Recently in Technology Category

February and March was supposed to be a time of rest before I head to the new job, but opportunity often knocks on the door when you least expect it.

When I met Mark Surman in Singapore last December, I had no idea I would eventually become involved in shaping the Open Web Career Track Drumbeat Project along with John Britton and Philipp Schmidt.

It was one of those requests that made me feel woefully inadequate, but I felt a deep affinity to its cause of providing accessible education to inculcate skills within the tech community — skills necessary to keep the web open and non-proprietary. John and Phlipp were extremely patient and kind to bring me up to speed.

So when Mark asked if I could present the Open Web Career Track project at Mozilla Developer Day in Bangalore, I agreed.

It is regrettable that I’ve never really traveled within Asia, and it would be my first time to India.

The crowd that showed up for MozDevDay was amazing. A full-house of about 300 people, on a Saturday, some coming from quite a distance away.

It was an eclectic experience: we talked pretty cutting edge tech in the hall — thanks to Arun — and ate sitting down on the grass patch under the noon sun. It was a departure from the sterile environment Singapore tech meetups are often held in, where the main complaint was always “why no wifi?”.

It was a blast speaking to the audience. The Indian and Chinese cultures share so many similarities it was easy to point out (and subsequently joke about) our common idiosyncrasies.

I’ve learned so much from the amazing people I met. In a land where there are places in poverty, open-source software means so much more than “why does OpenOffice mess up my Powerpoint slides?”. It is a means by which the poor can make themselves relevant in an increasingly technological world; where the oppressed can broadcast their plight to the rest of the world despite the best efforts of the oppressors to silence them.

The web has changed the way in which we communicate and connect with each other. It has the potential to be a lot more than a giant corporate marketplace. We need to consciously keep it inclusive and available to everyone.

Taken from the CNet article Sony PIctures CEO hates the internet: Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton said,

“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet…(The Internet) created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.”

The internet levels the playing fields for big corporations and small startups.

These are my perspectives:

I’m a guy who sees amazing opportunities coming from the internet. The fact that I can now do business anytime, in any timezone, to anyone who wants to buy my product on impulse is a wonderful notion. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day, and Madison Avenue were found in every connected household, and on every broadband-enabled mobile. My customers and purveyors of my content are empowered to connect with me, giving me constant feedback on how I can better serve their needs or improve my product. Best of all, where once I had to pay a lot of money to agencies running focus groups, I now get all this feedback for free. This goes a long way into helping me create a product that is useful to my customers, a product they are happy to pay for.

I’m a guy who sees the internet as the emancipator of the consumer. No longer are we bound to buy more than we need. We have been persecuted by corporations long enough, made to buy 19 tracks of garbage music for the 1 track we really want. They have forced their advertisements on our DVDs, disabling our right to skip content we have no interest in; wasted our time in the movie theatres and on the radio. They have grown fat on extorting us and blame us now that their unsustainable business model is collapsing. Many of us do not expect content to be free forever - we are wiling to pay a reasonable price for the content and services we consume. Spend less time branding us as pirates, and more time building the infrastructure to sell us content free of the boardroom’s control. It’s a simple business transaction - I want what I pay for, and am willing to pay reasonably for what I want.

My name is Lucian Teo. And if you are reading this for free, you are the consumer. You are the resistance.

Today’s keynote from George Wright, Vice-President Marketing and Sales at Blendtec, who brought us the unforgettable answer to the question, will it blend?

Their most famous blend, an iPhone:

What I didn’t know was they sold the blended iPhone on eBay for around $1000 and donated it to a children’s hospital.

Anyway, I digress.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s keynote at the New Media Expo here in Las Vegas wasn’t particularly illuminating, but reiterated the principles which we all know.

People want authentic content. Consumers are tired of corporate speak. They are tired of companies and organisations spamming them with perfectly edited copies and hiding behind a mask of disconnectedness. “Why else do they watch reality TV?”, Gary hammers home, almost shouting.

Points he brought up:

• Produce authentic content. Have less, or no editing.
• Care about your community. Answer every email. Be thankful they took time off their lives to read, watch or listen to your content.
• If you’re wrong, apologise. Everyone loves people who can admit their mistakes. If you’re right but someone else says you’re wrong, correct them gently.
• You are not going to be defined by the content you produce. You will be defined by the universe, and what they think of you. The ship has sailed - you can no longer control the message.
• Focus on what you’re good at. It helps prevent burning out.
• There is no niche too small. Dominate it. Know who the players are and dominate the space.

Many airlines in the United states have moved towards installing self-serve automated check-in machines directly in front of their counters at the airport. A small number of airline staff would be positioned behind these machines to handle the checking in of luggage, specifically the attaching of the sticky tag and then passing you the baggage claim stub.

While these machines means more service points for passengers needing a check-in, it has created a mess at the more crowded airports (namely LAX where I flew out of) as most passengers standing in line wait for the two or three counter staff to attend to them, rather than moving in to use the machines.

Is this a case of user education, or is it a process problem?

The check-in process, from the perspective of the airline, is fairly standard. From the passenger point of view, it is vastly different. They are likely to think of their needs as non-standard. They may not read English, have small children, be wheelchair-bound, or are simply uncomfortable using the touchscreen interface that frankly, needs to be improved.

The largest obstacle I see is that of checking in one’s luggage. Nowhere have I seen a single sign saying how check-in luggage is addressed. Common-sense on the part of the passenger would lead them to deduce that the automated check-in counters do not handle the checking-in of luggage, as it would constitute a grave security risk, not to mention the possibility of them losing their luggage and unable to place that responsibility on someone actually paid to handle these things.

