Bianca Bosker's Blog, page 17
March 6, 2013
How Apple's Losing Its Monopoly On Magic
On October 19, 2011, 14 days after the death of its celebrated founder Steve Jobs, Apple held a memorial service at its Cupertino campus. Posters bearing Jobs’ visage and his inspirational quotations appeared on the walls throughout the company’s headquarters.
“If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long,” declared one poster hung prominently in Apple’s Town Hall. “Just figure out what’s next.”
Nearly a year and a half later, Wall Street and the technology world seem increasingly convinced that Jobs’ company has failed to heed that advice, surrendering some of its aura as a supposedly limitless purveyor of brilliant new inventions along with billions in stock market value. In the Silicon Valley conversation, discussion of a reputedly invincible Apple has given way to questioning whether the company has lost its way while running out of fresh ideas.
On Wall Street, Apple has watched its stock price sink to its lowest level in more than a year, a dive that stands in contrast to its arch-rival Google, whose shares recently hit a new high. In the marketplace, Apple, in its present position, has devolved into a mere purveyor of consistently excellent products -- still an enormously lucrative perch, and yet a comedown for a company that only recently seemed to hold a monopoly on shiny new objects of consumer desire.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
In the three years since Apple released its last category-creating blockbuster, the iPad, investors are anxious for signs that the company has another breakthrough in its pipeline. Meanwhile, Apple’s competitors have successfully mimicked the company’s approach -- offering sleek gadgets and an ecosystem of content to go with them, paired with edgy marketing -- making Apple’s magic now seem almost mundane.
“Apple is going from a great company with unprecedented products to a good company with good performance,” said George Colony, chief executive of Forrester, a research and advisory firm. “The products are still very good, but not highly innovative. That’s different from a few years ago.”
No one is writing the company’s obituary. Despite the worried talk and some missteps, Apple sold 47 million iPhones over the last three months of 2012 alone. It remains the most valuable company on earth (or second-most valuable, depending on Exxon's stock performance on a given day). Over the course of last year, Apple's profits exceeded $41 billion, more than Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon combined.
But by one key measure -- its price-to-earnings ratio, or the amount its stock is worth as a multiple of its profits -- Apple has clearly sunk in the estimation of investors. When stock markets have confidence that a company is on the verge of a growth spurt, they bid its stock price up, paying many times current earnings for its shares in the belief that those earnings are about to expand. Over the last two years, Apple has watched its stock value sink from a price-to-earnings ratio of 23 to about nine -- the same territory as companies viewed as mature and stable, such as electrical utilities.
Amazon, which actually lost money in 2012, boasts a P/E ratio of 150 times expected earnings. The value reflects that investors view the company’s future business ventures -- whether a phone, an HBO-like offering or a push to replace supermarkets -- as a source of explosive earnings growth. To a large extent, Apple's more modest P/E ratio reflects doubt that Apple can upend the Law of Large Numbers and keep pace with the incredible growth rate they've maintained thus far. Apple sold 80 percent more iPads in 2012 than in 2011. Can it sell 80 percent more -- or 105 million iPads -- in 2013? And again in 2014?
Even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak worries that Apple may be surrendering its touch.
“We used to have these ads, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC, and the Mac was always the cool guy,” Wozniak told Bloomberg. “And ouch, it’s painful, because we kind of are losing that.”
Apple shares precious little about its current and future state of affairs, but the outside world senses trouble -- a sense amplified by turnover at the top. Scott Forstall, the company’s head of iOS software, was fired in November. John Browett, who replaced Ron Johnson as senior vice president of retail operations, lasted just seven months at Apple. Three months after his Browett's exit, his direct report, Apple’s vice president of retail, resigned.
The company’s uncanny grasp of consumer taste has lately seemed on the wane. In the past, Apple’s ads have become cultural phenomena of their own -- and yet Apple’s latest round of commercials were noteworthy only inasmuch as they proved entirely unremarkable (the notable exception: a series of “cringeworthy,” “hated” ads for the Apple Genius Bar).
Apple’s major product releases, such as the iPhone 5, new iPad and iPad Mini, offered only incremental improvements over their predecessors, or, in the case of Apple Maps, a product that fell short of expectations (though even with these "incremental improvements," Apple sold 1.7 million iPads and 3.7 million iPhones per week in the final three months of 2012). The company that prides itself on making the world’s best, most beautiful products has recently watched its mapping, mail and browser apps for the iPhone upstaged by Google’s own, in the estimation of some users.
“The Apple user is an adrenaline junky,” noted Howard Anderson, a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “He wants the latest and greatest, revolutionary not evolutionary.”
Apple’s business model, which relies on producing top-tier gadgets that retail for top-tier prices, appears weaker than it has in years, given changing conditions within Apple and in the market at large.
Though analysts note that Apple’s existing lineup of devices still bears Jobs’ fingerprints, the chief executive’s obsessive focus on product details can’t easily be matched. Despite Apple’s impressive sales under Cook's watch, Wall Street still seems to be wondering whether the company can maintain its momentum without its visionary founder.
Apple, for its part, has changed its product review process: Where designs for new features or products used to go through Jobs for his sign-off, they’re now evaluated by members of Apple's executive team, with a different mix of people assigned to different projects, a former Apple employee told HuffPost. The person noted that this procedure has been in place since Jobs’ health worsened.
And even as Apple has been adjusting to an innovation cycle that doesn’t include its founder’s input, its rivals are demonstrating that they are both able innovators and keen imitators of the Apple formula.
Competitors like Google, Samsung, Amazon and HTC are closing the gap between Apple’s offerings and their own, with high-quality handsets they sell for less than Cupertino’s, and a growing ecosystem of apps and entertainment to go with then. Analysts warn this trend may erode Apple’s profit margins, which in turn may erode confidence in the company’s future earnings.
“The market as a whole has changed. The Samsungs and others can now almost read the mind of Apple, more than they could have ten years ago,” said Peter Fader, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “It’s not clear to me that Apple can continue to have the same success with this innovation, product-driven strategy, as I think others will catch up. Customers are getting smart, and they can’t have the virtual monopoly they’ve enjoyed.”
Apple's allure has stemmed in large part from the sense that its devices are "gateway gadgets" to more spending: when people buy an iDevice, they are supposed to be making just the first of many purchases from the company, and will eventually fork over their credit cards to buy books, apps, music and other gadgets that all sync seamlessly within Apple's universe. People with MacBooks are enticed to buy iPhones with the pitch that they will be able to use the new device to play the iTunes music that they already own. This dynamic is supposed to be self-perpetuating, making people accustomed to shopping at iTunes -- and especially as the iPad beckons as a screen for video -- or to purchase an iPad so they can sync apps already on their iPhone.
Now, other companies have developed their own media and app libraries, which also act as portals to a range of content. And standalone services, such as Pandora, Spotify, Netflix and Amazon's Kindle ebook library, let people easily transfer their entertainment from one company's platform to another's, providing an alternative around Apple's iTunes.
In the longer-term, analysts like Colony warn that the exploding popularity of Google’s Android operating system, which powers phones and tablets from Samsung and HTC, among others, could lure developers away from the Apple system, which may soon be in an undesirable position familiar to BlackBerry and Microsoft: Apple could find itself playing catch-up with its app offerings.
Forrester estimates that by the end of this year, Android smartphones will outnumber iPhones by nearly five to one, with 894 million Android phones and 247 million iPhones worldwide.
Apple has previously brushed off questions about its share of the smartphone market, while citing data showing that even as Android commands a greater number of users, Apple users more frequently employ their devices to shop online, browse the web and download apps.
Analysts said they expect Apple’s future strategy to look a great deal like its past approach: grow revenues by launching products in new categories, and then push those devices into new markets. In short, adapt to swiftly changing consumer demands.
In the 2007 fiscal year, desktop computers comprised some 17 percent of Apple’s net sales, while iPhones made up only one percent. Five years later, the iPhone accounted for more than half of net sales, while desktop computers had shrunk to just 4 percent. In those past five years, Apple has also conquered new territory, with China now Apple’s second-largest market.
It is worth bearing in mind that Apple’s success has stemmed from entering areas pioneered by others, yet far from tamed, to enable mass enjoyment of consumer products. Apple did not invent the MP3 player; it merely built the most popular version of all time. The iPad came a decade after Microsoft’s efforts at launching a tablet, but Apple’s was the first to find a mass market. The iPhone was far from the first smartphone, trailing entrants from Microsoft, Nokia and BlackBerry, but its public embrace made apps and the mobile Web part of everyday life.
Apple’s future success now seems likely to hinge on its ability to pull off that trick once again, finding another lucrative area to transform -- perhaps television, wearable technology, or even the car. Some speculate that its next major play will be for the home, with devices like an Apple TV to put iTunes, Siri, the App Store and other Apple offerings on more screens and provide more opportunities to pay for Apple content.
The living room and the wrist seem to be among Apple’s primary targets, as rumors abound of possibilities like an Apple TV -- a full television, as opposed to the streaming video box the company sells now -- or an iWatch.
“Apple’s valuation is based on them continuing to revolutionize more businesses, which is practically impossible,” said Harvard Business School professor David Yoffie. “If they want to regain the shine they had two years ago, there needs to be more significant innovation that we have to see in existing core products, or new products.”
Apple’s sticky ecosystem of movies, music, magazines and apps looks likely to keep its base of existing users for the foreseeable future, even if it fails to deliver a revolutionary new product to entice fanboys.
But questions remain about Apple’s ability to produce cheaper devices that enable it to move into developing markets and tap a burgeoning population of smartphone owners. Can it conquer new markets -- a must to maintain its levels of growth -- unless its prices come down?
Cook has repeatedly emphasized that Apple will not sacrifice quality to achieve lower prices, though this past year Apple released a much less expensive iPad, the $329 iPad mini. When it discounted the iPhone 4, Apple was, in Cook's words, “surprised” by the large demand for the cheaper phone.
“They’re missing the popularization of the smartphone in making it a worldwide multi-socio-economic phenomenon,” argued Colony. “In so doing, that may in fact mean that they lose the war for developers … That is the Achilles heel at this moment.”
Domestically, with over half of all U.S. cellphone users already smartphone owners, Apple is “battling for fewer and fewer users, a smaller and smaller addressable market,” noted Ben Arnold, an analyst with research firm NPD.
Still, Arnold added, Apple is still attracting a flood of new customers -– by his firm’s measure, 27 percent of iPad buyers said the tablet was their first Apple product ever, yielding Apple an entirely new population of people that can tap into its app store, and might soon find themselves adding an iPhone or MacBook Air. And iPhone users remain loyal to the smartphone, with 88 percent of current owners saying they were likely to upgrade to another iPhone when the time came to buy a new phone, according to Strategy Analytics.
Wall Street’s pessimism about Apple’s future ultimately suggests that Apple’s obsessive secrecy, for so long an advantage for a company that enjoys more speculation about its products than any other, may finally be doing some harm. Is Apple mum because it’s hard at work on the next gadget revolution? Or is the silence sign it hasn’t figured out its next hit? Investors can’t seem to decide.
