Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve looked at availability of movies and TV shows that came out in the past year. But what about movies that came two years ago? Are those more available today than they were a year ago? Let’s look at the data.

2010: Box Office Winners availability

A year ago, I went through the list of box office winners and looked at their availability online. I pulled the information again in January 2012, a full year after the initial data set. The 2012 data looked like this:

Aggregate Rental data

When you tally it up, the rental only chart (excluding movies you can purchase) looks as follows:

The data seems to show that hits from over a year ago are still difficult to get. Netflix fares best, capturing 26% of the titles but pay-per-view services like Amazon, iTunes, and Vudu turn in a paltry offering with only 15% of the 2010 box office winners being available for rent on these services.

So, having run the data for 2 years in a row, are we seeing improvements in the market?

The picture here actually shows something fairly disastrous to people who hope that things are improving in terms of availability of movies along the long tail. While Netflix turns in a stronger performance, more than doubling availabilities of 2010 box office winners from 10 to 26, all other online services are seeing availability drop by 31% or more. This means that almost one third fewer 2010 box office winners are available this year as rentals as compared to last year. The strategy here seems to call in question the existence of a long tail in terms of media availability as far as rentals are concerned.

While the cost of storing a movie is a marginal one, it appears studios prefer to not make titles available as rentals online. There is some humor in the fact that whatever corner DVD rental place is still in existence near your home probably has a higher selection of available titles from 2010 than could be found last year because ALL 2010 box office winners are now available on DVD.

Aggregate Rental and Sales data

So, with a strong suspicion that sales numbers may be better, let’s see what happens if we had movies that may not be available for rent but can be purchase (ie. are more expensive to get)

The first one notices here is that the number of titles legally available online is still relatively low a full year after all the titles have been released. While DVDs have come out, legal online streaming services online offer a bit over half of the 2010 box office winners, with Amazon having the most extensive catalog. The availability of legal movie streams, when compared to DVD, is still a challenge.

But have things improved since last year? To figure that out, let’s look at the availability of the same titles over the last couple of years:

My initial hunch was that we would have seen improvements in the sales of legal streams from one year to the next, just as we would would have seen for DVDs because of availability.

But the picture is actually surprising as the availability of legal streams for 2010 box office winners has dropped in the last 12 months. On their face, one might expect sales of legal online streams to see patterns similar to sales of DVDs, even if they would trail the plastic medium. But what’s surprising here is that it appears studios have decided to pull their movie catalogs back offline.

There is still a long way before legal online streaming matches DVD sales as it appears movie studios are still addicted to selling pieces of plastic than they are to selling movies in any form available.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Streaming held back. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Last week, I looked at the availability of 2011 movie box office winners as legal internet streams. The results seem to incense Netflix supporters, who pointed out that the comparison was unfair because Netflix was more focused on TV fares. This week, I turn my attention to availability of popular TV shows as internet on-demand streams.

Approach

As I did a year ago, I pulled the data from Deadline.com’s Broadcast series ranker and cleaned it up. I took out every live and reality TV shows as the archival value of such show is limited since they are primarily marketed as “events” and, as such, loose most of their value to the viewer after the initial broadcast.

Where part of one of the seasons was available, I gave the service a partial availability. Where seasons prior to the 2010–2011 years were available, I did not give credit if the 2010–2011 season had no availability because I was focusing the effort on availability of last year’s shows.

From a service standpoint, I focused on services that allowed for streaming to most internet-enabled television. This meant that Netflix and Hulu were the main subscription based offerings and Amazon on-demand and iTunes were listed as pay-per-view services.

The list

With­out fur­ther ado, here’s the list of top 2011 TV shows avail­able for stream­ing on the internet:

While it is fun to check if your favorite show is available or not, the real interesting trending data only comes when you re-group the information. For this purpose, I looked at two different sets of data: first, I looked at whether all the episodes of the 2010–2011 season were available for a given series. Then I re-ran my research, giving full credit to the service for having “some” episodes from that season.

The results were as follows:

As one would expect, the pay-per-view services are doing better than the subscription based ones but what is surprising is how little content is actually available on the subscription-based services: Hulu only offers some episodes of half of the most popular shows, while Netflix barely has any offerings, clocking in with just above a third of the shows having some kind of stream.

When trying to access full seasons, the data is even worse, as Netflix offers full seasons on only 9 (or 18%) of the top 50 shows, while Hulu gives you access to the 2010–2011 season for 18 shows (or 36%). The amusing thing is that Hulu appears to give you access to as many full seasons as Netflix has as partial ones. The data shows that if you want access to popular TV shows via subscription, you’re better off going with Hulu than you are going with Netflix.

What seems to be hurting those services is the fact that CBS, one of the large TV networks has decided to go it alone when it comes to their own shows and show them on their own sites instead of making them available to stream aggregators.

Another interesting thing is that Netflix seems to pick up cancelled shows more readily than any other service. In my research, I found that if a show had been cancelled over the last year, it was more likely to be available on Netflix than on any of the other services.

On the pay-per-view side, Amazon and iTunes have now reached parity, as both service offer 43 (or 86%) of the shows on either per-episode or per-season fees. Their pricing seems to be roughly the same, with shows average between $.99 and $3.99 per episodes and full TV seasons passes going for $20.99 to $40.99. I would not be surprised if next year, we saw those services having the full set of shows available for instant streaming.

Breaking it down

Looking at the distribution, one might wonder how each of the services fares on sub-sets of the overall group. Furthermore, in terms of getting a better sense of trends, if is useful to overlay this with last year’s data and see whether progress has been made:

Overall, it looks like top 10 shows are less available onall-you-can-eat  subscription-based services this year than they were last year, while there is an increase in availability on pay-per-view services.

Netflix continues to trail other services in terms of making full seasons available and it seems it is a gap that will not narrow any time soon as Hulu, Amazon, and iTunes continue to aggressively grow their catalogs. In fact, the big story in this graph may be the big push Amazon is making in adding new titles to its streaming library. It has now matched Apple’s iTunes store in terms of offering, closing the gap it had last year.

When looking at partial availability, we are still seeing some differences:

Here, Netflix appears to have actually list some ground when it comes to the top 10 list, while all the other players have made substantial progress. This may point to another weakness for Netflix moving forward. Also of note is that while Apple used to be the go-to source for all TV series, Amazon has closed the gap in the last year, establishing itself as a strong second player in the market.

Conclusion

Many people look to online TV streams as the key to increasing the number of people cutting the cord from their cable companies and moving to internet-only offerings. This year’s data seems to indicate that it is now possible to do so but that the costs associated with such a strategy may not necessarily represent a huge saving for people who consume a lot of TV content.

The greatest amount of available content in terms of legal online streams can be found on pay-per-view services and subscription-based services like Netflix and Hulu still have some ways to go before providing a TV-like selection (this may explain why both of them are starting to turn further in the direction of producing their own content). However, viewers who watch only a few select show may be able to get this content from services like Amazon and Apple iTunes for a fee.

People watching this space should pay closer attention to Amazon’s aggressive push in this arena. As the company continues to expand its digital offerings, it seems to have earmarked video as one of the areas in which it is willing to go big and it has quietly grown its catalog over the last year.

Meanwhile, while Hollywood is trying to push for laws against online piracy (things like SOPA and PIPA), creating frictions with the tech community in the process, maybe it should focus on making content available through legal channels first, before complaining that people are stealing content. One of the reason people may be drive to piracy is the lack of availability of the content through legal means. Fill that gap, and you will see substantially less piracy of content happening on the internet.

Next week, I’ll take you through last year’s box office winners and how available those are. There are more surprises there, I promise; so stay tuned.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Legal streams for 2011 TV hits. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

A year ago, I looked at the availability of recent blockbuster hits in online stream and discovered some interesting patterns in online stream offerings. This year, I’m doing the same with the 2011 list of box office hits. The great news is that we appear to see some progress.