Perhaps it takes a while for passengers to warm up to the idea of helping themselves to the machines, but the path of least resistance definitely goes through the airline staff. It is the established method of checking yourself in.

Instead, I find myself at Tucson International’s Southwest Airlines counter, checking myself and my luggage at the machine while the two counter staff chat with each other directly in front of me because there is no one else in line. It feels like I’m not being attended to. Or that they’re not doing their jobs. But this is the new process which creates a negative customer experience.

Maybe a human-first, machine as backup process of checking people in?

Streetdirectory.com was a kind of guilty necessity. We’d rail about how they made us pay for maps, and cheered when Singapore Land Authority hammered them for us, but SLA’s provision of Singapore maps was lacking. It’s pretty good for a gahmen site, but in these parts it’s like an able-bodied man coming in first at the paralympics. I should know, I run one of these gahmen puppies.

But I digress. We still crawled back to Streetdirectory in the dead of night, because that was the only way to get bus information. SBS’s journey planner does a terrible job at helping us get from point A to point B. We needed Streetdirectory like we needed pocket money from an abusive parent.

Needed. Until now.

Gothere.sg rocks. And I don’t mean conceptually - it rocks right now. You can change your destination by dragging markers on the map, and the bus route is changed dynamically. How cool is that!

Sure, the trains could be brought in to make a better journey planner, but that’s a small gripe. My main suggestion to Dominic who runs gothere.sg is this: Pair with Singeo. We don’t need 2 kickass Singaporean web guys cannibalising each other. A partnership would really bring the house down.

An example of how clued in Dominic is: I twittered how much I liked gothere.sg yesterday, and Dominic emailed me out of the blue to thank me for the tweet and also cited my work at MOE. That’s savvy customer relationship building for you.

We sold ourselves to the underdog. Then when the dog grew up, it bit us.

I was one of the early adopters who purchased the iPod Touch. I didn’t really need one - I already had an older iPod Video.

The iPod touch was the first time I felt shortchanged from the get-go. Apple always had this wonderful glow about them - their products would deliver the best technology had to offer in a sleek beautiful package. The iPod Touch could have been so much more, but Apple chose to cripple many features, delivering a merely passable product. I held on to the hope future software updates from Apple would fully realise the iPod Touch’s potential. I jailbroke my iPod Touch once and experienced the fullness of a real programmable device in my hand. I chose to update the firmware, disabling all the amazing 3rd party applications I had installed because I foolishly believed that Apple would eventually come through and outshine anything these 3rd party developers could produce.

I believed in the altruistic front Apple put up. I believed Steve Jobs when he said he was forced to incorporate DRM into all mp3s sold on iTunes because the record labels dictated so. I knew full well that the inclusion of DRM also locked us all into only using iPods for our music. But iPods would be the best players the technological world could possibly offer, right?

So forgive me if I was terribly upset last night when Steve Jobs announced some new enhancements for my iPod Touch. I’d get five new applications: email, stocks, google maps, notes and weather. They’re not mind-blowing by any standards. I’d have expected Microsoft to wow me more. The best part was that Apple expected iPod Touch owners to shell out $20 to have them installed, while anyone who bought a new iPod Touch would have them for free. Microsoft added functionality to their Zune product line for free. Hell has frozen over.

We were penalised for jumping in early. Exactly what Apple did when they made early adopters of the iPhone pay $200 more than customers who bought it 2 months after it was launched.

It doesn’t pay to be a Mac zealot. It doesn’t pay to believe in Apple, or any corporation. We all knew corporations exist solely to make money, but we hoped our Apple would be different.

Now we know better than to blindly believe. Apple will no longer enjoy the benefit of the doubt - it will have to earn our dollars the hard way.

I’m now using nokia’s wifi zone on a bus. Connection isn’t the fastest, but the fact that I have Internet access while on the move, while not using 3G or GPRS is quite liberating. The iPod’s error correction is amazing. I’m typing everything wrongly, but in blind faith the iPod gets pretty much everything right.

To me the best thing about all this web 2.0 fanfare is the push towards open information. RSS, mashups, Google - all made possible because of information sharing.

The tricky bit arises when drawing the line between sharing and stealing. In his latest post, Greg Storey from Airbag calls theft on Flickr user Allig8torx for poaching photos from File Magazine (see FM’s Untitled by Byron Barett and Allig8tor’s astica3). Several Airbag readers defend Allig8tor (the nick is becoming such a pain to type), as it is possible that he’s just using Flickr as an online repository, rather than passing the photos off as his own.

Regardless of intention, the publication of someone else’s photos are a violation of intellectual property rights, unless permission is sought and obtained.

But what of aggregation? Surely there is added value when these individuals scour and collect the best resources out there and compile them for the rest of us. Patrick Haney’s Web Design Inspiration, also hosted on Flickr, is an invaluable resource. The works displayed aren’t his. I doubt expressed permission was sought in these cases as well.

The main difference is that Patrick attributes his sources. The URL of every site is listed; nothing was done to obscure the brand of the website. Not only does Allig8tor not name his sources or attribute the creators of the photos, he renames them in his set. It’s not exactly claiming them to be his own, but it removes all trace of ownership.

Overheard on television a few minutes ago.

Timothy Goh, Vice-President of Mediacorp’s New Media Business unit said we’re in 2.0 right now and going into web 2.5.

I can’t help rolling my eyeballs at people who talk about the certainty of web 2.0++. Most can’t define web 2.0 comprehensively (I know I probably can’t).

He also talked about how traditional ads were primarily one-way communication, but with the web it was different. It allows one to put up images…

Gosh. I know a picture says a thousand words, but that’s still one-way to me.

How did these people become decision-makers in online space?