“Jobs was brilliant at managing expectations, and it’s hard for anyone else to replicate that … he’s no longer there, and the credibility is no longer as secure,” said Yoffie.
“It’s always a mistake to underestimate Apple,” Yoffie added. “I’ve done it a few times in my studying of Apple, and it’s never a good thing to do.”
“If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long,” declared one poster hung prominently in Apple’s Town Hall. “Just figure out what’s next.”
Nearly a year and a half later, Wall Street and the technology world seem increasingly convinced that Jobs’ company has failed to heed that advice, surrendering some of its aura as a supposedly limitless purveyor of brilliant new inventions along with billions in stock market value. In the Silicon Valley conversation, discussion of a reputedly invincible Apple has given way to questioning whether the company has lost its way while running out of fresh ideas.
On Wall Street, Apple has watched its stock price sink to its lowest level in more than a year, a dive that stands in contrast to its arch-rival Google, whose shares recently hit a new high. In the marketplace, Apple, in its present position, has devolved into a mere purveyor of consistently excellent products -- still an enormously lucrative perch, and yet a comedown for a company that only recently seemed to hold a monopoly on shiny new objects of consumer desire.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
In the three years since Apple released its last category-creating blockbuster, the iPad, investors are anxious for signs that the company has another breakthrough in its pipeline. Meanwhile, Apple’s competitors have successfully mimicked the company’s approach -- offering sleek gadgets and an ecosystem of content to go with them, paired with edgy marketing -- making Apple’s magic now seem almost mundane.
“Apple is going from a great company with unprecedented products to a good company with good performance,” said George Colony, chief executive of Forrester, a research and advisory firm. “The products are still very good, but not highly innovative. That’s different from a few years ago.”
No one is writing the company’s obituary. Despite the worried talk and some missteps, Apple sold 47 million iPhones over the last three months of 2012 alone. It remains the most valuable company on earth (or second-most valuable, depending on Exxon's stock performance on a given day). Over the course of last year, Apple's profits exceeded $41 billion, more than Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon combined.
But by one key measure -- its price-to-earnings ratio, or the amount its stock is worth as a multiple of its profits -- Apple has clearly sunk in the estimation of investors. When stock markets have confidence that a company is on the verge of a growth spurt, they bid its stock price up, paying many times current earnings for its shares in the belief that those earnings are about to expand. Over the last two years, Apple has watched its stock value sink from a price-to-earnings ratio of 23 to about nine -- the same territory as companies viewed as mature and stable, such as electrical utilities.
Amazon, which actually lost money in 2012, boasts a P/E ratio of 150 times expected earnings. The value reflects that investors view the company’s future business ventures -- whether a phone, an HBO-like offering or a push to replace supermarkets -- as a source of explosive earnings growth. To a large extent, Apple's more modest P/E ratio reflects doubt that Apple can upend the Law of Large Numbers and keep pace with the incredible growth rate they've maintained thus far. Apple sold 80 percent more iPads in 2012 than in 2011. Can it sell 80 percent more -- or 105 million iPads -- in 2013? And again in 2014?
Even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak worries that Apple may be surrendering its touch.
“We used to have these ads, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC, and the Mac was always the cool guy,” Wozniak told Bloomberg. “And ouch, it’s painful, because we kind of are losing that.”
Apple shares precious little about its current and future state of affairs, but the outside world senses trouble -- a sense amplified by turnover at the top. Scott Forstall, the company’s head of iOS software, was fired in November. John Browett, who replaced Ron Johnson as senior vice president of retail operations, lasted just seven months at Apple. Three months after his Browett's exit, his direct report, Apple’s vice president of retail, resigned.
The company’s uncanny grasp of consumer taste has lately seemed on the wane. In the past, Apple’s ads have become cultural phenomena of their own -- and yet Apple’s latest round of commercials were noteworthy only inasmuch as they proved entirely unremarkable (the notable exception: a series of “cringeworthy,” “hated” ads for the Apple Genius Bar).
Apple’s major product releases, such as the iPhone 5, new iPad and iPad Mini, offered only incremental improvements over their predecessors, or, in the case of Apple Maps, a product that fell short of expectations (though even with these "incremental improvements," Apple sold 1.7 million iPads and 3.7 million iPhones per week in the final three months of 2012). The company that prides itself on making the world’s best, most beautiful products has recently watched its mapping, mail and browser apps for the iPhone upstaged by Google’s own, in the estimation of some users.
“The Apple user is an adrenaline junky,” noted Howard Anderson, a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “He wants the latest and greatest, revolutionary not evolutionary.”
Apple’s business model, which relies on producing top-tier gadgets that retail for top-tier prices, appears weaker than it has in years, given changing conditions within Apple and in the market at large.
Though analysts note that Apple’s existing lineup of devices still bears Jobs’ fingerprints, the chief executive’s obsessive focus on product details can’t easily be matched. Despite Apple’s impressive sales under Cook's watch, Wall Street still seems to be wondering whether the company can maintain its momentum without its visionary founder.
Apple, for its part, has changed its product review process: Where designs for new features or products used to go through Jobs for his sign-off, they’re now evaluated by members of Apple's executive team, with a different mix of people assigned to different projects, a former Apple employee told HuffPost. The person noted that this procedure has been in place since Jobs’ health worsened.
And even as Apple has been adjusting to an innovation cycle that doesn’t include its founder’s input, its rivals are demonstrating that they are both able innovators and keen imitators of the Apple formula.
Competitors like Google, Samsung, Amazon and HTC are closing the gap between Apple’s offerings and their own, with high-quality handsets they sell for less than Cupertino’s, and a growing ecosystem of apps and entertainment to go with then. Analysts warn this trend may erode Apple’s profit margins, which in turn may erode confidence in the company’s future earnings.
“The market as a whole has changed. The Samsungs and others can now almost read the mind of Apple, more than they could have ten years ago,” said Peter Fader, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “It’s not clear to me that Apple can continue to have the same success with this innovation, product-driven strategy, as I think others will catch up. Customers are getting smart, and they can’t have the virtual monopoly they’ve enjoyed.”
Apple's allure has stemmed in large part from the sense that its devices are "gateway gadgets" to more spending: when people buy an iDevice, they are supposed to be making just the first of many purchases from the company, and will eventually fork over their credit cards to buy books, apps, music and other gadgets that all sync seamlessly within Apple's universe. People with MacBooks are enticed to buy iPhones with the pitch that they will be able to use the new device to play the iTunes music that they already own. This dynamic is supposed to be self-perpetuating, making people accustomed to shopping at iTunes -- and especially as the iPad beckons as a screen for video -- or to purchase an iPad so they can sync apps already on their iPhone.
Now, other companies have developed their own media and app libraries, which also act as portals to a range of content. And standalone services, such as Pandora, Spotify, Netflix and Amazon's Kindle ebook library, let people easily transfer their entertainment from one company's platform to another's, providing an alternative around Apple's iTunes.
In the longer-term, analysts like Colony warn that the exploding popularity of Google’s Android operating system, which powers phones and tablets from Samsung and HTC, among others, could lure developers away from the Apple system, which may soon be in an undesirable position familiar to BlackBerry and Microsoft: Apple could find itself playing catch-up with its app offerings.
Forrester estimates that by the end of this year, Android smartphones will outnumber iPhones by nearly five to one, with 894 million Android phones and 247 million iPhones worldwide.
Apple has previously brushed off questions about its share of the smartphone market, while citing data showing that even as Android commands a greater number of users, Apple users more frequently employ their devices to shop online, browse the web and download apps.
Analysts said they expect Apple’s future strategy to look a great deal like its past approach: grow revenues by launching products in new categories, and then push those devices into new markets. In short, adapt to swiftly changing consumer demands.
In the 2007 fiscal year, desktop computers comprised some 17 percent of Apple’s net sales, while iPhones made up only one percent. Five years later, the iPhone accounted for more than half of net sales, while desktop computers had shrunk to just 4 percent. In those past five years, Apple has also conquered new territory, with China now Apple’s second-largest market.
It is worth bearing in mind that Apple’s success has stemmed from entering areas pioneered by others, yet far from tamed, to enable mass enjoyment of consumer products. Apple did not invent the MP3 player; it merely built the most popular version of all time. The iPad came a decade after Microsoft’s efforts at launching a tablet, but Apple’s was the first to find a mass market. The iPhone was far from the first smartphone, trailing entrants from Microsoft, Nokia and BlackBerry, but its public embrace made apps and the mobile Web part of everyday life.
Apple’s future success now seems likely to hinge on its ability to pull off that trick once again, finding another lucrative area to transform -- perhaps television, wearable technology, or even the car. Some speculate that its next major play will be for the home, with devices like an Apple TV to put iTunes, Siri, the App Store and other Apple offerings on more screens and provide more opportunities to pay for Apple content.
The living room and the wrist seem to be among Apple’s primary targets, as rumors abound of possibilities like an Apple TV -- a full television, as opposed to the streaming video box the company sells now -- or an iWatch.
“Apple’s valuation is based on them continuing to revolutionize more businesses, which is practically impossible,” said Harvard Business School professor David Yoffie. “If they want to regain the shine they had two years ago, there needs to be more significant innovation that we have to see in existing core products, or new products.”
Apple’s sticky ecosystem of movies, music, magazines and apps looks likely to keep its base of existing users for the foreseeable future, even if it fails to deliver a revolutionary new product to entice fanboys.
But questions remain about Apple’s ability to produce cheaper devices that enable it to move into developing markets and tap a burgeoning population of smartphone owners. Can it conquer new markets -- a must to maintain its levels of growth -- unless its prices come down?
Cook has repeatedly emphasized that Apple will not sacrifice quality to achieve lower prices, though this past year Apple released a much less expensive iPad, the $329 iPad mini. When it discounted the iPhone 4, Apple was, in Cook's words, “surprised” by the large demand for the cheaper phone.
“They’re missing the popularization of the smartphone in making it a worldwide multi-socio-economic phenomenon,” argued Colony. “In so doing, that may in fact mean that they lose the war for developers … That is the Achilles heel at this moment.”
Domestically, with over half of all U.S. cellphone users already smartphone owners, Apple is “battling for fewer and fewer users, a smaller and smaller addressable market,” noted Ben Arnold, an analyst with research firm NPD.
Still, Arnold added, Apple is still attracting a flood of new customers -– by his firm’s measure, 27 percent of iPad buyers said the tablet was their first Apple product ever, yielding Apple an entirely new population of people that can tap into its app store, and might soon find themselves adding an iPhone or MacBook Air. And iPhone users remain loyal to the smartphone, with 88 percent of current owners saying they were likely to upgrade to another iPhone when the time came to buy a new phone, according to Strategy Analytics.
Wall Street’s pessimism about Apple’s future ultimately suggests that Apple’s obsessive secrecy, for so long an advantage for a company that enjoys more speculation about its products than any other, may finally be doing some harm. Is Apple mum because it’s hard at work on the next gadget revolution? Or is the silence sign it hasn’t figured out its next hit? Investors can’t seem to decide.
“Jobs was brilliant at managing expectations, and it’s hard for anyone else to replicate that … he’s no longer there, and the credibility is no longer as secure,” said Yoffie.