2011: Box Office Win­ners availability

For each movie of the top 100 movies at the box office, I pulled data on for streaming info on Netflix, Amazon on Demand, iTunes, and Vudu. I also pulled up availability of DVDs to use as a yardstick in terms of overall movie availability. The final chart looked like this:

But the information, in a raw form, doesn’t really tell us much. To get a better sense of where we are, we need to re-aggregate the info.

Aggregate rental data

Looking at the rental market, we can now see the aggregation providing us a clearer picture

The data shows that Netflix appears to be missing the Flix part of its name when it comes to streaming, as it offers only 5 of the top 100 box office winners of 2011. By comparison, pay-per-view seems to be doing a better job at making top hits available for streaming, with the numbers declining as you go deeper into the list. So top movies seem to be widely available this year (in fact, 64 percent of the top 25 movies were available for streaming only 9% short of what’s available on more traditional formats like DVD).

Another interesting thing to note here is that the data seems to be relatively consistent across online pay-per-view services with Amazon, iTunes, and Vudu apparently getting access to the same movies, leading one to think that there is little differentiation between those products (of note: Vudu has actually tried to differentiate on offering by providing 7.1 surround sound and 3D movies to available TV sets.) With prices across those services being roughly the same (movies are renting for $3.99 to $5.99 on average), there is a question as to how those services will be able to provide a differentiated experience in the future.

But the big advantage of doing this again this year is that we can compare the information against last year’s data and see if progress has been made:

The story here isn’t that pretty for Netflix, which has lost substantial ground from last year’s position, offering less than half of the hits it used to offer last year. If you think of their recent moves towards creating original content, it appears that Netflix is slowly moving away from its initial strategy of providing online streaming of movies on a subscription basis and moving more to a model more akin to that of a TV network.

Another interesting development here is that online streaming seems to be some losing ground compared to DVDs. One could assume that, as a new technology, online streaming would be gaining ground on DVDs but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Granted, we only have a couple of data points so next year’s data will provide us with a better understanding as to whether hollywood is trying to slow down the progress of online streaming.

Sales Data

If we are witnessing such a slow down, one of the reason may be that movie studios are looking to maximize revenue coming from sales.

The first interesting item to show up here is that we are now seeing remarkable consistency in availability of titles on streaming services. However, the availability of legal movie streams is still trailing the availability of movies on DVDs. This gap seems to be less pronounced when it comes to the top of the list than when ones goes further back into the box office records.

Once again, looking at how availability this year compared to last year’s availability provides some interesting information:

As opposed to online rentals, sales of streaming movies seem to be gaining on sales of DVDs, with an increasing parity in availability of movies as bits (streams) or plastic (DVDs). This appears to confirm the suspicion that movie studios are trying to protect their sales revenue at the expense of promoting pay-per-view.

Conclusion

The past year has seen an increasing alignment in the libraries of titles offered by online streamers in an on-demand basis. At the same time, we have seen Netflix apparently abandon its strategy of offering popular movies on a subscription basis. Next week, I will look at whether Netflix’s efforts are getting more focused on television streams or whether we are seeing them pull back across the board in terms of availability of more recent content.

We are also seeing Hollywood now treating online as more equivalent to DVD sales, offering titles for sale online at roughly the same rate as they do on DVD. Let’s hope that this trend continues to hold and that the industry sees the wisdom of providing online streams in an earlier release window. A few independent movies have done simultaneous releases online and in theaters this year and Hollywood has a potential to increase its revenues if it were to increasingly go in that direction.

Two sets of data only provide a small view into an overall trend but I promise I will continue growing the data set and revisit those numbers next year, giving us a better sense as to whether there is any changes in this segment of the media distribution puzzle.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Where the hits are streaming in 2011. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Before we kick in a new year of post, I want to take a quick look back at things I covered on 2011 as I still believe many of those represent important trends and inform some of my thinking.

I kicked off the year with the usual prediction list (and closed it out with a review) and was surprised by how many of the themes I highlighted ended up making their way through other entries.

I had set a goal for myself to do a post a week and decide to create a framework that allowed me to do so efficiently. My process is to capture simple ideas in a backlog and then dig through them once a week, sometimes tying the story to a recent development. Every Friday night or Saturday, I then crank out a post that covers that top in as broad a way as I could.

I write mostly for myself, as a way to get a better sense of my own thinking on a topic and then get feedback on how wrong (or occasionally, right) I am. This allows me to refine the strategy behind Keepskor and get a better sense of where our industry is heading.

While I never set a narrative for what is being covered on TNL.net, one seems to emerge when I look at the work I produced over the last year.

An emerging New York

I kicked off the year by making a bold prediction about a re-emerging and re-invigorated New York technology scene.  A year later, I feel ever more strongly about the things I highlighted in that series of posts: New York has emerged as a major player and I suspect that, within a generation or two, New York has a chance to displace the valley as the center of the US tech industry (note that the longer view is something I articulated later in the year but has been a dominant theme on this site for a decade).

The series created quite a stir when it came out and was one of the most trafficked group of entries this year (in fact, it still gets a decent amount of traffic a year later.)

If you’re on the East coast, you no longer have to relocate south of San Francisco to make it. New York provides an environment that rivals San Francisco and has a few extra advantages I had not covered in that series. For example, being halfway between London and the Valley, New York is the perfect place to manage a business that is not solely aimed at the US.

Myth-busting in startup land

This feeling from the ground, as I started re-entering the startup world, got me in the direction of thinking about the broader trends relating to startups. I a series about startup myths, I debunked the ideas that startups are risky, expensive, idea-based, smooth rides where everyone makes money.

My reason for doing this series of post was to archive thoughts on this that I could send to people when they brought up those myths (and as someone who spend too much time on Wall St., I’ve been exposed to quite a few of those people.)

Financial Markets

Using some of the skills I did pick up on Wall St., I’ve been trying to make sense of the financial markets and get a better understanding of the overall economic picture. This first led me to analyze whether internet valuations were getting over-inflated (they weren’t.)

As internet companies started testing the IPO waters again, I checked to see if LinkedIn was overvalued and highlighted some concerns around the GroupOn offering and later in the year, I started thinking writing more about digital currency.

The Internet War

The concept of digital currency is but one of the hot flashpoint between the current world and the internet one. Over the past year, we’ve seen increased activity from hacker groups and the rise of the internet as a political philosophy. Calling for an end to apathy on the part of our industry when it comes to policy making, I tried to make the case for the creation of a new set of definitions and protocols to control the internet of the future.

This is in reaction to an increasing privatization of large parts of the web, balkanizing the open web,  as companies try to monetize their user base to return value to their investors or counter suspected threats by new entrants. Along the way, those companies are redefining identity ownership through surprising terms of service agreements.

A resurgent Microsoft

Meanwhile, another story that has made its way through my narrative has been a massive comeback: Over the last few years, Microsoft has become a symbol of technology decline. But 2011 has shown us a resurgent company, first in its agreement with Nokia, which will bear fruits in 2012; then with the bets its placing on the web as a core component of the next version of Windows; and then through the success of its revolutionary Kinect device.

Microsoft’s bet on the web as the core of Windows is a smart one. HTML5 is enjoying wider support and new technologies like WebGL are bringing the web to new levels, levels that could be matching native apps soon. I will probably write more about these trends in 2012.

Internet and TV Colliding

Another item I have covered extensively in 2011 is the merging of television and the internet. Last year, I looked at where 2010 box office winners were streaming, how available popular TV shows were, and whether there was a delay in availability.I also looked into why live TV streams were not available online, explaining how some of the missing pieces of the puzzle could fit together. This provided readers with a stronger understanding of where the market stood. At the time, the results showed that availability was getting better but still had a long way to go.

I will start revisiting a lot of this information next week to gauge how much progress has been made in making movies and TV shows available on the internet.

My interest in this as a trend is that it provides us with a better view into whether internet TV is ready for primetime as a new internet channel (Netflix getting into the content production business was a major event in that direction, opening the door for other internet companies to offer something on that third screen… and for a few players to become new gatekeepers if we are not careful.)

