity to push promotions and deals, offering discounts or free products to the mayor or anybody else that checks in.
Admittedly, the average person has no idea what NFC is right now. But it’s almost universally predicted to reach mainstream adoption within a few years, quite possibly replacing our wallets and keys at some point in the future. NFC is already included on a number of Android-powered handsets and is rumored to be coming to the iPhone 5 next year.
Are you excited about the prospect of checking in by waving your phone, or do you think this propels laziness to new and unprecedented heights? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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Education-Specific HTML to Be Submitted to Search Engines Soon
Nov 21st
Students, educators and others interested in finding the best published content, events and experts for learning new things will be heartened to learn that a new metadata markup standard is in the works to make discovery of learning materials easier than ever. Perhaps more importantly, it will make those materials easier for machines to find. Once finding the right content is a solved problem, many new things could become possible.
The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), a project co-led by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, today took the next step towards submitting its specification to Schema.org, the collaboration between Google, Yahoo and Bing that maps out 100 different types of content online in a standardized format.
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The LRMI 0.5 spec lets publishers communicate in a page’s HTML things like the competencies taught, the competencies required, the type of educational materials and the typical age range of intended users for anything educational published online. Time required for completion, degree of interactivity and a small number of other ways of describing educational content are included in the spec.
Active participants working to figure out how to construct LRMI and how to integrate it into Schema.org include people from small non-profits like open curriculum community Curriki, corporate education technology giant Pearson, international information standards group Dublin Core and intellectual property law group Creative Commons, among others.
Participants debate on the official mailing list over new terminology, balancing concerns like coherence with Schema.org, ease of input by people who will enter metadata to go with resources being published online and specificity gained or lost by the way that metadata fields are named and framed.
While some semantic technologies are able to assert categorization from the top down, whether content publishers participate or not, it seems likely that the kind of data that will be communicated in LRMI will require informed participation by the producers of the content themselves. Requiring participation in categorization could pose a challenge to hopes the spec will gain meaningful adoption.
The LRMI effort doesn’t seem well-known yet outside its own ranks, either; the official website has almost no inbound links indexed by Google yet and none of the education technology blogs we track here at ReadWriteWeb have mentioned LRMI yet. The project was just announced last month though and in the education market, a month isn’t a very long time.
LRMI isn’t alone though, either. Nathan Angell, a Board Director at the collaborative open education software community Sakai Foundation and a Product Manager at rSmart, calls LRMI “another welcome intervention in growing list of data specifications for education.”
“These days we have access to an unbelievable number of learning resources–both open and proprietary–but it’s still hard to find the right ones, quality resources, suited to your needs, when you need them.
“For example, in the Sakai community, we have built a new platform–the Open Academic Environment–that helps people create and tag learning materials, and most importantly, share them openly by default.
“With the LRMI specification, we can help people tag their materials with exactly the right information that will make them easy for others to find and use…and even better, we can augment the suggested content widgets we already have in place to discover resources in the moment that match the very specific needs of a particular educator or student.”
Angell, who isn’t associated with LRMI in particular, sees data specifications like this as potential game changers. Those suggested content widgets are really shorthand for computation that can begin at a higher level of abstraction if the hard work of content categorization and description has already been done in a standardized way. That means education technology providers, search engines and others don’t have to invest time and energy into understanding educational resources online – they can begin with a pre-existing understanding of that content and then offer higher-level features and services on top of already-organized information.
“LRMI helps set the stage for the hive mind that will help our children’s children learn faster and better than we ever thought possible,” Angel says. “In comparison, school today will look like drawing pictures in the dirt with a stick.”
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