“It’s always a mistake to underestimate Apple,” Yoffie added. “I’ve done it a few times in my studying of Apple, and it’s never a good thing to do.”
March 3, 2013
Clifford Nass On 'Seductive' Tech And Why You Treat Your Phone Like A Friend
Why are people polite to computers? And why are they moved by flattery from a machine they know is spouting words at random?
According to Stanford University professor Clifford Nass, who studies how humans interact with machines, we tend to treat computers much like we treat living, breathing people. Our interactions with our friends and our iPhones aren't so different, after all.
Nass, the author of more than three books about how people use technology, has worked with companies to make gadgets more helpful, more intuitive and less annoying. Microsoft hired Nass to improve its Office assistant Clippy. And more recently, Google has tapped Nass to help with Google Glass and its self-driving cars.
For our "Life As" series, we asked Nass about the future of our relationships with machines, what we most need to hear from our gadgets and how we're re-wiring our brains.
What’s the biggest change you’ve noted in what people want and expect from technology?
People are more accepting now than they used to be of having technologies that are more richly and clearly social. They want personality, they want something that will joke or be more present.
In the old days, people didn’t like that -- remember Clippy the paper clip. Admittedly it wasn’t great implementation, but it’s an example of something that was trying to say "I’m visible here, I’m psychologically present." People are much happier with that than they used to be, and that's a function of voice [recognition technology] and of people becoming more attached to their technologies.
How do you see our interactions with devices evolving?
As technologies become more competent and as they speak like us -- as they use words and phrases the way we do -- we will see people responding much more socially and much more powerfully to technologies. There is no question that we will see much more tight reactions to technology. We’ll feel a much more emotional attachment to technology.
What does that mean for our relationships with each other?
One of the effects is it can impact the conversations we have with other people. We do see a great increase in people using their machines when they’re with other people -- they’re disconnected from the conversation, for lack of a better term.
Many people have healthy relationships with other people. But yes, there’s something very seductive about technologies that cause us to be distracted and to be de-emphasize our person-to-person relationships. Throughout history it has been that we feel people are healthier and do better when they have strong social connections. To the extent that those connections are no longer with each other but with machines, yeah, that’s worrisome. Certainly there’s been a dramatic de-emphasis in face-to-face communication. The importance of seeing you or hearing your voice when we communicate has declined.
What concerns you most about the direction of current technologies?
Unquestionably my biggest concern is the dramatic growth of multitasking. We know the effects of multitasking are severe and chronic. I have kids and adults saying, “Sure, I multitask all the time, but when I really have to concentrate I don’t multitask.”
The research to shows that’s not quite true: when your brain multitasks all the time there are clear changes in the brain that make it virtually impossible for you to focus. If we’re breeding a world in which people chronically multitask that has very, very worrisome and serious effects on people’s brains. For adults it has effects on their cognitive or thinking abilities. For younger kids we’re seeing effects on their emotional development. That does scare the heck out of me.
What’s the most important force driving our multitasking?
The way to make money in media is to sell attention. You have to fight and claw and do all these things to get attention. And the more media there is, the more you have to compete, so it’s an arms race, with everyone competing harder and harder to grab people’s attention.
I don’t think the industry will change, so people have to change. What needs to happen is people need to say, “I’m not going to multitask, I’m not going to fall into the tendency of being seduced.”
Google Glass offers a way for us to keep a screen in front of our faces at all times -- and, to an extent, multitask. What will Glass do to our brains?
We know that chronic multitasking is bad for your brain, but that involves usually using four or more streams of information at one time. We don’t have any data -- because, of course, it’s a new technology -- on what happens if you use two streams of data at one time.
If you want to check email compulsively, neither Glass nor any other technology will stop you. They want you to check things compulsively because they make money on it. It’s not a criticism, that’s their job. They’re going to drive you nuts because that will generate revenue for them and there’s little you can do about it. That’s the reality.
If you were to design the most addictive, attention-grabbing app ever, what would it look like?
It would have a human face (because people love human faces), a human voice and a very clear personality. It would have would be extroverted and friendly. It’d use a lot of vocal range and it would be highly expressive. It would encourage you to talk back to it in natural language. It would understand all the social rules -- it would flatter, it would understand your emotions and it would respond with similar emotions. It would do things to make people feel like they were part of its team. That would be a very good start.
What do we want to hear from our devices that we don’t hear?
Praise. One of the biggest mistakes that’s been made in the industry is we haven’t designed technology to say nice things to us. Whenever technology tells us something, it’s always because we did something bad.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
According to Stanford University professor Clifford Nass, who studies how humans interact with machines, we tend to treat computers much like we treat living, breathing people. Our interactions with our friends and our iPhones aren't so different, after all.
Nass, the author of more than three books about how people use technology, has worked with companies to make gadgets more helpful, more intuitive and less annoying. Microsoft hired Nass to improve its Office assistant Clippy. And more recently, Google has tapped Nass to help with Google Glass and its self-driving cars.
For our "Life As" series, we asked Nass about the future of our relationships with machines, what we most need to hear from our gadgets and how we're re-wiring our brains.
What’s the biggest change you’ve noted in what people want and expect from technology?
People are more accepting now than they used to be of having technologies that are more richly and clearly social. They want personality, they want something that will joke or be more present.
In the old days, people didn’t like that -- remember Clippy the paper clip. Admittedly it wasn’t great implementation, but it’s an example of something that was trying to say "I’m visible here, I’m psychologically present." People are much happier with that than they used to be, and that's a function of voice [recognition technology] and of people becoming more attached to their technologies.
How do you see our interactions with devices evolving?
As technologies become more competent and as they speak like us -- as they use words and phrases the way we do -- we will see people responding much more socially and much more powerfully to technologies. There is no question that we will see much more tight reactions to technology. We’ll feel a much more emotional attachment to technology.
What does that mean for our relationships with each other?
One of the effects is it can impact the conversations we have with other people. We do see a great increase in people using their machines when they’re with other people -- they’re disconnected from the conversation, for lack of a better term.
Many people have healthy relationships with other people. But yes, there’s something very seductive about technologies that cause us to be distracted and to be de-emphasize our person-to-person relationships. Throughout history it has been that we feel people are healthier and do better when they have strong social connections. To the extent that those connections are no longer with each other but with machines, yeah, that’s worrisome. Certainly there’s been a dramatic de-emphasis in face-to-face communication. The importance of seeing you or hearing your voice when we communicate has declined.
What concerns you most about the direction of current technologies?
Unquestionably my biggest concern is the dramatic growth of multitasking. We know the effects of multitasking are severe and chronic. I have kids and adults saying, “Sure, I multitask all the time, but when I really have to concentrate I don’t multitask.”
The research to shows that’s not quite true: when your brain multitasks all the time there are clear changes in the brain that make it virtually impossible for you to focus. If we’re breeding a world in which people chronically multitask that has very, very worrisome and serious effects on people’s brains. For adults it has effects on their cognitive or thinking abilities. For younger kids we’re seeing effects on their emotional development. That does scare the heck out of me.
What’s the most important force driving our multitasking?
The way to make money in media is to sell attention. You have to fight and claw and do all these things to get attention. And the more media there is, the more you have to compete, so it’s an arms race, with everyone competing harder and harder to grab people’s attention.
I don’t think the industry will change, so people have to change. What needs to happen is people need to say, “I’m not going to multitask, I’m not going to fall into the tendency of being seduced.”
Google Glass offers a way for us to keep a screen in front of our faces at all times -- and, to an extent, multitask. What will Glass do to our brains?
We know that chronic multitasking is bad for your brain, but that involves usually using four or more streams of information at one time. We don’t have any data -- because, of course, it’s a new technology -- on what happens if you use two streams of data at one time.
If you want to check email compulsively, neither Glass nor any other technology will stop you. They want you to check things compulsively because they make money on it. It’s not a criticism, that’s their job. They’re going to drive you nuts because that will generate revenue for them and there’s little you can do about it. That’s the reality.
If you were to design the most addictive, attention-grabbing app ever, what would it look like?
It would have a human face (because people love human faces), a human voice and a very clear personality. It would have would be extroverted and friendly. It’d use a lot of vocal range and it would be highly expressive. It would encourage you to talk back to it in natural language. It would understand all the social rules -- it would flatter, it would understand your emotions and it would respond with similar emotions. It would do things to make people feel like they were part of its team. That would be a very good start.
What do we want to hear from our devices that we don’t hear?
Praise. One of the biggest mistakes that’s been made in the industry is we haven’t designed technology to say nice things to us. Whenever technology tells us something, it’s always because we did something bad.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
March 1, 2013
Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg Defended By Women In Tech Despite Recent Attacks
Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer have presented themselves as trailblazing women who, despite continued barriers to female advancement, have managed to secure the corner office.
With both women the focus of headlines in recent days -- Sandberg for a book that some say dismisses the challenges of work-motherhood balance for those without eight-figure incomes, Mayer for an edict that employees at Yahoo can no longer work from home -- they find themselves on the receiving end of accusations that they have effectively created new obstacles for women.
But if the furor has rendered them lightning rods in a national conversation about the pressures on career women, it does not seem to have cost them many admirers among females forging their way in technology.
In conversations with five women who make their living in technology -- some in Silicon Valley, others on the East Coast -- the sense emerges that Sandberg and Mayer remain inspirational figures who have triumphed despite institutional challenges. If the punditocracy cares to make hay of their recent words and actions, these women prefer to focus on trying to emulate their successes.
“I came from nothing -- I didn’t have any relationships or money -- and I wish that when I was struggling with my own career, I had had advice from Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg. I had to figure my own way out,” said Ping Fu, chief strategy officer at 3D Systems and the author of Bend, Not Break , an autobiography recounting her ascent in Silicon Valley. “No matter who gives advice, it’s never applicable to everybody ... You don’t have to take it if you don’t think it applies to you, but it can apply to others.”
Fat bank accounts, nannies and lavish homes don’t disqualify Mayer and Sandberg from being role models, these women said. True, they had educations at elite universities and middle-class upbringings to help springboard their careers, but they didn’t start off with a staff of assistants.
“She [Sandberg] wasn’t born into where she is. She worked to get there, so it’s unfair to criticize her for that,” said Marissa Campise, a vice president at Venrock, a venture capital firm.
And women in tech are not inclined to wholly dismiss the duo's advice if their own situations are not exactly the same, or if certain opinions expressed by Sandberg and Mayer clash with their own. Although they said they don't agree with Mayer's working-from-home ban, they acknowledged it is likely more of a business decision made to save an ailing company than it is a war on working mothers.
The debate over the female tech executives suggests an unfair double standard that persists for women, they added. Men in Silicon Valley who balance fatherhood with life in the C-Suite not only escape similar levels of scrutiny over the helping hand they do or don't lend to women, but have largely managed to avoid questions about their work-life balance.
“Why are no men attacked?” Fu asked. “They have money and a babysitter, so their advice shouldn’t count?”
Women in the tech world aren’t looking to Mayer and Sandberg for a direct career roadmap they can copy, but rather for a vocabulary -- and structure -- for conversations about what still isn’t working for women in the workplace. Sandberg's advice in her book Lean In won't apply to everyone, and certainly puts the onus on women to seize opportunities in their careers. But better to have a high-profile, high-powered person acknowledge the slights and biases women still face than to clam up completely, the women noted.