I suspect this collision is part of the reason we have seen the entertainment industry rally behind SOPA, as it has seen first the music and now the book industry getting impacted in radical ways as media increasingly become mobile and can be consumed on phones and tablets.

Other trends

However, I was surprised that I had not spent more time covering some other trends I’m seeing emerging.

My archives did not include any mentions of bitcoin, though I think that virtual currencies are one of the hot topics currently sitting below the surface. While I am not convinced that bitcoin is the one that will win in the future, I do believe that we will see increasing traffic in that arena soon.

I also strongly believe that a new manufacturing age is upon us. The revolution behind 3D printing, 3D scanning and more customized and micro-produced materials is something that we will see on the edge this year and probably in the mainstream by end of year or early next year. This will have a substantial impact on our economy in the long run and I will keep an eye on it.

Conclusion

While I have deliberately chosen not to focus my writing on a narrow area, it appears there are broad topics that I return to on a regular basis. The intersection of media, technology, business and politics are part of the broad trends I follow around here and generally form the core of what I write about. My friend Anil defines his own writing as being about culture and I believe that broadly, he and I write about some of the same things.

Over the next year, I will revisit a lot of the work I did in 2011 as I wanted to establish a few foundational posts from a trending standpoint. But as we become more public about Keepskor, I will also write about some of the things that led to its creation and some of the thinking behind it. As someone who spent a lot of time dealing a dual life as blogger and Wall Streeter, I haven’t really said much about what I’m working on but I’m sure that readers will be interested as it taps into some of the trends highlighted above and a few that I haven’t talked about yet.

2012 is going to be a very exciting year and I will try to have a body of work at the end of it that matches what I’ve accomplished in 2011.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2011: The year that was. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

With a new year kicking in, it’s time for a new batch of predictions.

Business

One of the easiest predictions to make is that Facebook will go public this year, and it will manage to do so in a very successful IPO. I suspect that this may actually be the high watermark for the current boom cycle as Facebook is the most successful of the companies that were born of the Web 2.0 cycle. In a fashion similar to what happened with the Netscape IPO in 1995, the Facebook IPO may create a small window of opportunity for many other companies to go public.

On the private end of the spectrum, I think we will see the following companies see some form of liquidity event via either acquisition or IPO: Twitter has a strong chance of being acquired by Apple, which will quickly merge the offering into all of its products; Another possibility is that Twitter and Tumblr merge to create a mico-blogging powerhouse spanning both ends of the country. Meanwhile, Foursquare will either IPO or be acquired by Facebook or GroupOn in a share-only deal. Meetup will go public, creating another great story for the New York technology scene.

When it comes to Google, we will see the company continue its integration of Google+ into everything it does, with the biggest impact being the move to migrate all Orkut users to the new service. This will create an outcry in countries like India and Brazil, where Orkut has been popular but will leave many in the American media to wonder what the big deal is as Us customers have mostly left already.

Meanwhile, a lot of the companies that went public in 2011 will meet some strong headwinds as the rigor of the public market make it much more difficult for them to maneuver. Expect some changes at GroupOn and Zynga, with many people questioning their business models and long term viability.

Media

For a couple of years, there’s been a slow ramp up to the integration of the Internet with television. The rise (and to some extent fall) of Netflix, along with the entrance of new players like Hulu and Amazon, have made video distribution on the big screen one of the areas where the Internet and television have already intersected.

However, other areas of interaction have, so far, not been quite as successful. Apple is still treating AppleTV as a hobby, Google has mostly failed so far with GoogleTV, and other players like Roku and Boxee have, to date, been only adopted on the fringe.

In 2012 all that changes as the TV screen takes center stage in a way that a new generation of smart phones arose after the 2007 iPhone announcement. First of all, we will see some increased standardization around how to deliver content to TV screens, with agreements from TV set manufacturers like Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, and Vizio agreeing to some level of standardization. Apple will also announce a large screen product it will position in the TV market: The set will have AppleTV’s technology built-in, be accessible over WiFi, and connect directly to the iTunes store as well as integrate with the iPhone and iPad and other Airplay compatible devices. The set will run iOS and will be managed by a remote that runs on iPod touch, iPhones and iPads.

Meanwhile, cable companies will start opening up their platforms with some software development kits allowing to access content on the set top boxes they use. Once the Motorola acquisition is completed, Google will start transitioning the Motorola set-top boxes, which are a large part of the cableTV market, to GoogleTV, increasing the footprint of the service in the marketplace. Along the way, we will also see GoogleTV become more streamlined and less ambitious, focusing on delivering Android apps to the big screen instead of trying to rebuild the whole TV industry.

The concept of cord-cutting will continue to gain support but will not yet jump into the mainstream consciousness. With shows now being available exclusively on the likes of Netflix, we might see some interesting positioning whereas some TV carrier will offer Netflix as a premium service.

Politics

Social media will dominate the political cycle in 2012, with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, and Meetup becoming part of the political operative tool belt. However, traditional electoral models will continue to be disrupted by the rise of distributed networked organizations like Occupy Wall Street, Wikileaks, or Anonymous. Except those players and new ones built on a similar model to have a substantial impact in terms of registering new voters and getting those voters to the polls in elections in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.

In the US, the 2012 electoral cycle will see Republicans select Mitt Romney, a candidate most of their electorate is not very excited about, to run against Barack Obama. With the unexpected support of Occupy Wall Street and its splinter organization, Obama will win re-election as issues around economic disparities and job creation continue to be big topics of discussion.

In Europe, expect to see incumbents toppled in many countries: with major elections coming up in France, Spain, Russia, and Finland, it is possible that we will see a major change in political alignments across most of Europe, along with an increase chance of protest in those different countries. In Russia, in particular, we may see the internet play a crucial role in organizing protest if there are questions regarding voting irregularities.

The continuing protests in the middle east region may also lead to substantial changes in governance in several countries including Bahrain, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. During the presidential elections in Iran, we will see increasing clampdowns on internet sites as the government tries to shut any means of communication available to large groups of protesters.

… and of course, the easiest prediction to make is that the media industry will continue to push for more restrictions on the Internet, leading to more activists pushing back.

Technology

2012 is going to be an explosive year for technology.

First of all, we will see HTML5 roaring back, as many companies realize that it is cheaper to build in HTML5 and that the gap between platform specific code and HTML5 is shrinking. The introduction of WebGL, and proper implementation of geolocation and caching within mobile devices will give developers the ability to develop applications in HTML5 that can rival some of the offerings of native code. This is a move that will be resisted by platform makers like Apple and Google as it will loosen their stranglehold on their respective platforms; however, the split side of this is that effort is that some large companies will look to free themselves from said control by creating HTML5 instances of their own products.

On the mobile end, the Microsoft/Nokia will get some real traction with Windows Phone becoming a strong third player in the mobile market. Apple and Android will continue dominating the market with Microsoft still being a distant third. RIM’s position in the market will substantially worsen and will either be sold or go into bankruptcy.

Enterprise cloud strategies will continue to grow, leading to a growing divide between companies that can get efficiencies through the use of cloud computing and companies that are kept by different regulatory frameworks from being able to realize the financial gains offered by such model.

3D will be a hot buzzword, with the introduction of consumer-oriented 3D scanners and 3D printers that will push the idea of scanning and printing your own plastic parts. This will lead to some controversy around the concept of 3D objects piracy popping up in the media, with little actual evidence to back those fears. On the 3D projection end, we will see the rise of designer 3D glasses and the first glasses-free 3D television hitting the market, as we as a few consumer-grade 3D cameras. At the same time, we will see more and more technology to upscale 2D to 3D, in an attempt to develop a larger consumer market for 3D technology.

On the PC end, netbooks will disappear as a category and the hot new trend will be to offer thinbooks that mirror much of what Apple is offering with the Macbook Air product line.  Solid State Drive will aso increasingly become standard on new computers and we will see Apple actually announce they are getting rid of traditional hard-drive in all their product offerings. This will lead to their being able to announce that all their hardware can now run for at least 7 hours on a single charge.

