One of the most significant challenges in management in high-tech is communicating information; sharing perspectives on the complex, dynamic world in which we work. It’s the whole process of encoding what you know in a way that makes it most likely to be effectively decoded.
• Geography: rivers, cities and battles are named and placed according to their occurrence on a regular map.
• The army’s course: the path’s flow follows the way in and out that Napoleon followed.
• The army’s direction: indicated by the colour of the path, gold leading into Russia, black leading out of it.
• The number of soldiers remaining: the path gets successively narrower, a plain reminder of the campaigns human toll, as each millimetre represents 10.000 men.
• Temperature: the freezing cold of the Russian winter on the return trip is indicated at the bottom, in the republican measurement of degrees of réaumur (water freezes at 0° réaumur, boils at 80° réaumur).
• Time: in relation to the temperature indicated at the bottom, from right to left, starting 24 October (pluie, i.e. ‘rain’) to 7 December (-27°).
A new Snow Leopard has just been tagged, imaginatively known as M7 for the moment:
we are excited to announce that we collared another male [Snow Leopard] on the 25th of February 2010. [He] was captured, collared and released safely…
Temporarily named M7 (light blue on the map), this male is a large cat[; he] weighs 39.5 kg, though lacks any scars on his face, giving an indication that he is a big, yet possibly young snow leopard
Let me begin with a confession: as a passionate advocate of usability in consumer electronics, I am a long-time TiVo fan, so much so that its availability has dictated my choice of video content service. First DirecTV, then Comcast when they made available the Series 3 integrated with the cable service (although the CableCard installation was a nightmare of epic proportions…).
Over the last several days there were, however, four related news items, some of which seem tinged with irony:
today, its judgement against EchoStar and DishTV for $200 million was upheld – unsurprisingly EchoStar plans to appeal – vindicating the value of the key innovation that TiVo provides
a couple of days ago, TiVo announced its Series 4 devices: demonstrating the importance of ‘over the top’ video, its new UI integrates this seamlessly into the overall user experience
TiVo Premiere
a few days earlier, Clicker, a service that in some ways appears inspired by TiVo, aiming to bring a TiVo-like experience to web TV garnered $11m in funding
Clicker
the explosion in diversity of content and the growth of time-shifting and now place-shifting is forcing cable providers towards switched video, which in turn threatens TiVo’s whole technical architecture because of its inability to communicate upstream
So, what does this mean? Does TiVo win the IP battle and lose the platform war? Do the innovators it inspired arise to eclipse it? Whither linear TV and OTT content?
(Parenthetically, the new UI is Flash-based, but then TiVo does control the hardware platform)
Serendipity: today I was talking with one of my MIT thesis students about what will become the next ’stethoscope’ for doctors. GE believes that it should be its compact ultrasound Vscan should be the next stethoscope, as Engadget reported recently:
the not-quite-flip phone tricorder Vscan, which all kidding aside is one of the smallest functional ultrasound machines we’ve seen. The goal is for doctors to have better access to specialist tools, reducing the number of referrals and improving diagnoses, etc. — and we’re sure selling an absolute ton of these is probably on the to-do list as well
Tricorder ultrasound
Perhaps the smartphone, which is in the process of eating the consumer electronics industry is, however, also going to eat at least the low end of the medical devices industry:
Smartphones could be the most important diagnostic tool of this century as part of a revolution in digital wireless medical devices, according to Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist working at The Scripps Research Institute, speaking at the TedMed conference last year. In a video released earlier this week, Topol shows off patches communicating with his smartphone to continuously monitor his vital signs.
Standards battles are often critical to competitive success; one of the key contests currently underway is over web standards for rich(er) content:
Adobe’s Flash – very widely used (YouTube, anyone), but not (famously) supported by Apple on the iPhone, and perceived by many as a major source of security weakenesses
HTML5 – being advocated by Google
Silverlight – Microsoft’s proprietary technology
In a recent assessment, we concluded that Flash was so widespread, and the standard-setting process so slow, that it would be a very very long time before HTML5 became the dominant standard.
An interesting recent development suggests, however, that a reassessment might be worthwhile – we’re always alert for these ‘triggers’ or early indicators of how different demand and business ecosystem scenarios evolve:
Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is “good enough” for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went live Monday, dumping Flash.
…
It illustrates the options customers have between picking the closed Flash – or Silverlight from Microsoft – and open technologies such as HTML to serve content to a new generation of mobile computing devices
Virgin picked HTML to give users of iPhones and other mobiles the option in the future of checking in through their phone. The battle between Adobe and Apple has seen Flash deliberately excluded from the Jesus Phone.
Simhambhatla: iPhone, and other mobile, users welcome
Later, it highlights the value of Flash when you control the hardware:
Flash provides beautiful interactivity,” Simhambhatla said. “We wanted to bring a smoother application experience and modularity and be able to build up an interactive experience for the kiosk user – Flash is all these.
“Flash is really, really good, but as long as you can keep the hardware controlled…If the hardware you are trying to put your product on isn’t [controlled] then Flash is questionable.”
One of the key questions about where the demand opportunity for high-tech will be is about the adoption of smartphones: what will be their penetration?
One of the important considerations here is the price point:
we’re already seeing smartphones on the $99 value menu offered to consumers
a key and closely related question is how much do these smartphones cost, to the network operators who market them, and to the vendors who build them
A news item from DigiTimes, which follows the ODM and EMS community in Taiwan and China closely suggests that prices may be falling faster than (some had) anticipated, heralding smartphones for the teeming masses, rather than just the technological elite.
Prices for Android-powered smartphones are declining at a pace faster than expected due to competition for orders from handset makers in Taiwan and China…
Huawei Technologies has pursued an aggressive pricing strategy to push sales of its Android phones, especially through telecom channels… China-based telecom equipment and handset maker is making a second customized Android-powered phone, the Pulse Mini, for T-Mobile, which will begin to market the model in the UK in April 2010 with an unlocked price [that] represents a reduction of over 54% compared to … its predecessor, the Pulse, said the sources. Huawei began to ship the Pulse to T-Mobile in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Despite the threat from Huawei, most Taiwan handset makers insisted that they will continue to focus on medium- to high-end Android models to avoid fierce completion in the low-end segment.
Stryde Hax (fabulous name for a detective) has a fascinating post that everyone should read on how Harrington High exploited information technology to become Big Brother:
This investigation into the remote spying allegedly being conducted against students at Lower Merion represents an attempt to find proof of spying and a look into the toolchain used to accomplish spying.
Read it through for the updates as well, which reflect a careful and thoughtful attitude to these issues.
Some interesting observations from one of my colleagues at MIT Erik Brynjolfsson, in the MIT Center for Digital Business reflecting on the dynamics of productivity and how information technology is reshaping the economy. Their key point, which has been echoed by work by my other colleagues in the Management Innovation Lab at London Business School is the importance of the accumulation of organizational capital: improved operational processes and management practices.
It seems that Samsung has recognized the importance of the smartphone market – Samsung aims to treble smartphone sales in 2010 | Reuters – and now has ambitions to treble its shipments. While a target of 18 million smartphones sounds impressive, that doesn’t make it a leader:
With Nokia’s shipments comprising about 40% of the smartphone market, it’s on track to be about 220 to 250 million units, depending on how fast it grows; that implies 7-8% market share for Samsung, split across the Android and WinMo platforms.
Posted by Michael A M Davies 
Simhambhatla: iPhone, and other mobile, users welcome
Michael A M Davies
Brad W Hagedorn
Moe Kelley
Amy Bullard Davies