Sandberg’s life advice crops up frequently in lunches and dinners between female colleagues and friends, and Sandberg's mottos -- like “lean in,” “demand a seat at the table” and “don’t leave before you leave” -- are approaching slogan status among many working women.
Nisha Gulati, a former Facebook employee and current community director for Carrotmob, said she thinks about Sandberg’s maxims “all the time” and credits Sandberg’s philosophy for helping her make the shift to a new job at a Silicon Valley startup. When she was debating her next career move, Gulati, then 30 years old and anticipating that she’d want to have children within a few years’ time, caught herself evaluating her job offers by comparing firms’ maternity policies.
“Then I realized that that mentality was exactly what Sheryl talks about. That was me leaving before I left,” Gulati wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. “And it was a totally ridiculous and short-sighted way of making the decision. I realized that I should grab onto the incredible opportunity, not the convenient one -- that's what a man would do.”
Gulati also maintains that Sandberg’s advocacy has helped women discuss issues of work-life balance in the workplace.
“Because she’s speaking about it so publicly, it makes it easier to have these conversations with your coworkers and your family, within Facebook and outside of Facebook,” Gulati said.
Even as the executives' personal success provides inspiration to other women, there's hope that Mayer and Sandberg will more actively move the focus beyond their own career paths to stress what companies can do to help their employees -- male and female -- "lean in." It's one thing to be a role model, but another to be actively petitioning and advocating for systemic change in the corporate landscape.
"For the woman who does want a seat at the table and wants to 'learn in,' Sandberg shows how she can do that more," said NY Tech Meetup executive director Jessica Lawrence. "The other part is that there is definitely a systemic problem as well ... It's not only about women changing their own behavior, but about society changing its behavior as well."
With both women the focus of headlines in recent days -- Sandberg for a book that some say dismisses the challenges of work-motherhood balance for those without eight-figure incomes, Mayer for an edict that employees at Yahoo can no longer work from home -- they find themselves on the receiving end of accusations that they have effectively created new obstacles for women.
But if the furor has rendered them lightning rods in a national conversation about the pressures on career women, it does not seem to have cost them many admirers among females forging their way in technology.
In conversations with five women who make their living in technology -- some in Silicon Valley, others on the East Coast -- the sense emerges that Sandberg and Mayer remain inspirational figures who have triumphed despite institutional challenges. If the punditocracy cares to make hay of their recent words and actions, these women prefer to focus on trying to emulate their successes.
“I came from nothing -- I didn’t have any relationships or money -- and I wish that when I was struggling with my own career, I had had advice from Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg. I had to figure my own way out,” said Ping Fu, chief strategy officer at 3D Systems and the author of Bend, Not Break , an autobiography recounting her ascent in Silicon Valley. “No matter who gives advice, it’s never applicable to everybody ... You don’t have to take it if you don’t think it applies to you, but it can apply to others.”
Fat bank accounts, nannies and lavish homes don’t disqualify Mayer and Sandberg from being role models, these women said. True, they had educations at elite universities and middle-class upbringings to help springboard their careers, but they didn’t start off with a staff of assistants.
“She [Sandberg] wasn’t born into where she is. She worked to get there, so it’s unfair to criticize her for that,” said Marissa Campise, a vice president at Venrock, a venture capital firm.
And women in tech are not inclined to wholly dismiss the duo's advice if their own situations are not exactly the same, or if certain opinions expressed by Sandberg and Mayer clash with their own. Although they said they don't agree with Mayer's working-from-home ban, they acknowledged it is likely more of a business decision made to save an ailing company than it is a war on working mothers.
The debate over the female tech executives suggests an unfair double standard that persists for women, they added. Men in Silicon Valley who balance fatherhood with life in the C-Suite not only escape similar levels of scrutiny over the helping hand they do or don't lend to women, but have largely managed to avoid questions about their work-life balance.
“Why are no men attacked?” Fu asked. “They have money and a babysitter, so their advice shouldn’t count?”
Women in the tech world aren’t looking to Mayer and Sandberg for a direct career roadmap they can copy, but rather for a vocabulary -- and structure -- for conversations about what still isn’t working for women in the workplace. Sandberg's advice in her book Lean In won't apply to everyone, and certainly puts the onus on women to seize opportunities in their careers. But better to have a high-profile, high-powered person acknowledge the slights and biases women still face than to clam up completely, the women noted.
Sandberg’s life advice crops up frequently in lunches and dinners between female colleagues and friends, and Sandberg's mottos -- like “lean in,” “demand a seat at the table” and “don’t leave before you leave” -- are approaching slogan status among many working women.
Nisha Gulati, a former Facebook employee and current community director for Carrotmob, said she thinks about Sandberg’s maxims “all the time” and credits Sandberg’s philosophy for helping her make the shift to a new job at a Silicon Valley startup. When she was debating her next career move, Gulati, then 30 years old and anticipating that she’d want to have children within a few years’ time, caught herself evaluating her job offers by comparing firms’ maternity policies.
“Then I realized that that mentality was exactly what Sheryl talks about. That was me leaving before I left,” Gulati wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. “And it was a totally ridiculous and short-sighted way of making the decision. I realized that I should grab onto the incredible opportunity, not the convenient one -- that's what a man would do.”
Gulati also maintains that Sandberg’s advocacy has helped women discuss issues of work-life balance in the workplace.
“Because she’s speaking about it so publicly, it makes it easier to have these conversations with your coworkers and your family, within Facebook and outside of Facebook,” Gulati said.
Even as the executives' personal success provides inspiration to other women, there's hope that Mayer and Sandberg will more actively move the focus beyond their own career paths to stress what companies can do to help their employees -- male and female -- "lean in." It's one thing to be a role model, but another to be actively petitioning and advocating for systemic change in the corporate landscape.
"For the woman who does want a seat at the table and wants to 'learn in,' Sandberg shows how she can do that more," said NY Tech Meetup executive director Jessica Lawrence. "The other part is that there is definitely a systemic problem as well ... It's not only about women changing their own behavior, but about society changing its behavior as well."
February 27, 2013
The Secret To Google Glass Success: Make It Seem Normal
How do you get millions of people to shell out hundreds of dollars for a device they don’t know how to use, have heard likened to the Terminator and would have to wear on their face?
That’s the question facing Google ahead of the launch of Project Glass, Google’s high-tech glasses that can snap photos, translate phrases and offer directions, all via a small glass cube suspended over the wearer’s right eye.
Though Glass isn’t slated for public release until later this year, Google is making an early version available for purchase to a limited group of people, who will be selected based on their answer to the prompt, “If I had Glass.”
With Glass, Google has pioneered an unprecedented approach to wearable technology and a novel way to access the Internet. But having negotiated the technical challenges of building Glass, Google now faces the task of convincing people to buy and wear the device. Google has to take a groundbreaking device born from its top-secret lab working on sci-fi feats -- and make it seem normal.
In a push to be sure Glass looks more like a status symbol and less like a science experiment when it makes its official debut, Google is expanding its definition of early adopter to include "real" people -- those outside the Silicon Valley scene -- to help acclimate the world to Glass. These recruits represent a strategic marketing push to teach the general public how and why to use Glass, and assure them they'll look just fine doing so.
"It’s not yet clear what message wearing Glass sends. Who adopts it early on is going to play a part in creating that image, which is why the early adopters are so important,” said Bryan Bollinger, a marketing professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. “If you’re using Glass, it’s right there in your face, so the message it says is really important. And right now, I don’t see what Google’s brand is besides being seen as a company that's proficient from a technical point of view.”
Because it’s worn prominently on people’s foreheads and offers an unusual style of screen, Glass’s ability to crack into the mainstream will depend on whether it can shift social, etiquette and style norms.
Thus far, the Glass “look” has alternately been described as “freakish,” “ridiculous” and “pretty goddamn nerdy.” Even Mark Zuckerberg, the ultimate reshaper of social norms, wondered if there might be something a bit off about wearing Glass. “How do you look out from this without looking awkward?” Zuckerberg asked Google co-founder Sergey Brin at an event earlier this month, according to Forbes.
Rather than letting traditional, tech-savvy early adopters alone define Glass, Google has launched a campaign that seems designed to put Glass in suburbs, subways and airplanes.
The company announced last week it was expanding its Glass Explorer Program in a search for “bold, creative individuals” -- a description that seems more germane to an exclusive social club -- to be among the first to try Glass. The “Explorers” selected for the program will be eligible to purchase the $1,500 glasses.
Judging from the scenarios highlighted in the teaser video for Glass, Google's “bold, creative individuals” might include skydivers, sculptors, parents, ballerinas, horseback riders, amateur pilots, adventurous travelers and runway models -- in short, cutting-edge members of the creative class. In keeping with Silicon Valley’s preference for showing hipster-types in ads, Google's official photos of Glass almost exclusively depict youthful models and men with scruffy chins wearing Glass, against Brooklyn-esque backdrops.
But Google is also expressly hoping to attract parents, business travelers and active outdoorsy types to Glass, said Google’s Steve Lee, director of Project Glass. He noted the company is eager to get the gadget into the hands of a broader range of people than the several thousand, mostly male techies who signed up for Glass at Google’s I/O developer conference last summer.
The editor overseeing The Huffington Post’s parenting section received a personal invitation from Google to get an “exclusive demo” of Glass. And Glass videos have shown parents using the glasses to snap pictures of their little ones or help kids video chat with distant relatives.
“Diversity is key,” a Google spokeswoman told The Huffington Post. “We’re set on getting a really diverse base of people who are going to take Glass out into the world to have a diverse range of experiences that we can’t anticipate in a conference room."
Google has seized opportunities to put Glass on the brows of the rich, beautiful and famous. Last year, Google put Glass front and center before the fashion world with help from designer Diane von Furstenberg, whose models strutted down the catwalk in the glasses during her fall fashion show. Yet the Explorer program suggests Google sees a limit to what can be accomplished with highly paid celebrity spokespeople -- like
But even if a carefully curated crowd of early adopters offer inspiration for how to use Glass, the ultimate test will be in how naturally people can use the device, observed Ideo design director Arvind Gupta. Bluetooth headsets and Apple earbuds both let people talk on the phone by speaking into the air, yet the former has had far more difficulty shedding its stigma, Gupta noted. The New York Times reported that Google planned to work with eyeglass makers, such as Warby Parker, to develop a range of frames for Glass, and Google has designed its glasses so that its key component -- the screen and the hardware powering it -- can easily snap onto other frames.
"The biggest key to Google Glass's success is not just how it looks, but whether you can control it in a way that doesn't make you look foolish or crazy," said Gupta. "It's not just about looking cool when you put it on. You also have to feel cool."
That’s the question facing Google ahead of the launch of Project Glass, Google’s high-tech glasses that can snap photos, translate phrases and offer directions, all via a small glass cube suspended over the wearer’s right eye.
Though Glass isn’t slated for public release until later this year, Google is making an early version available for purchase to a limited group of people, who will be selected based on their answer to the prompt, “If I had Glass.”