Any which way, we will be revisiting those predictions at the end of the year and see how well (or badly) I did. I wish you, dear reader, a very happy new year and look forward to a continued dialogue in 2012.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The 2012 Crystal ball. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

A small christmas diversion (sang to the tune of “The 12 days of Christmas”):

On the first day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
A like and a retweet too

On the second day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the third day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the fourth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the fifth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the sixth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the seventh day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the eighth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the ninth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
nine quora thanks
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the tenth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
ten wordpress entries
nine quora thanks
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the eleventh day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
eleven google +1s
ten wordpress entries
nine quora thanks
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the twelfth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
twelve youtube videos
eleven google +1s
ten wordpress entries
nine quora thanks
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

Happy holidays.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The 12 days of Social. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Every year, I make a set of predictions as to what the new year is going to bring. At the end of year, I also review how close or far off the mark I’ve come. It is now time to review the 2011 edition of predictions, which I made on the 3rd of January of this year.

Politics

Last year’s leading internet political story was the rise of wikileaks and, as such, my views were impacted by it. Surprisingly, there has not been that many wikileaks-like organizations arising on the internet. This may be due to the fact that there just aren’t that many people leaking information.

The power of wikileaks, however, could not be denied, and my predictions of protests arising out of cablegate were right on the mark. This year, cablegate highlighted some of the abuse of governments in Tunisia and Egypt and some of that evidence was part (but only part) of what led to radical changes in those northern African countries.

On the regulation end, the FCC has indeed gotten more aggressive, with its more visible move being its attempt to block the acquisition of T-mobile by AT&T. However, to my surprise, there hasn’t been that much complaining from either political party about this rejuvenated enforcement effort.

Meanwhile, the rise of SOPA is clearly in line with the prediction that the entertainment industry will push for more internet regulation.  However, it is relatively easy to predict such thing as it appears the entertainment industry is forever locked into the concept of a more regulated internet. They basically see the internet as competition and would love nothing more than to strangle it to death.

So looking at the political end of the spectrum, I’ll give myself points for good prognostication.

Business

In that category, I decided to stick my neck out on the concept of a public-less IPO and while it was essentially something that happened with Facebook, the concept did not really take off for other companies as they decided to go the public route instead. My expectations were really that IPOs would not come until very late into the year and I was surprised by the likes of LinkedIn, GroupOn, and Zynga managing to get into the market relatively early.

Furthermore, I was pretty much off the mark when it came to NFC. NFC is (and has been) a promising technology but 2011 was not a breakout year for the technology. At this point, only a few select Android models seem to support it and there seems to be little traction from the market around it. While Intel invested in NFC, it may be a technology that grows into usage without having a particular breakout year.

The rise of cord-cutters did happen but not in as large an amount as I suspected. While this is a trend that continue to grow, it is still sitting on the edge and hasn’t gone mainstream yet. However, its a trend I will continue to monitor closely as I suspect this will move to the mainstream in relatively short order.

All and all, my predictions on business were off the mark. Maybe I’ll do better next year.

Technology

Gamification continues to grow but did not really have the big breakout year I expected. While more and more companies are continuing to integrate game-like behavior in their applications and workflows, we are starting to experience a period of consolidation in the space, with bunchball being one of the larger players. This seems to highlight that this space is one where only a couple of major players will arise and smaller players are already running out of steam. The focus around developing gamification models for computer-based applications may be part of the reason for this failing to move forward as the trend is increasingly to more and more applications moving to a mobile-first model.

The scan and shoot revolution I predicted quietly made its ways into the mainstream, with smart phones being the new weapon in every shoppers’ belt this christmas season. It’s one of those quiet revolution that arrived in 2011.

And finally, the big bet I had made on a Microsoft Nokia partnership came in mid-february, when Nokia announced that it would focus all its efforts on developing exclusively for the Microsoft platform.

The internet backlash I was expecting for this year did not come to pass. There may yet be more power in the current positive cycle that has been covering our industry and, as such, it appears that the possibility of a backlash against our industry remains a remote but slim possibility at this time.

So all and all, I’d get a barely pass on the technology side.

Arts and Entertainment

The recent multi-billion contract extensions for NFL broadcast rights are in line with my prediction that big event entertainment is becoming the core focus of the broadcast entertainment world. The continuing effort to support the existing model will increase this trend, giving more and more power to producers of real-time events.

Remixing, and Danish coolness, did not come of age in the past year, however. While groundbreaking on Bjarke Ingels first American project happened in New York, Danes haven’t really moved to the center of popular consciousness. The same is true of remixing: while supercuts are still making their way through youtube but, as a whole, remixing is still not something that has made it into the mainstream.

Maybe I should keep to the margins when it comes to making big predictions around arts and entertainment.

All and all, for this year, my performance at predictions has been average. I will try to do better for the 2012 year.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2011 Predictions: The scorecard. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What is digital currency?

At its core, digital currency is a type of currency that only exists electronically. It is not traded as coins or paper but rather as electronic exchanges on computers and computer networks.

Since the early 1990s, a wide mix of libertarian and cypherpunk thinkers have been trying to figure out a way to make an electronic version of cash, complete with its anonymity and liquidity features available. While the anonymity part had, for the most part, been resolved by the early 1990s (cryptographer David Chaum, who founded Digicash, the pioneer in the field, had research papers on those aspects as early as the late 1980s and had implemented the core basis of an anonymous currency by the very early 1990s), the challenge for digital currency has been one of transaction volume.

With some small changes, systems that were originally planned for all-digital currencies were eventually adapted to support existing legacy currencies like dollars and euros, leading to the rise of companies like Paypal, with a centralized clearing system not dissimilar to those in more traditional payment systems like Honk Kong’s Felica–based Octopus smart card payment system, which is probably the most successful implementation of a store-and-forward payment system in the world.

Similarly, in the US and Europe, recent deployment of store-value cards and NFC technologies have established a potential infrastructure for building out a possible way to eliminate physical cash over the long run. Over the last decade, the rise of internet payments, electronic deposits, and electronic debits has lowered the reliance individuals and corporations have had on paper checks, leading to a substantial drop in the amount of business done around check-related product lines. It is assumed by many in the financial industry that checks are on their last legs.

So what about cash?

Cash has a very long history and seems to have gone from one technological revolution to the other without being drastically impacted. In fact, a history of cash seems to point to cash being closer to a concept that can attach itself like a remora to the latest technology. So while coins used to be the only way to transact cash prior to the invention of the printing press, cash eventually came through the first information revolution stronger as currency became something printed on bills and thus became easier to carry around.

With the advent of the telegraph system, cash started being delivered more as a concept, using a store and forward approach whereas one could go to a telegraph office and send a promissory note over the air. The sender would pay the telegraph operator and the telegraph operator would then work out credits and debits between the different offices, only moving physical cash when actually needed. The same concept basically moved from telegraph to telephone to fax machines to the internet and now to mobile phones. Different modes of distributions but fundamentally the same concept.

The introduction prepaid cards (also known as stored-value cards) in the last decade has made it possible to move cash into a fairly anonymous plastic container that can then be used to make payments wherever the currency it has been filled with is accepted. With players like Visa and Mastercard in the game, it is easy to find networks that support such offerings.

Back to the Euro crisis

For countries in the Euro-zone, there is now a choice: either agree to a more centralized management of their economy from the European Union or decide to strike out on their own.

The former would lead those countries to become more like states in the United States, where they have some level of autonomy but also must ensure alignment with a larger federal entity. The net result, in the long run, for the countries that decide to go down that route, is that they will help forge a United States of Europe, with closer cooperation and eventually a concept similar to federation making its way through that union (I’d put the probability of this happening as fairly high within the next 25 years)

The latter is a more interesting case, from a technological standpoint, because it would mean figuring out how to fill the gap and this is where a digital currency makes sense. If you look at the USA, which came of age in a time when paper currency had become common-place, the vast majority of the cash being trafficked is through bills in denominations as low as $1 (there are $1 coins but they are not very commonly used.) By comparisons, Euros and other European currencies do not have a bill for a single unit of currency and still hang on to coins for that purpose: this is due to the psychological concept of money of more tangible and since the lower end of currency is handled more often, people may want to feel it in their hands.

So what if a country that decided on building (or rebuilding) a currency from the ground up were to do so in today’s day and age?

First of all, we are dealing with a world where electronic payment systems have become more common, with ATM and credit card readers reaching near ubiquity in everyday commerce. At the same time, we are dealing with a world where mobile phones are becoming something that everyone carries. Looking at those factors, is it too much of a leap to imagine a world where a currency could be added and subtracted from phones or pre-paid cards. Why would one need physical cash in today’s world? Are there use cases where the legal transfer of money from an individual to a company and vice-versa could not exist in an all-electronic world?

I’d warrant that no. There is no reason why cash needs to remain a physical component. For starters, the government could distribute e-wallets to any of its constituents relatively cheaply (today, the cost of a pre-paid card with no value on it would be measure in cents in the US) through bank networks. Some ATM might have to be retrofitted reloading of cards but that would be about it (they can already read the cards today). And with just such a move, a whole country would have moved from a physical currency to a digital one.

So the question now remains as to which country will be bold enough to make that first move. To go electronic would probably be substantially cheaper than any other alternatives a country would have to consider if it decides to create or relaunch a currency… and that’s why this option should be the top on the implemetation table for countries that are leaning in that direction.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title From Euro to e-uro. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Electronic Consumer Hardware

If you have a stereo or a set of speakers in your house, you’re dealing with technology that hasn’t really changed that much in almost a century. In the same way, TV sets have seen little evolution in the way of being smart over the last 50 years: when you think about it, the biggest steps in TV have moved from black & while to color (in the 70s), cathode ray tube to plasma and LCD (late 90s), and analog to digital (early 2000s). In each case, the focus has been on the picture and not so much on the logic to receive and display information.

While new models of television of radio are introduced on a yearly basis, the fundamentals behind them are essentially the same and the features that are introduced are, for the most part, marginal improvements.

However, over the last 4–5 years, a quiet revolution has been underway in the hardware business with the addition of two apparently innocuous components making their way through into a lot of the more recent version of new devices: USB drives and internet connectivity (either wired or wireless). This has made it possible for the core software components of those devices to be upgraded, either by downloading the upgrade on a USB drive and plugging it into the consumer device or automatically in the background via the internet, opening a whole new world of possibilities.

The remote experience

A radio station in the 1920s used a knob to find the right signal and today it’s a button. The clarity improved by moving from AM to FM and HD radio but the user experience is basically the same. For TV, the experience has moved from having to turn a knob on the TV screen to turning a knob on a device that was connected via a cable to the TV to pressing a button on a wireless remote control. The interface has not changed much, except for adding more buttons to allow access to more complexity.

Meanwhile, an increasing amount of touchscreen devices are starting to populate home, whether they are mobile phones or tablets and there is now a slew of software that allows for operating some of the more complex technologies out there. Using simple infrared adaptors, those devices are now allowed to share their own smarts with TV sets and radios, pushing the creation of simpler and more adaptable interfaces for remote controls to increasingly becoming software based solutions. As software evolves, it can be upgraded easily and include new functionality without getting rid of the devices that consume it.

Hardware is a platform

In this instance, we are seeing software trumping hardware. Short of the dependence on certain physical components being natively included in hardware devices (for example, the ability to support certain forms of communications like infrared or short range radio), the hardware does not really need to get upgraded unless its primary function (eg. showing a picture or playing some sounds) is itself in need of an upgrade. And one could see a time when the receiving hardware would receive software upgrades that allow for this interoperability to be a smoother experience because hardware is a platform.

A group of technologies around interoperability have made it easier for this phenomenon to happen. While few people care about such standards at HTML5, HTTP, TCP/IP, WiFi, and DLNA, they can serve as the building block of the future.

Imagine a television, for example, where every channel would be served through an internal web server that rendered everything on the screen via a web page with an HTML5 embedded video player. All of a sudden, the TV screen would become a giant web browser in full screen mode, allowing to not only access any content on cable or broadcast TV but also any content available on the internet.

Add a layer that would allow for throwing HTML5 applets on top of that screen and you would have a standard compliant approach to developing things for television. Throw a webGL interpreter in there and you have something that is drastically more advanced than what any TV in 2011 can currently do. Now make this layer addressable as a web service standard and you could not only see other companies incorporate it but also see an explosion of support from the development community.

Standardization is they key to TV’s future

Today, developing for television (or send streaming audio to a stereo) is an often frustrating experience, forcing developers to encode content so that it meets the requirement that each TV or set-top box manufacturer has set forward. This often complicated landscape has left most developers avoiding it because the return on investing in a single platform just isn’t there. A way to battle this is through standardization of the underlying interfaces. Since the 1990s many people, myself included, have pushed for a standard language to merge television and the web.

These efforts need the support of TV manufacturers and the understanding from said manufacturers that open standards will not only lift their industry but potentially fuel another area of growth for their offerings. As more and more applications get developed on top of a standard compliant deck, there will be increasing demands on the part of the developers to give access to other parts of the hardware, which could be completed via paid software updates. Hardware manufacturers would then find themselves in a world where they could make money on the initial hardware they sell but also add extra revenue by turning on extra functions through software sales.

Lack of standardization creates a winner-takes-all market

Apple has an early lead in the audio market, with Airplay (and its support from many hardware vendors). For example, in our house, we have equipped several rooms with Airport Express adaptors connected to powered speakers or stereos. Apple had initially locked Airplay to Apple only devices, but an ingenious company called Rogue Amoeba put out a piece of software called Airfoil that allows us to play from any source we can find on a computer. It would be nice to get such functionality on our mobile phones and tablets but, because Apple is locking up its system, it is unlikely that such thing could happen unless allowed by Apple.

An open standard that reproduces such functionality could not only hamper Apple’s ability to lock people into its ecosystem but could also help proliferate the rise of inexpensive devices that can be addressed from the internet.

In this case, as in the case of TV, we could see a single closed proprietary standard emerge and create an early lock-in for the owner of that standard. However, if there is one lesson the internet has taught everyone in the computing industry, it is that open always trumps proprietary in the long run. Early platforms may get early wins, but eventually, the open standard disturbs their marketplace and destroys the proprietary aspect.

Some people may consider the the receiving devices for new content as dumb devices but I would argue that they would fall in the category of smart devices: after all, isn’t the smartest person in a room generally the one that first listens and only speaks their mind after receiving appropriate input. Maybe we should create a new category, calling those wise devices instead of smart ones.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Interop: the future of hardware. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Kinect and the gesture based world

Last year, Microsoft unveiled the Kinect, a revolutionary new device that allowed Xbox 360 users to use their bodies as the way to interact with computer games. With the Kinect, Microsoft solved a substantial interface problem that had been slowing down the success of any computing-intensive efforts on the TV screen: How does one increase functionality on a large screen without requiring more complex remote controls.

It was already a given that computer keyboards and mice were not the way to interface with a large screen, as the added complexity they added to a living room setup were making for a more annoying user experience than simple TV remotes. In a world of users being already annoyed by the proliferation of TV remotes.

By introducing a mode of interaction that allowed to get rid of contact with the screen, either through a remote control or by directly touching it (a mode that works for smaller screen like phones or tablets but gets more complex when the screen is larger and thus farther away from the user), Microsoft created a whole new interaction language for computing devices and has made it possible to grow substantially beyond the traditional mode of interfacing with a computer interface.

The kinect interface is something that was predicted as far back as the early 1990s, when AT&T ran its now famous “You Will” TV ad campaign in the United States, and was later popularized by Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report movie. The idea of gesturing in the air took substantial hold in the collective consciousness and when the iPhone and iPad were introduced, people looked at that multitouch model as the answer.

But there has long been a challenge as to how to deal with larger screen. It is difficult to consider users stepping up to a 42 inch (or larger) TV screen and touching the surface of the screen in order to get what they want. So the next challenge became how to get rid of that last piece that stopped the users from interfacing. Nintendo first advanced the idea by putting a sensor in the joystick to the Wii.