With Glass, Google has pioneered an unprecedented approach to wearable technology and a novel way to access the Internet. But having negotiated the technical challenges of building Glass, Google now faces the task of convincing people to buy and wear the device. Google has to take a groundbreaking device born from its top-secret lab working on sci-fi feats -- and make it seem normal.
In a push to be sure Glass looks more like a status symbol and less like a science experiment when it makes its official debut, Google is expanding its definition of early adopter to include "real" people -- those outside the Silicon Valley scene -- to help acclimate the world to Glass. These recruits represent a strategic marketing push to teach the general public how and why to use Glass, and assure them they'll look just fine doing so.
"It’s not yet clear what message wearing Glass sends. Who adopts it early on is going to play a part in creating that image, which is why the early adopters are so important,” said Bryan Bollinger, a marketing professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. “If you’re using Glass, it’s right there in your face, so the message it says is really important. And right now, I don’t see what Google’s brand is besides being seen as a company that's proficient from a technical point of view.”
Because it’s worn prominently on people’s foreheads and offers an unusual style of screen, Glass’s ability to crack into the mainstream will depend on whether it can shift social, etiquette and style norms.
Thus far, the Glass “look” has alternately been described as “freakish,” “ridiculous” and “pretty goddamn nerdy.” Even Mark Zuckerberg, the ultimate reshaper of social norms, wondered if there might be something a bit off about wearing Glass. “How do you look out from this without looking awkward?” Zuckerberg asked Google co-founder Sergey Brin at an event earlier this month, according to Forbes.
Rather than letting traditional, tech-savvy early adopters alone define Glass, Google has launched a campaign that seems designed to put Glass in suburbs, subways and airplanes.
The company announced last week it was expanding its Glass Explorer Program in a search for “bold, creative individuals” -- a description that seems more germane to an exclusive social club -- to be among the first to try Glass. The “Explorers” selected for the program will be eligible to purchase the $1,500 glasses.
Judging from the scenarios highlighted in the teaser video for Glass, Google's “bold, creative individuals” might include skydivers, sculptors, parents, ballerinas, horseback riders, amateur pilots, adventurous travelers and runway models -- in short, cutting-edge members of the creative class. In keeping with Silicon Valley’s preference for showing hipster-types in ads, Google's official photos of Glass almost exclusively depict youthful models and men with scruffy chins wearing Glass, against Brooklyn-esque backdrops.
But Google is also expressly hoping to attract parents, business travelers and active outdoorsy types to Glass, said Google’s Steve Lee, director of Project Glass. He noted the company is eager to get the gadget into the hands of a broader range of people than the several thousand, mostly male techies who signed up for Glass at Google’s I/O developer conference last summer.
The editor overseeing The Huffington Post’s parenting section received a personal invitation from Google to get an “exclusive demo” of Glass. And Glass videos have shown parents using the glasses to snap pictures of their little ones or help kids video chat with distant relatives.
“Diversity is key,” a Google spokeswoman told The Huffington Post. “We’re set on getting a really diverse base of people who are going to take Glass out into the world to have a diverse range of experiences that we can’t anticipate in a conference room."
Google has seized opportunities to put Glass on the brows of the rich, beautiful and famous. Last year, Google put Glass front and center before the fashion world with help from designer Diane von Furstenberg, whose models strutted down the catwalk in the glasses during her fall fashion show. Yet the Explorer program suggests Google sees a limit to what can be accomplished with highly paid celebrity spokespeople -- like
But even if a carefully curated crowd of early adopters offer inspiration for how to use Glass, the ultimate test will be in how naturally people can use the device, observed Ideo design director Arvind Gupta. Bluetooth headsets and Apple earbuds both let people talk on the phone by speaking into the air, yet the former has had far more difficulty shedding its stigma, Gupta noted. The New York Times reported that Google planned to work with eyeglass makers, such as Warby Parker, to develop a range of frames for Glass, and Google has designed its glasses so that its key component -- the screen and the hardware powering it -- can easily snap onto other frames.
"The biggest key to Google Glass's success is not just how it looks, but whether you can control it in a way that doesn't make you look foolish or crazy," said Gupta. "It's not just about looking cool when you put it on. You also have to feel cool."
Key To Google Glass Success: Make It Seem Normal
How do you get millions of people to shell out hundreds of dollars for a device they don’t know how to use, have heard likened to the Terminator and would have to wear on their face?
That’s the question facing Google ahead of the launch of Project Glass, Google’s high-tech glasses that can snap photos, translate phrases and offer directions, all via a small glass cube suspended over the wearer’s right eye.
Though Glass isn’t slated for public release until later this year, Google is making an early version available for purchase to a limited group of people, who will be selected based on their answer to the prompt, “If I had Glass.”
With Glass, Google has pioneered an unprecedented approach to wearable technology and a novel way to access the Internet. But having negotiated the technical challenges of building Glass, Google now faces the task of convincing people to buy and wear the device. Google has to take a groundbreaking device born from its top-secret lab working on sci-fi feats -- and make it seem normal.
In a push to be sure Glass looks more like a status symbol and less like a science experiment when it makes its official debut, Google is expanding its definition of early adopter to include "real" people -- those outside the Silicon Valley scene -- to help acclimate the world to Glass. These recruits represent a strategic marketing push to teach the general public how and why to use Glass, and assure them they'll look just fine doing so.
"It’s not yet clear what message wearing Glass sends. Who adopts it early on is going to play a part in creating that image, which is why the early adopters are so important,” said Bryan Bollinger, a marketing professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. “If you’re using Glass, it’s right there in your face, so the message it says is really important. And right now, I don’t see what Google’s brand is besides being seen as a company that's proficient from a technical point of view.”
Because it’s worn prominently on people’s foreheads and offers an unusual style of screen, Glass’s ability to crack into the mainstream will depend on whether it can shift social, etiquette and style norms.
Thus far, the Glass “look” has alternately been described as “freakish,” “ridiculous” and “pretty goddamn nerdy.” Even Mark Zuckerberg, the ultimate reshaper of social norms, wondered if there might be something a bit off about wearing Glass. “How do you look out from this without looking awkward?” Zuckerberg asked Google co-founder Sergey Brin at an event earlier this month, according to Forbes.
Rather than letting traditional, tech-savvy early adopters alone define Glass, Google has launched a campaign that seems designed to put Glass in suburbs, subways and airplanes.
The company announced last week it was expanding its Glass Explorer Program in a search for “bold, creative individuals” -- a description that seems more germane to an exclusive social club -- to be among the first to try Glass. The “Explorers” selected for the program will be eligible to purchase the $1,500 glasses.
Judging from the scenarios highlighted in the teaser video for Glass, Google's “bold, creative individuals” might include skydivers, sculptors, parents, ballerinas, horseback riders, amateur pilots, adventurous travelers and runway models -- in short, cutting-edge members of the creative class. In keeping with Silicon Valley’s preference for showing hipster-types in ads, Google's official photos of Glass almost exclusively depict youthful models and men with scruffy chins wearing Glass, against Brooklyn-esque backdrops.
But Google is also expressly hoping to attract parents, business travelers and active outdoorsy types to Glass, said Google’s Steve Lee, director of Project Glass. He noted the company is eager to get the gadget into the hands of a broader range of people than the several thousand, mostly male techies who signed up for Glass at Google’s I/O developer conference last summer.
The editor overseeing The Huffington Post’s parenting section received a personal invitation from Google to get an “exclusive demo” of Glass. And Glass videos have shown parents using the glasses to snap pictures of their little ones or help kids video chat with distant relatives.
“Diversity is key,” a Google spokeswoman told The Huffington Post. “We’re set on getting a really diverse base of people who are going to take Glass out into the world to have a diverse range of experiences that we can’t anticipate in a conference room."
Google has seized opportunities to put Glass on the brows of the rich, beautiful and famous. Last year, Google put Glass front and center before the fashion world with help from designer Diane von Furstenberg, whose models strutted down the catwalk in the glasses during her fall fashion show. Yet the Explorer program suggests Google sees a limit to what can be accomplished with highly paid celebrity spokespeople -- like
But even if a carefully curated crowd of early adopters offer inspiration for how to use Glass, the ultimate test will be in how naturally people can use the device, observed Ideo design director Arvind Gupta. Bluetooth headsets and Apple earbuds both let people talk on the phone by speaking into the air, yet the former has had far more difficulty shedding its stigma, Gupta noted. The New York Times reported that Google planned to work with eyeglass makers, such as Warby Parker, to develop a range of frames for Glass, and Google has designed its glasses so that its key component -- the screen and the hardware powering it -- can easily snap onto other frames.
"The biggest key to Google Glass's success is not just how it looks, but whether you can control it in a way that doesn't make you look foolish or crazy," said Gupta. "It's not just about looking cool when you put it on. You also have to feel cool."
That’s the question facing Google ahead of the launch of Project Glass, Google’s high-tech glasses that can snap photos, translate phrases and offer directions, all via a small glass cube suspended over the wearer’s right eye.
Though Glass isn’t slated for public release until later this year, Google is making an early version available for purchase to a limited group of people, who will be selected based on their answer to the prompt, “If I had Glass.”
With Glass, Google has pioneered an unprecedented approach to wearable technology and a novel way to access the Internet. But having negotiated the technical challenges of building Glass, Google now faces the task of convincing people to buy and wear the device. Google has to take a groundbreaking device born from its top-secret lab working on sci-fi feats -- and make it seem normal.
In a push to be sure Glass looks more like a status symbol and less like a science experiment when it makes its official debut, Google is expanding its definition of early adopter to include "real" people -- those outside the Silicon Valley scene -- to help acclimate the world to Glass. These recruits represent a strategic marketing push to teach the general public how and why to use Glass, and assure them they'll look just fine doing so.
"It’s not yet clear what message wearing Glass sends. Who adopts it early on is going to play a part in creating that image, which is why the early adopters are so important,” said Bryan Bollinger, a marketing professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. “If you’re using Glass, it’s right there in your face, so the message it says is really important. And right now, I don’t see what Google’s brand is besides being seen as a company that's proficient from a technical point of view.”
Because it’s worn prominently on people’s foreheads and offers an unusual style of screen, Glass’s ability to crack into the mainstream will depend on whether it can shift social, etiquette and style norms.
Thus far, the Glass “look” has alternately been described as “freakish,” “ridiculous” and “pretty goddamn nerdy.” Even Mark Zuckerberg, the ultimate reshaper of social norms, wondered if there might be something a bit off about wearing Glass. “How do you look out from this without looking awkward?” Zuckerberg asked Google co-founder Sergey Brin at an event earlier this month, according to Forbes.
Rather than letting traditional, tech-savvy early adopters alone define Glass, Google has launched a campaign that seems designed to put Glass in suburbs, subways and airplanes.
The company announced last week it was expanding its Glass Explorer Program in a search for “bold, creative individuals” -- a description that seems more germane to an exclusive social club -- to be among the first to try Glass. The “Explorers” selected for the program will be eligible to purchase the $1,500 glasses.