 But the Wii still required some component to interface with the system. The real genius of the Microsoft solution was that it did away with every interaction components. In returning to a basic approach using only our bodies, Microsoft created a model that will continue to impact computing for decades to come.

Siri and the voice-driven world

Meanwhile, Apple had also been considering how to get rid of direct touching of a device. Their research led to an innovative company that was doing interesting things in voice-related controls: Siri, Inc.

Upon seeing the company, Apple promptly acquired it, realizing that the approach Siri was taking to voice-enabled interfaces was one of the next components of the future of computing.

There has been many other efforts at doing voice-controlled interfaces, dating back to the 1990s and it has long been assumed by the mainstream that voice-controlled interfaces were the way computing was headed. In Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A space odyssey”, we all met HAL, a computer that could handle conversations with human beings with some disastrous effects for the human. With the possible exception of Star Trek, the ability for a computer to carry on a conversation with a human being has generally been presented as a disastrous thing for humanity: a long strand of movies showed computers and robots (basically humanoid computers, as far as movies are concerned) have shown that the ability to carry a conversation with a human being is the first step to a computer deciding to rebel against his owner. Whether it is HAL in 2001 (1968), Delos Control in West World (1973), Master Control Program in Tron (1982), Edgar in Electric Dreams (1984), or Skynet in the Terminator franchise (1984, 1991, 2003), humanity always seems to be endangered by talking computers.

When technological fears are represented in media forms, they merely represent the farthest the imagination of a society can go when it comes to imagining the peak of what is possible with technology. So computers being able to carry on conversations have long been a holly grail of the computing world… and now Apple owns something that may point to the right approach.

A question as to whether this type of technology will become more than just something that can be found in Apple products is going to turn not on technical merits but on juridical points as Apple may have locked up most of the potential roads forwards by patenting substantial portions of the space. Unless they decide to make the technology available to others, it may find itself locked into the Apple ecosystem with no way to get out for a long period of time.

However, Apple’s competitors including Google and Microsoft will probably consider this an important enough space to attempt to go after it with all their might. As voice driven interfaces have long been seen as a high mark on the technological and technical advances scale, those companies will not want to be left out of what may be the next big thing.

Lessons in hidden complexity

What Siri and the Kinect have in common is that they have managed to package up a lot of complexity into what appears to be a very simple solution.

The Kinect includes infrared projectors, an infrared camera, a video camera, motion sensors, several microphones and motors to track individuals and enough processing power to handle audio and video recognitions into a sleek black bar that sends infrared light all over a room, records where the light is not showing and based on that makes some guesses where bodies are located while at the same time tracking audio and video cues to direct whatever program is being used with it.

Siri records what its user says to it, sends the recording to a server which turns that recording into text it translates it into actionable material before identifying the right information database to retrieve information from,  getting the necessary information, packaging it into a file that will be read back by the device and sending that file back to the phone (all this in a matter of a few seconds).

The big secret in the success of these offerings is that they do not scream about all the innovation and complexity. In fact, they go out of their ways to hide that complexity and there is a lesson here for most startups: it is not because things are complex that you should display them as such; quite the contrary, as new companies should address complex problems and go as far as possible to shield users away from that complexity.

Disappearing devices

The other important thing to pay attention to here is that we are seeing the increasing disappearance of the interface. In the early days of computing, the keyboard was the way to enter information into a machine (I know some will gripe that there were punch cards before that but I’m talking about the modern era of computing); that was eventually augmented by other devices like the mouse and touchpad, which remained the dominant form of interaction with computers over almost 3 decades; more recently, we have seen a more direct interaction with screens as touch interfaces have gained prominence on new form factors like mobile phones and tablets. Each step of the way, we are seeing the friction between a user’s input and the computer’s response slowly fritting away, with less and less being between the user and the device.

But in each case, the interaction was between the user and the computing device itself.

With whole-body and voice interfaces like the Kinect and Siri, that last amount of friction is disappearing and we may be entering a new era of ubiquitous computers, where the computing devices just disappears. I think the current direction of those technologies points to a potential future where we could see the iphone nano, a new screen-less version of iphone that would take the form factor of a simple pair of headphones with no extra wires. All interactions would be handled via voice command with hardly any need for a screen.

Meanwhile, in the living room, your TV will be both voice and motion aware, turning itself off when no one is in the room and completely controlled without requiring any physical remote control (something that will guarantee high acceptance as the proliferation of remote controls in the living room has become a modern annoyance).

That future is not too far away. As an eternal optimist, I would put its promise at somewhere around 5 years from now but as a realist, I also need to warn that it is likely this could take as much as a decade to reach the mainstream. So get ready for new interfaces and if you want to beta test the future, grab a Kinect or a new iPhone 4S: they are the first of many such devices that will populate our world within the next decade.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Beyond touch interfaces. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It’s been two months since about 100 people started occupying a small park near Wall Street and from there, the seeds of what appears to be a growing movement has hatched. I’ve written in the past about the Occupy Wall Street movement but have continued following it since. Strip out the political content and what you have here is one of the fastest growing startups in America and one that could redefine how business is run.

The active class

As many people have mentioned, the movement was initially made up of younger people, primarily recent college graduates who could not find jobs. But what none of the commentary appreciated (and something I was also not fully aware of) was that this was the first massive movement led by a generation that had not known a time when the internet did not exist. In my previous note on the subject, I had highlighted how much of that movement had the feel of internet philosophy brought into the real world but it wasn’t until more recently that I realize that #OWS is a breakdown of the boundary between virtual and real world.

As a whole generation has learned to chat, exchange ideas, create content, and spread messages over the online medium, they have been affected in a way that many had prognosticated but few had seen: one of the fascinating thing about the internet’s lack of ownership is the fact that it leaves all of us as owners of the internet.

Whereas some activists, myself included, once worried that it was only left up to a few to protect this wonderful public sphere that had been created, the truth is that support for an open internet, and by extension a more open society, is strong. Witness, for example, what happened last week when SOPA threatened this opennesss: not only did net people rise up and confronted their lawmakers on this but users of those services also did, generating thousands of calls to Congress.

Two things happen when someone makes that first call to Congress: first, they feel a sense of kinship with the other people who are fighting for the same cause, and secondly they feel they have a say and can have an impact in changing the system, making them more likely to be socially and politically active in the future.

For over a decade now, many have talked of internet activism but we also need to think about the longer impact that such thing has. I’d venture that the activism created by the ability of quickly sharing political stories or quickly reaching out to politicians is creating a more active political class on all sides of the spectrum: on the right, we’ve seen the rise of the Tea Party, and on the other side, we’re seeing the rise of #OWS.

What has traditionally been known as the left (the side that wants a more active government instead of a less active one) is also more in line with the model set in place by the early founders of the internet. Remember that the net has largely been administered as a common, with all parties involved being given more or less equal rights. There has been tensions when some parties have tried to reach for more rights, as can be witnessed in the recent fight over SOPA.

The people’s microphone

So what does this all have to do with #OWS? Well, let me get to that. In order to do so, we must look at the people’s microphone. What started as a way to get around laws requiring a permit to use amplification equipment has become a key component of this new movement.

A few days ago, I tweeted that “Mic Check is the RT of #OWS”. What I meant by that is that it’s becoming clearer to me is that through those words, #OWS are asking the rest of the crowd to spread a message.

From a messaging standpoint, there are a few components at play here. First, there is the use of simple words to trigger attention. To paraphrase Will Rogers, belonging to the left is not belonging to any organized movement. But the “mic check” changes that: it opens up a request for the crowd to lower their message and agree to amplify someone else’s. A basic assumption here is that while there may not be agreement as to what is being talked about, there is an agreement that the message will be relayed forward.

This is in line with the current principle of “net neutrality” many fights have arisen about online: there is a general agreement between all parties on the internet that no matter what the traffic is, every internet service provider agrees to carry it without discrimination. So “Mic Check” can be seen as a request to open a web page or application on the internet, with the assumption that communication will continue until the message has been communicated.

Psychologically, this type of agreement already primes the brain to be more receptive to an idea. The next step in what happens with the people’s microphone is the amplification, or the repeating of that other message one has agreed to carry. Here again, some interesting components happen: Because the message is to be repeating by a large crowd, who repeats it to the people behind them, it enforces an oratory style that requires something in line with the type of pithy statement that would fit in the 140 characters allowed for a tweet.

By repeating the idea, however, something else might happen in people’s brain (and this is based on the kind of psychological primers that are used in many videogames): having opened up to a mike check (and thus agreed to carry the message), the brain is more receptive to the message being amplified. When the message is repeated, a certain sense of ownership of the message is conferred on the person amplifying the message.

That sense of ownership is something that probably translates into a sense of belonging and lasts longer than the meeting the person has attended. I suspect that, through the use of the people’s microphone, #OWS is increasing the overall number of converts to its movement.

Large orgs and #OWS

Having built a relatively leaderless movement and managed to get a large amount of supporters, #OWS has attracted the attention of many established players in the political world. And on this part Thursday’s anniversary events at Foley Square, many organized labor members could be seen with placards for their own causes.

However, what is becoming increasingly clear is that while #OWS is a very inclusive movement, it is not a movement that will be easily hijacked. The unions may be allowed to voice their message but they will not be allowed to lead the leaderless movement, nor will anyone else. Partnerships and inclusive behavior is something that has been more common in the technology industry (though that is, unfortunately, starting to change among some of the bigger players) and there may be a lesson here for all organizations as to how to balance their own interest while working together with other groups (Yes, Wall Street, even you can learn from #OWS!)

Foley square may have been an organized event for the second anniversary of #OWS but the use of amplified equipment seemed to have given it less fervor, with more people milling about and having different discussions about different topics. The cohesion that arose out of gatherings of thousands at Zuccotti Park did not appear to be there at Foley Square and seemed more in line with what traditional political rallies look like than the kind of effort seen around #OWS.

However, political organization of all stripes have a lot to learn from #OWS. For example, looking at the people’s microphone I mentioned above, there may be value in considering how to drop amplified equipment from smaller gatherings (sub-10,000 people). In an age of retweeting and sharing, political images and hashtags are also extremely important. The hashtag, that weird # symbol before a specific term is a unifying force between different efforts. It has been widely adopted across most content sharing services and can serve as a way to aggregate and integrate content from many different services into a single place (or allow users to search for said content in a consistent fashion). Here, #OWS did some of its own learning: in its early days, they were gathering around the tag #occupywallstreet, which is fairly lengthy and thus steals away from the rest of the message when dealing with a service with limited character availability, the shorter #OWS has allowed the movement to recapture precious characters. How that learning was incorporated into their ongoing efforts could be seen with the selection of #N17 as the date of November 17 to celebrate their anniversary.

The tents may be gone from Zuccotti Park and many other #OWS encampments but I suspect that the movement will continue growing because, at the end of the day, what made it strong was not a set of tents and tarps but a sense of ownership of the future by all its members and that, as a society, is something we all need more of.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Re:Occupied. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

As any TNL.net readers know, there has long been a battle between two groups on the Internet: those who believe that copyright holders should be given preferential treatment and those who believe the internet should be a level-playing ground. I am firmly in the latter camp, even though I produce large amounts of content online.

A few years ago, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (aka DMCA), a law that, while somewhat more aggressive than I’d like it, manages to strike a balance between the interests of both copyright holders and online sites by requiring that a takedown notice be sent to a site if you see infringing content. The site then needs to honor or fight the takedown notice in court. The DMCA turned out to be a decent compromise protecting the interests of most people and things should probably have stopped there.

But the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA for short) goes substantially farther. It looks to assume guilt on the part of the site hosting content and looks to provide a system that would put control of internet domain names in the hands of the government.

Today, when you type TNL.net in your browser, that gets translated into a set of numbers known as an IP address (this is similar to you looking up contacts in your address book instead of having to remember that contact’s phone number). What SOPA calls for is that if a copyright owner finds one piece of infringing content on a site, they could go to the government and ask them to block that address. People would still be able to access the site if they knew the IP address (and most pirates would)  but the regular public would not be able to access the site by typing its name. Sites like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Flickr, and other could immediately disappear from the internet for a single presumed act of copyright sharing.

So I would urge you to contact your congressperson in opposition of SOPA today. Sendwrite has created a helpful online tool to send physical letters to your congressperson. The few minutes you put in will make it possible for the internet to continue existing.

Before you go, imagine two futures: in one, the internet becomes like TV, you don’t get to choose what’s on, when it’s on and where it’s on; in the other, the internet remains as it is today, a place where you can choose what you want to see, when you want to see and where you want to see it. Which future do you want? If it’s the latter, contact your congressperson today.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Stopping SOPA. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

On what time horizon do you work? With 20 years of the web now behind us, our field has a fair amount of history, which has left us with a few theoretical barnacles to shake loose. But it also raises questions as to the time horizon over which predictions ought to be made and roadmaps designed. And it raises questions on what our industry obsesses about in the here and now as opposed to what it could think about in the long run.

History will teach us… something?

When Tim Berners-Lee first demonstrated the technologies behind what came to become the world wide web, he had little idea of the impact his invention would have. But what has happened since may allow us to look back and better understand how to look forward. While it took a couple of years for the web to move from academic and research circles to a more mainstream and commercialized space, some of the early battles are still reflected in what we see today.

For example, there is a constant struggle for control of the viewing experience on the internet. In the earlier days of the web, that struggle was represented by the browser wars with a large fight exploding between the dominant browser creator at the time (Netscape) and the dominant Operating System vendor at the time (Microsoft). The same fight can be seen today in the struggle over whether web applications or dedicated platform specific applications ought to rule the roost in the future.

The death of Netscape left the web barren for a few years as few contender to the supremacy of Internet Explorer emerged until the Firefox project finally found its footing. Over those years, the web largely stagnated, partly as the result of a deflation of the financial bubble that had arisen over the previous year but also partly as a result of the lack of a credible contender to the dominant browser brand.

Looking forward by looking back

When looking at the future, we can be a lot more hopeful today, because the odds of a winner-take-all have been lowered in some segments of the market. For example, the rise of iOS has been counterbalanced by the rise of Android and an increase in the number of web-based apps. With such a diversity in the mobile space, it also will make it difficult for new entrants to succeed. Marketplace tend to reward only a couple of groups and we are already at a point where we have 3 players. This is bad news for Microsoft and Nokia who are trying to play this from behind and have a real uphill fight to gain any serious traction, no matter how great their offering is.

In the tablet space, the story is a little more worrisome. Apple’s current domination of that market could lead to a new stagnant space unless a contender is identified. Amazon’s positioning of the Kindle Fire as a potential alternative may present opportunities to restore a balance, forcing all players to bring their best game. At this point, it appears that the marketplace has widely rejected other offerings in the tablet space so Amazon’s entry makes this an interesting case. The question at this point is not whether Amazon will topple Apple (it won’t) but whether it will introduce a product that appeals to a segment of the consumer market and forces Apple to keep improving its offering (and here, I would present the iPod roadmap as an example of how innovation dies in a marketplace, even if that marketplace is dominated by Apple: from a product standpoint, the iPods sold today have not really changed since the introduction of the iPod Touch four years ago).

On the standard front, we are seeing some fierce battle lining up in how browser supports new features of HTML5 and related technologies. As I pointed a couple of weeks ago, this is a good thing. The current diversity of browsers in the marketplace forces every player to attempt efforts at being on the cutting edge. This is the kind of thing that will speed up adoption of new technologies across the landscape as a whole and will help the open web become a strong contender for the future of computing. Technologies like HTML5, CSS3, WebAudio, and WebGL are helping the web become more operating system-like and, as such, increase its chances at becoming a strong player on any platform.