Judging from the scenarios highlighted in the teaser video for Glass, Google's “bold, creative individuals” might include skydivers, sculptors, parents, ballerinas, horseback riders, amateur pilots, adventurous travelers and runway models -- in short, cutting-edge members of the creative class. In keeping with Silicon Valley’s preference for showing hipster-types in ads, Google's official photos of Glass almost exclusively depict youthful models and men with scruffy chins wearing Glass, against Brooklyn-esque backdrops.
But Google is also expressly hoping to attract parents, business travelers and active outdoorsy types to Glass, said Google’s Steve Lee, director of Project Glass. He noted the company is eager to get the gadget into the hands of a broader range of people than the several thousand, mostly male techies who signed up for Glass at Google’s I/O developer conference last summer.
The editor overseeing The Huffington Post’s parenting section received a personal invitation from Google to get an “exclusive demo” of Glass. And Glass videos have shown parents using the glasses to snap pictures of their little ones or help kids video chat with distant relatives.
“Diversity is key,” a Google spokeswoman told The Huffington Post. “We’re set on getting a really diverse base of people who are going to take Glass out into the world to have a diverse range of experiences that we can’t anticipate in a conference room."
Google has seized opportunities to put Glass on the brows of the rich, beautiful and famous. Last year, Google put Glass front and center before the fashion world with help from designer Diane von Furstenberg, whose models strutted down the catwalk in the glasses during her fall fashion show. Yet the Explorer program suggests Google sees a limit to what can be accomplished with highly paid celebrity spokespeople -- like
But even if a carefully curated crowd of early adopters offer inspiration for how to use Glass, the ultimate test will be in how naturally people can use the device, observed Ideo design director Arvind Gupta. Bluetooth headsets and Apple earbuds both let people talk on the phone by speaking into the air, yet the former has had far more difficulty shedding its stigma, Gupta noted. The New York Times reported that Google planned to work with eyeglass makers, such as Warby Parker, to develop a range of frames for Glass, and Google has designed its glasses so that its key component -- the screen and the hardware powering it -- can easily snap onto other frames.
"The biggest key to Google Glass's success is not just how it looks, but whether you can control it in a way that doesn't make you look foolish or crazy," said Gupta. "It's not just about looking cool when you put it on. You also have to feel cool."
February 23, 2013
Cyborg Neil Harbisson On Life With Extra Senses
Neil Harbisson is a cyborg.
Protruding from his skull is an electronic eye that allows Harbisson, a 30-year-old who was born color-blind, to listen to color. For the past 10 years, the cybernetic device, which Harbisson calls his “antenna,” has converted light into higher or lower-pitched tones that Harbisson hears through bone conduction.
In a 2012 TED talk, Harbisson explained that going to an art gallery is like going to a concert and he looks at food in a whole new way: "Now I can display the food on a plate, so I can eat my favorite song."
Harbisson, an artist and co-founder of the Cyborg Foundation, argues that technology can endow humans with an endless number of new senses and abilities that expand what they feel and, consequently, what they know about the world. While some speculate about the possibility of a sixth sense, Harbisson dreams of helping us attain a 13th or a 14th sense.
“We don’t depend on natural evolution anymore,” Harbisson explained. “We can evolve during our lifetime and we can evolve in the way we wish.”
For HuffPost's "Life As" series, Harbisson discussed whether Google Glass will make cyborgs of us all, the “end of using our hands” and why he wants to light up his mouth.
What makes someone a cyborg?
To me, being a cyborg is defined by the feeling that a cybernetic device is no longer a device, but part of the body. When I first started using the electronic eye, I didn’t feel like cyborg. It was only once I had the sense there was no difference between the software and my brain did I feel like a cyborg.
When people say tech is distracting us, it’s because we’re using it now as a tool, not as a part of our body.
How do you see people’s senses and abilities being transformed by technology?
We should find inspiration in the senses that already exist and try to copy them and apply them to us. If we compare our senses to the senses of other animals and species that we don’t have, we can get ideas for new abilities that we can adapt to humans by applying cybernetics to the body.
I can perceive ultraviolet, which is a color many birds and insects already perceive. And I can hear through bone conduction, which dolphins already do. We could acquire senses that let us perceive where north is, like sharks, or improve our sense of smell, just like a dog’s.
Do you consider Google Glass a form of cybernetics that’s helping to bring the cyborg movement to the masses?
Google Glass will extend our abilities, but I’m not sure it will extend our senses. I’m also not sure whether Glass will block our vision or enhance our sense of sight.
When I got my electric eye, one of the things I didn’t want to do was to block a sense. So instead of blocking my ability to hear, I decided to hear colors through bone conduction, which was an entirely new sense for me.
Why should we pursue cybernetics and cyborgism?
If we extend our senses, then, consequently, we will extend our knowledge.
It’s really very basic. If we could all perceive reality at the level of other animal species, then I’m sure we’d learn so much because knowledge comes from our senses.
What does a cyborg future look like? What will this technology look like in five or 10 years’ time?
I think it’ll mean the end of using our hands. It’s really not practical to walk around with mobile devices we use with our hands and fingers. In five or 10 years’ time, when it’s normal not to use our fingers, we’ll start accepting the use of technology as a permanent part of the body and we’ll stop using it as a tool.
I think the next real change will come when we can have software in our genes and we can modify ourselves by changing our genes.
What developments in the world of cybernetics are you most excited about?
We receive many emails from children who say they want to become cyborgs. These kids tell us about the robots they’re creating and the senses they’re giving their robots, and I know how interested they are in incorporating those senses into their own bodies, not a robot’s.
It’s strange that we create tech and then we apply it to machines, when we could apply it to ourselves. Cars can now detect if something is behind them, but we don’t have this ability. Why are we applying such a simple sense to a car when we could apply it to ourselves? Kids are really inspired to not just apply senses to robots and machines, but to try them on themselves.
What concerns you most about the cyborg movement?
It would be good to have cyborg hospitals. Right now, there isn’t enough collaboration between computer scientists, psychologists, neurologists and doctors. In my case, if I can’t perceive a color well, I don’t really know where I should go. Should I go see an optician? An otolaryngologist? A software developer?
What do you enjoy most about being a cyborg?
The sense that there’s never an end. There are no limits.
I had this feeling that I would never perceive color and now I feel I can perceive as much color as I wish and more that I ever could have perceived. It’s exciting to know there are other senses I can continue to extend.
What’s next?
My next step is not only to continue extending my color perception and also to extend my hearing through bone conduction.
I’d even like to do something simple like having a light in my mouth. If one of my teeth fell out, I feel like it’d be useless to have it replaced with a normal tooth when I could have an artificial tooth with light in it.
So you could just open up your mouth to read at night?
Yes, exactly. But I’d need to think of a way of turning it on and off because when I eat, I don’t want to have light going on and off in my mouth.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Protruding from his skull is an electronic eye that allows Harbisson, a 30-year-old who was born color-blind, to listen to color. For the past 10 years, the cybernetic device, which Harbisson calls his “antenna,” has converted light into higher or lower-pitched tones that Harbisson hears through bone conduction.
In a 2012 TED talk, Harbisson explained that going to an art gallery is like going to a concert and he looks at food in a whole new way: "Now I can display the food on a plate, so I can eat my favorite song."
Harbisson, an artist and co-founder of the Cyborg Foundation, argues that technology can endow humans with an endless number of new senses and abilities that expand what they feel and, consequently, what they know about the world. While some speculate about the possibility of a sixth sense, Harbisson dreams of helping us attain a 13th or a 14th sense.
“We don’t depend on natural evolution anymore,” Harbisson explained. “We can evolve during our lifetime and we can evolve in the way we wish.”
For HuffPost's "Life As" series, Harbisson discussed whether Google Glass will make cyborgs of us all, the “end of using our hands” and why he wants to light up his mouth.
What makes someone a cyborg?
To me, being a cyborg is defined by the feeling that a cybernetic device is no longer a device, but part of the body. When I first started using the electronic eye, I didn’t feel like cyborg. It was only once I had the sense there was no difference between the software and my brain did I feel like a cyborg.
When people say tech is distracting us, it’s because we’re using it now as a tool, not as a part of our body.
How do you see people’s senses and abilities being transformed by technology?
We should find inspiration in the senses that already exist and try to copy them and apply them to us. If we compare our senses to the senses of other animals and species that we don’t have, we can get ideas for new abilities that we can adapt to humans by applying cybernetics to the body.
I can perceive ultraviolet, which is a color many birds and insects already perceive. And I can hear through bone conduction, which dolphins already do. We could acquire senses that let us perceive where north is, like sharks, or improve our sense of smell, just like a dog’s.
Do you consider Google Glass a form of cybernetics that’s helping to bring the cyborg movement to the masses?
Google Glass will extend our abilities, but I’m not sure it will extend our senses. I’m also not sure whether Glass will block our vision or enhance our sense of sight.
When I got my electric eye, one of the things I didn’t want to do was to block a sense. So instead of blocking my ability to hear, I decided to hear colors through bone conduction, which was an entirely new sense for me.
Why should we pursue cybernetics and cyborgism?
If we extend our senses, then, consequently, we will extend our knowledge.
It’s really very basic. If we could all perceive reality at the level of other animal species, then I’m sure we’d learn so much because knowledge comes from our senses.
What does a cyborg future look like? What will this technology look like in five or 10 years’ time?
I think it’ll mean the end of using our hands. It’s really not practical to walk around with mobile devices we use with our hands and fingers. In five or 10 years’ time, when it’s normal not to use our fingers, we’ll start accepting the use of technology as a permanent part of the body and we’ll stop using it as a tool.
I think the next real change will come when we can have software in our genes and we can modify ourselves by changing our genes.
What developments in the world of cybernetics are you most excited about?
We receive many emails from children who say they want to become cyborgs. These kids tell us about the robots they’re creating and the senses they’re giving their robots, and I know how interested they are in incorporating those senses into their own bodies, not a robot’s.
It’s strange that we create tech and then we apply it to machines, when we could apply it to ourselves. Cars can now detect if something is behind them, but we don’t have this ability. Why are we applying such a simple sense to a car when we could apply it to ourselves? Kids are really inspired to not just apply senses to robots and machines, but to try them on themselves.
What concerns you most about the cyborg movement?
It would be good to have cyborg hospitals. Right now, there isn’t enough collaboration between computer scientists, psychologists, neurologists and doctors. In my case, if I can’t perceive a color well, I don’t really know where I should go. Should I go see an optician? An otolaryngologist? A software developer?
What do you enjoy most about being a cyborg?
The sense that there’s never an end. There are no limits.
I had this feeling that I would never perceive color and now I feel I can perceive as much color as I wish and more that I ever could have perceived. It’s exciting to know there are other senses I can continue to extend.
What’s next?
My next step is not only to continue extending my color perception and also to extend my hearing through bone conduction.
I’d even like to do something simple like having a light in my mouth. If one of my teeth fell out, I feel like it’d be useless to have it replaced with a normal tooth when I could have an artificial tooth with light in it.
So you could just open up your mouth to read at night?
Yes, exactly. But I’d need to think of a way of turning it on and off because when I eat, I don’t want to have light going on and off in my mouth.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
February 21, 2013
Social Media for Your Social Afterlife
In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test to measure the intelligence of machines, one that's still in use today. If a human couldn't distinguish a computer from a human in a text-based conversation, Turing theorized, the machine could be said to be "thinking."
Now consider this: What if you couldn't distinguish your own words from a machine pretending to be you? Would you let a machine do your thinking? And your socializing?
These questions aren't as hypothetical as they might seem.
LivesOn, a social media service-cum-publicity stunt, is using artificial intelligence to mimic individuals' Twitter activity in order to help people keep socializing online -- even once they're six feet under.
"When your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting" reads the tagline for LivesOn, which promises to maintain your "social afterlife."
The brainchild of London advertising agency Lean Mean Fighting Machine, LivesOn promises to learn your "likes, tastes, syntax" on Twitter; compose tweets and post retweets that replicate the pattern of your own; then post those messages from your account after you've kicked the bucket. The service, which is being developed with Queen Mary, University of London, has not yet launched, though already several thousand potential users have registered their interest.
"There's so much data and information people are posting and sharing about themselves ... And we thought, 'What is this going to mean for us, as a species, in evolutionary terms? What constitutes you? And what will constitute you in the future?'" said Lean Mean Fighting Machine creative partner Dave Bedwood of the inspiration for LivesOn. "This could be an early version of the Matrix."
As absurd as the concept may sound, LivesOn takes current trends in social media to their logical extreme.
Technology has already enabled us to transcend the boundaries of time and space to socialize, virtually, with people who aren't with us, physically. We carry our extended social circles with us wherever we go, so that while at dinner with a date, we can simultaneously mingle with hundreds of other people and, just by tapping Instagram or Twitter's real time feed of photos and posts, share in thousands of other moments taking place right at that instant.
As cyborg anthropologist Amber Case argued in a 2010 TED Talk, while other technology enhanced our physical abilities, online social networks have allowed for the "extension of the mental self," and endowed us each with a "second self" that's always up to hang out with someone online. "Whether you like it or not," Case explained, "you're starting to show up online, and people are interacting with your second self when you're not there."
Already, when it comes to engaging with others online, our presence is optional. Our consciousness -- and pulse -- could be unnecessary soon, too.
Bedwood hopes that "as years go by, your LivesOn will become almost like an online twin." We may not be able to live forever (though people in Silicon Valley are also working to remedy that), but we could keep up the appearance of immortality online, as author Nicholas Carr noted in a blog post on LivesOn. We take it for granted that information lives forever online. As LivesOn goes to show, people can live forever online, too.
Carr, who compares LivesOn to a "simulated Singularity," observes:
Facebook, always on the bleeding edge of social norms, is already digitally resuscitating the dead, often in ways people find ghoulish or creepy. A colleague recently complained that she saw her deceased friend appear on the margins of her News Feed for having "liked" a brand that was advertising on the site. The social network made it appear as if he was still active on the site.
With its frictionless sharing and auto-posting apps, Facebook has also automated some of our posting on our behalf, letting us stay active on the site even when we're not on the social network (or, put another way, ensuring we can be social at all times, even when we're not socializing). Twitter users needn't despair: Bedwood said that the living could use his company's service to keep up their patter online.
And it seems people are quite content to carry on conversations with artificially intelligent approximations of ourselves. People are getting seduced by spambots, as the Tumblr "Okc_ebooks" goes to show. The blog features instant message exchanges with male online daters on OkCupid who, unbeknownst to them, were corresponding with Horse_ebooks, a Twitter bot that spews gibberish culled from ebooks. Though some of the men suspected there was something a bit off about their conversation partner, others flirted back. "Are you a poet?" one asked. Another went straight for, "yeah so wanna get f**ked?"
Will we like our automated alter-egos better than we like ourselves? Twitter, Facebook and Instagram could end up as social networks for our AI identities, with bots chatting to bots, liking each others' tweets and becoming best online friends on our behalf. Maybe that lets us focus on our dinner dates. Or maybe we'll find companionship with the algorithms.
Now consider this: What if you couldn't distinguish your own words from a machine pretending to be you? Would you let a machine do your thinking? And your socializing?
These questions aren't as hypothetical as they might seem.
LivesOn, a social media service-cum-publicity stunt, is using artificial intelligence to mimic individuals' Twitter activity in order to help people keep socializing online -- even once they're six feet under.
"When your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting" reads the tagline for LivesOn, which promises to maintain your "social afterlife."
The brainchild of London advertising agency Lean Mean Fighting Machine, LivesOn promises to learn your "likes, tastes, syntax" on Twitter; compose tweets and post retweets that replicate the pattern of your own; then post those messages from your account after you've kicked the bucket. The service, which is being developed with Queen Mary, University of London, has not yet launched, though already several thousand potential users have registered their interest.
"There's so much data and information people are posting and sharing about themselves ... And we thought, 'What is this going to mean for us, as a species, in evolutionary terms? What constitutes you? And what will constitute you in the future?'" said Lean Mean Fighting Machine creative partner Dave Bedwood of the inspiration for LivesOn. "This could be an early version of the Matrix."
As absurd as the concept may sound, LivesOn takes current trends in social media to their logical extreme.
Technology has already enabled us to transcend the boundaries of time and space to socialize, virtually, with people who aren't with us, physically. We carry our extended social circles with us wherever we go, so that while at dinner with a date, we can simultaneously mingle with hundreds of other people and, just by tapping Instagram or Twitter's real time feed of photos and posts, share in thousands of other moments taking place right at that instant.
As cyborg anthropologist Amber Case argued in a 2010 TED Talk, while other technology enhanced our physical abilities, online social networks have allowed for the "extension of the mental self," and endowed us each with a "second self" that's always up to hang out with someone online. "Whether you like it or not," Case explained, "you're starting to show up online, and people are interacting with your second self when you're not there."
Already, when it comes to engaging with others online, our presence is optional. Our consciousness -- and pulse -- could be unnecessary soon, too.
Bedwood hopes that "as years go by, your LivesOn will become almost like an online twin." We may not be able to live forever (though people in Silicon Valley are also working to remedy that), but we could keep up the appearance of immortality online, as author Nicholas Carr noted in a blog post on LivesOn. We take it for granted that information lives forever online. As LivesOn goes to show, people can live forever online, too.
Carr, who compares LivesOn to a "simulated Singularity," observes:
As more and more of our earthly self comes to be defined by our online profiles and postings, our digital garb, then it becomes a relatively easy task for a computer to replicate that self, dynamically and without interruption, after we're gone. As long as you keep posting, liking, and tweeting, spewing links to funny GIFs and trenchant longform texts, circulating the occasional, digitally fabricated instagram photo or vine video, your friends and acquaintances will never need know that your body has shuffled off the stage. For all social intents and purposes -- and what other intents and purposes are there? -- you'll live forever. I update, therefore I am.
Facebook, always on the bleeding edge of social norms, is already digitally resuscitating the dead, often in ways people find ghoulish or creepy. A colleague recently complained that she saw her deceased friend appear on the margins of her News Feed for having "liked" a brand that was advertising on the site. The social network made it appear as if he was still active on the site.
With its frictionless sharing and auto-posting apps, Facebook has also automated some of our posting on our behalf, letting us stay active on the site even when we're not on the social network (or, put another way, ensuring we can be social at all times, even when we're not socializing). Twitter users needn't despair: Bedwood said that the living could use his company's service to keep up their patter online.
And it seems people are quite content to carry on conversations with artificially intelligent approximations of ourselves. People are getting seduced by spambots, as the Tumblr "Okc_ebooks" goes to show. The blog features instant message exchanges with male online daters on OkCupid who, unbeknownst to them, were corresponding with Horse_ebooks, a Twitter bot that spews gibberish culled from ebooks. Though some of the men suspected there was something a bit off about their conversation partner, others flirted back. "Are you a poet?" one asked. Another went straight for, "yeah so wanna get f**ked?"
Will we like our automated alter-egos better than we like ourselves? Twitter, Facebook and Instagram could end up as social networks for our AI identities, with bots chatting to bots, liking each others' tweets and becoming best online friends on our behalf. Maybe that lets us focus on our dinner dates. Or maybe we'll find companionship with the algorithms.
February 20, 2013
Google Glass Video Shows Off Translating, Directing, Photographing Alter-Brain
Google has released its second teaser video for Google Glass, the company's futuristic augmented reality specs that may be slated for release later this year. While the first video tracked a New Yorker's mundane errands through the city, the new clip is a dizzying, high-octane view of Glass's functionality -- as seen by skydivers, equestrians, catwalking fashion-mavens and ballerinas.
In tandem with the video's release, Google announced it's seeking to expand its initial Glass test group beyond tech-world early adopters to include "bold, creative individuals" (a phrase that could have been lifted directly from a list of SoHo House's membership criteria...)
The clip is intended to show "how it feels" to wear Google Glass, which appears in the wearer's field of view as a small suspended screen that can show images, messages, translations, mapping information and video chats with people who aren't present. Google demonstrates how users can use the glasses to share what they're doing by snapping photos, recording video or broadcasting a live video feed of what's in front of their face. People can also speak messages that the device can send.
But Glass also seems poised to make good on Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page's vision of a Google that makes users smarter. "Imagine your brain being augmented by Google," Page said in a 2004 interview. We no longer have to imagine it: Google has a video showing what that looks like in action.
Though it remains to be seen how useful Glass will be for everyday use, Google demonstrates how Glass can instantly summon -- and supplement -- what you don't know. One character in the video uses Glass to translate a phrase into Thai. Another uses Glass to look up facts about a jellyfish, and another uses Glass to get directions while biking.
There's one thing Google doesn't showcase, however: what people look like wearing Google Glass. In both the video and the picture-heavy page highlighting Glass's capabilities, people wearing the device are conspicuously absent (aside from two very brief, very blurry and very not close-up glimpses of a skydiver and trapeze artist wearing the spectacles). The device may be practical, intuitive and even beautiful as an object, but getting people to actually wear Glass on their faces, day-to-day, requires shifting some fashion norms.
The glasses themselves might not be elegant just yet, but Glass' logo is. The lettering looks more Philippe Starck than Silicon Valley and seems to underscore the growing sense that Apple is losing its monopoly on slick design.
In tandem with the video's release, Google announced it's seeking to expand its initial Glass test group beyond tech-world early adopters to include "bold, creative individuals" (a phrase that could have been lifted directly from a list of SoHo House's membership criteria...)
The clip is intended to show "how it feels" to wear Google Glass, which appears in the wearer's field of view as a small suspended screen that can show images, messages, translations, mapping information and video chats with people who aren't present. Google demonstrates how users can use the glasses to share what they're doing by snapping photos, recording video or broadcasting a live video feed of what's in front of their face. People can also speak messages that the device can send.
But Glass also seems poised to make good on Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page's vision of a Google that makes users smarter. "Imagine your brain being augmented by Google," Page said in a 2004 interview. We no longer have to imagine it: Google has a video showing what that looks like in action.
Though it remains to be seen how useful Glass will be for everyday use, Google demonstrates how Glass can instantly summon -- and supplement -- what you don't know. One character in the video uses Glass to translate a phrase into Thai. Another uses Glass to look up facts about a jellyfish, and another uses Glass to get directions while biking.
There's one thing Google doesn't showcase, however: what people look like wearing Google Glass. In both the video and the picture-heavy page highlighting Glass's capabilities, people wearing the device are conspicuously absent (aside from two very brief, very blurry and very not close-up glimpses of a skydiver and trapeze artist wearing the spectacles). The device may be practical, intuitive and even beautiful as an object, but getting people to actually wear Glass on their faces, day-to-day, requires shifting some fashion norms.
The glasses themselves might not be elegant just yet, but Glass' logo is. The lettering looks more Philippe Starck than Silicon Valley and seems to underscore the growing sense that Apple is losing its monopoly on slick design.
February 18, 2013
Life As A Tech Reporter In The 1970s, At The Dawn Of The PC Age
Victor McElheny was The New York Times' go-to tech reporter in the 1970s, a decade marked by a series of tech-world firsts that moved computing beyond labs and into homes, including the release of Apple's first computer, the introduction of the digital camera and the debut of the Altair computer.
For our "Life As" series, McElheny talked about being a tech journalist at the dawn of the PC era.
The New York Times hired you in 1973 to be one of just two or three writers covering tech at the paper. What did your job entail?
In 1976, The New York Times restarted a column called "Technology." They had had such a column once before in the 1930s; then it had lapsed, and they had sought for years and years to have such a person write the column. In fact, they had hired two to three people in succession under the notion that this person would be the New York Times tech reporter, and I think two or three people in succession signed on, but immediately contrived to escape from covering tech and do other things. The paper hired me in 1973 to be a technology reporter, and I actually did it. I was their principal technology reporter for five years, and I was the second person to write their "Technology" column.
What did you cover as part of the technology beat?
The New York Times didn't have a totally clear idea of what they meant by "technology." They just wanted the other things besides what science covered. The New York Times just thought that you had all these machines -- whether it was copiers or computers or the telephone system -- that you put under the broad label "technology." But that word refers to a combination of skills and insights and devices and systems.
In a sense, what I was trying to do during that five-year period was teach the paper what "technology" meant. It's not just the latest copier, it's the electric power system. It's not just the subways, it's the sewage system. I covered Apple, and I covered Kodak's introduction of the digital camera. I profiled Andrew Grove, who later became CEO of Intel. I was writing about experiments with cell phones in Jersey City and also doing stories about Chinese agriculture and the anniversary of the mechanical cotton picker.
New technology always seems to elicit new phobias and fears. Now, we worry about privacy, dwindling attention spans and whether Facebook is making us lonely. What were people's biggest tech fears in the 1970s?
I think people felt that they were being pushed around by all these new capabilities and made to feel inadequate a lot of the time. When some new stuff comes along, whether it's 1760 or today, new stuff means new skills. It's new stuff someone else may know more about than you or a new machine in the office that you have to learn to use.
The big thing that bothered everyone in the '70s were copiers because they were always crapping out. And you were always in a hurry because someone needed the copies you were making. You felt like a klutz a lot of the time.
What was it like covering Apple as the company was just starting out?
I was invited to witness a demonstration of the Apple II, which Mike Markkula, who was then the chairman of Apple, demonstrated to me at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1977. The top PR man in Silicon Valley, Regis McKenna, had arranged this demonstration. It was amazing because there were peripherals -- a printer and some devices for reading some kind of memory disk -- all over that hotel room and connected to the Apple II to show its potential as a word processor as well as a calculating machine. I was thrilled. I absolutely loved it.
You've seen a lot of technologies hyped, launch, then fail. What do you see as overhyped now?
The obvious answer is social media. There's a lot of practical usefulness to social media, but at the same time there's an enormous amount of hype about this, and people get tired of that. There is a realistic maximum you can spend on social media. There are the classic things that human beings do that people have to leave space for. You can't run life on gossip. You have to make useful things. Whether you apply yourself to writing a speech or hammering away at something, you can't be texting while you're doing that.
What was the most memorable thing you covered as part of your beat?
The most dramatic moment took place around 9:30 p.m. on the evening of July 13, 1977, when I was in my apartment in Brooklyn looking across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, and the lights start going out in Manhattan as well as in my own apartment. That was the blackout of 1977, and it was certainly the most dramatic moment of my career as a technology reporter at The New York Times. [My story on that] was the most important thing in the paper. And usually my stuff was not the most important thing in the paper.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Check out more interviews in our "Life As" series, which features unsung figures in tech, here.
For our "Life As" series, McElheny talked about being a tech journalist at the dawn of the PC era.
The New York Times hired you in 1973 to be one of just two or three writers covering tech at the paper. What did your job entail?
In 1976, The New York Times restarted a column called "Technology." They had had such a column once before in the 1930s; then it had lapsed, and they had sought for years and years to have such a person write the column. In fact, they had hired two to three people in succession under the notion that this person would be the New York Times tech reporter, and I think two or three people in succession signed on, but immediately contrived to escape from covering tech and do other things. The paper hired me in 1973 to be a technology reporter, and I actually did it. I was their principal technology reporter for five years, and I was the second person to write their "Technology" column.
What did you cover as part of the technology beat?
The New York Times didn't have a totally clear idea of what they meant by "technology." They just wanted the other things besides what science covered. The New York Times just thought that you had all these machines -- whether it was copiers or computers or the telephone system -- that you put under the broad label "technology." But that word refers to a combination of skills and insights and devices and systems.
In a sense, what I was trying to do during that five-year period was teach the paper what "technology" meant. It's not just the latest copier, it's the electric power system. It's not just the subways, it's the sewage system. I covered Apple, and I covered Kodak's introduction of the digital camera. I profiled Andrew Grove, who later became CEO of Intel. I was writing about experiments with cell phones in Jersey City and also doing stories about Chinese agriculture and the anniversary of the mechanical cotton picker.
New technology always seems to elicit new phobias and fears. Now, we worry about privacy, dwindling attention spans and whether Facebook is making us lonely. What were people's biggest tech fears in the 1970s?
I think people felt that they were being pushed around by all these new capabilities and made to feel inadequate a lot of the time. When some new stuff comes along, whether it's 1760 or today, new stuff means new skills. It's new stuff someone else may know more about than you or a new machine in the office that you have to learn to use.
The big thing that bothered everyone in the '70s were copiers because they were always crapping out. And you were always in a hurry because someone needed the copies you were making. You felt like a klutz a lot of the time.
What was it like covering Apple as the company was just starting out?
I was invited to witness a demonstration of the Apple II, which Mike Markkula, who was then the chairman of Apple, demonstrated to me at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1977. The top PR man in Silicon Valley, Regis McKenna, had arranged this demonstration. It was amazing because there were peripherals -- a printer and some devices for reading some kind of memory disk -- all over that hotel room and connected to the Apple II to show its potential as a word processor as well as a calculating machine. I was thrilled. I absolutely loved it.
You've seen a lot of technologies hyped, launch, then fail. What do you see as overhyped now?
The obvious answer is social media. There's a lot of practical usefulness to social media, but at the same time there's an enormous amount of hype about this, and people get tired of that. There is a realistic maximum you can spend on social media. There are the classic things that human beings do that people have to leave space for. You can't run life on gossip. You have to make useful things. Whether you apply yourself to writing a speech or hammering away at something, you can't be texting while you're doing that.
What was the most memorable thing you covered as part of your beat?
The most dramatic moment took place around 9:30 p.m. on the evening of July 13, 1977, when I was in my apartment in Brooklyn looking across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, and the lights start going out in Manhattan as well as in my own apartment. That was the blackout of 1977, and it was certainly the most dramatic moment of my career as a technology reporter at The New York Times. [My story on that] was the most important thing in the paper. And usually my stuff was not the most important thing in the paper.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Check out more interviews in our "Life As" series, which features unsung figures in tech, here.
February 15, 2013
Tesla, The New York Times And The Truth About 'Truth' In Data
Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The fierce dispute between The New York Times and the CEO of Tesla Motors over the merits of its electric car is remarkable for what it says about how we argue in a time of seemingly limitless information.
Tesla co-founder Elon Musk and New York Times writer John Broder are not arguing over interpretations or subjective characterization about the experience of the new car. Rather, they are arguing over basic facts -- things that are supposed to be easily established in an age when cameras, sensors and instantly searchable databases are ubiquitous.
After Broder wrote a critical review of Tesla's Model S, Musk declared the article a "fake" and promised data from the vehicle's logs would "tell [the] true story" about the mischaracterized mishaps on Broder's route.
But since then, Musk and Broder have each produced their own measurements, taken from the car and reporter's notebook, respectively, and still no "true story" has emerged. The conflicting accounts -- both quantified, both recorded in detail -- are as much a lesson in the perils of drawing conclusions from high-tech tracking as they are a guide to the optimal conditions for electric cars.
Data is supposed to be the authoritative alternative to selective anecdotal recollection, though more data seems in some cases to only make our disagreements more heated, with every party able to marshal a seemingly stronger and tailored case. In Tesla-gate, Big Data hasn't made good on its promise to deliver a Big Truth. It's only fueled a Big Fight.
The problem is that the data shows what happened, but not why, argued David Weinberger, author of Too Big to Know and a senior researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. While the stats and facts capture what occurred inside the car, they tell us precious little about the people who made those things happen and why they behaved the way they did.
Observers aren't interested in the Tesla tiff because they care deeply about whether Broder turned down the heat when he said he did, or set cruise control when he claims, explained Weinberger. Rather, the data is useful to us only as it helps us shape a clear narrative from the data -- the story of the smug CEO attacking an innocent journalist, or the tale of the corrupt reporter trying to take down an innocent entrepreneur. Yet hard numbers capture action, not intention, and the conflicting accounts offer no more insight into the "true story" onlookers want to assemble.
"The only reason we care about the data is because it fits into a story that was interesting for reasons that have nothing to do with the data itself," Weinberger said. "We're not trying to understand the data or even what happened. We're trying to understand what the humans in the story were doing. Was Broder driving around to drain the battery, as Musk says? Or was he circling around trying to find the badly-marked power source the way Broder says? What we want to know is human intentionality, and data doesn't settle that question."
At least not yet.
Smaller sensors, more astute algorithms, dwindling data-storage costs and more detailed readings on our every move are leading us to a world where everything is tracked and analyzed. Machines are increasingly adept at capturing not only what we did, but more precisely, what we meant by it.
Massachusetts-based startup Affectiva has developed emotion-recognition software that allows the company to track audience reaction to different stimuli -- advertising, in particular. Solariat, which applies artificial intelligence to social media marketing, can pick up on people's intentions based on what they share to a social network. We're also closer than ever to being able to turn back the clock to reconstruct any experience and analyze what really took place. Rick Smolan, author of The Human Face of Big Data, predicted we're not far from a world where every conversation will be recorded and indexed: "For almost every moment," Smolan noted in an interview last fall, "it will start being like there really is a time machine where you can step back in time to any moment."
But for the time being, we're stuck dealing -- and arguing over -- data that provides an incomplete view of human behavior.
"Facts and data do a much better job in domains, such as science, where there is no human intentionality," noted Weinberger. "As soon as you involve a human doing things for some purpose, data is helpful, but not conclusive."
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