Roadmap 2025

But looking at today and looking forward, we are seeing a marketplace that is increasingly fragmented. So what’s a startup with limited resources to do? Should one put all their eggs in a single basket and bet on a single platform? Should a company look at introducing fewer features across all platforms, spreading their product roadmap over a longer timeline? Or should developers go to the lowest common denominator and target through the web browser?

The answer is it’s complicated but, at its core, one needs to think about what is needed to move the company forward and get it to reach early measurement markers while still focusing on the future.

At Keepskor, we call that Roadmap 2025.

I know it sounds extremely ambitious for a company to think to 2025 when it doesn’t yet have a product in the marketplace. But the issue for most startup is not ambition but the lack of such thing. By focusing on Roadmap 2025, we get a sense of how the marketplace is evolving and how we want our product to evolve accordingly. Frequent readers of TNL.net know that this column is not really concerned about the next few months and tends to focus more on the underlying cultural and business trends that can have decade-long impacts. This is why things like the impact of DVRs on the television business were discussed here over a decade ago, or more recently, I looked at what challenges existed for books and television. The 2025 consumer market will be impacted by those changes and the way in which applications designed on the internet interact with that will also be impacted. As will the dominant platforms, one of which, we hope, will be Keepskor.

But how does a Roadmap 2025 look in the present? Well, put quite simply, the present is an early alpha. The minimum viable product the marketplace will accept for something much larger. But the MVP for a platform that will exist in 2025 is substantially bigger than the MVP for a simple app. And building it requires higher levels of abstraction than a normal product. For example, no one really knows what the winning front-ends will be in 2025. What we know is that they will be different than the ones we are used to today. So we design our platform to ensure that input and outputs are separated from everything else. In the short run, this creates an added layer of translation that increases latency (measured in milliseconds) to every transactions but a slowdown we consider acceptable for now.

Iterate backwards

The basic agile method of development looks to scrums that are moving the product forward in an iterated fashion, tackling one component or another over short cycles. The level of clarity as to what will happen in the next scrums is generally dependent on how far forward you’re looking as each scrum can move a product to the adjacent possible. In a long roadmap model, one iterates backward. For example, if you are looking at what your product looks like in 2025, do you know what it looks like in 2024? You may have a rough idea as to how the product should evolve along the way. Maybe you get a sense of what it looks like in 2020 or 2015?

I call this backwards iteration. Move from the ideal state and start planting base camps backwards. It’s a strategy I learned from long-distance skating (I’ve done runs of up to 65 miles on a single day). No one wins a long distance race by focusing on the end point. The win is only by focusing on the next 100 yards and iterating those forward. But before you do so, you need to have a sense of what you need to do by each of those 100 yard markers. And that means considering how tired you will be and how much slower you will be at the end of the race and working backwards to assess the best balance of expanding and depleting energy vs. yards won.

In a business, this allows you to build a model that is pretty accurate for the first couple of years, and only mildly less so afterwards. It also allows you to go back to the roadmap when major events happen and identify whether they will have any impact on your business (and if they do, whether this impact needs to be mitigated now, and can be mitigated by moving an item forward in the roadmap).

From a communication standpoint, it also makes it easier for people getting involved in your business to get a sense of where you’re looking to go. This may mean that some investors are not interested because they don’t buy into your vision (and that’s OK because those investors would be an issue further down the road if you’re still going down some of the same paths) and also means that some people will not be interested in joining the company because they don’t agree with the steps moving forward. I consider that early filtering as it ensures that your company gets proper buy-in from all stakeholders, thus lowering the chances that employees will leave once they are fully committed.

Study the past, understand the future

But a roadmap 2025 plan is not something that one pulls completely out of thin air. What it is, more than anything, is a set of assumptions based on close study of part events. For example, the majority of the Keepskor roadmap can be explained by events that have already happened. This grounding in history and historical trends helps us ground the business into models that have been proven to work in the past and which, when combined, turn out to be substantially bigger than the initial ideas.

When looking more closely at history, I get a sense that most areas of history have some cyclical component to them, with a pendulum swinging in one direction or the other but always moving us forward ultimately. The study of previous cycles is probably the greatest tool one has in understanding what the future can look like.

However, there is one thing to note: The distant future is easier to prognosticate than the closer one because things actually do change at a much slower pace than most would expect. In the 1990s many dotcommers, present company included, made what looked like wild statements about the future and how the internet would change everything. Circa 1999 and certainly in 2001, those seemed like crazy pronouncements but, in hindsight, the world we described as coming to bear at the turn of the century is pretty much the world we live in today: the revolution has just taken longer to take hold.

A personal note

For years, people have asked me why I was writing TNL.net as I didn’t seem to derive any real income from it and the things I wrote about were, on the whole, only tangentially related to what I do. Over the last year, I’ve come to discover that the writing of TNL.net is a somewhat selfish act. First, it allows me to crystallize a lot of my own thinking: the process of writing and editing an entry forces me to focus on a topic area very closely. It also forces me to review source material and historical data to ground and inform my thinking. And then, there’s the part where you, the reader, enter. Your emails or discussion help me get a better sense of some of the flaw in my argument.

Update: I generally start writing early in the week and fill the entry up over time until it gets published on Sunday evening. This week, Fred Wilson posted “Long Roadmaps”, a great entry that covers some of the same ground. I guess there must be something in the air here in NYC that gets us to think about those things.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The long view. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The tech world is abuzz at the news that Google may start providing cable television service in the United States but there could be several challenges to their efforts as incumbents may have issues with this intrusion and may block them by withholding popular fares.

Economics of the TV business

To understand the challenges Google may front in entering the cable TV business, one must first understand that TV is not a monolithic entity but an ecosystem, with players in a number of different areas. At the beginning of the chain are the show producers, who develop TV properties, either on their own or with economic participation from a distributor. Then there are distributors, what we traditionally know as TV channels, who package groups of TV shows aiming at a particular demographic segment and then offer this up to advertisers as a way to reach a particular type of audience. This is traditionally what people think when they think of TV.

But in order for those TV shows to make their way to the end users, they need to travel to consumers’ TV screens, which themselves are controlled by a different set of aggregators, who put together groups of TV shows in order to attract consumers. In order to do so, they must pay the TV channels what is known as a carry or transmission fee, which depends on the popularity of a TV station and is negotiated individually between those aggregators and the companies that own the TV channels. Those aggregators are often known as cable companies or satellite TV companies. But there are also what are know as the TV networks (the big 4 networks are ABC (owned by Disney), NBC (owner by Comcast), CBS (owned by Viacom), and Fox (owned by News Corp.)), which are aggregates of local TV stations who deliver their wares locally over the air and negotiate carrying on cable separately.

Over the years, there have been fierce battle between the content players and content carriers over such fees, leading, for example, to TV stations not being available on certain cable channels as pressuring tactics during negotiations. Part of the reason is that some of the content players are now also owned by content carriers, leading to situations where large conglomerates that own both carriers and creators look to get an advantage by forcing higher transmission fees on their competitors.

Who are the big content owners?

Outside of the big 4 TV networks, it is hard to find data about who the biggest players in the content market are. Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that most ratings are based on the concept of shows and not on the aggregation of those shows. Last year, The Daily Beast put together an interesting list of what they considered the most valuable cable properties in the USA:

Looking at this, an interesting trend emerges: it becomes pretty clear that there is a high level of concentration in the hands of a few players. Of the top 25 owners, the list looks like this:

 Who are the big content carriers?

The next question to ask in order to understand what other players Google would have to compete with in order to succeed in the TV ecosystem requires a look at the distributors. Outside of the big 4 networks, the list of the top 10 cable and satellite TV companies looks as follows:

What’s interesting here is that we start seeing some overlap between some content owners and content carriers. Comcast, Time-Warner and Cablevision all have channels in the top 25.

Owner and distributors

But then you have to overlay the TV networks to get a fuller sense of where we sit in the content landscape. So we look at whether companies own networks, cable stations in the top 25 or both:

So, of the top 4 national networks and top 25 TV stations, all networks are owned by large distributors who also have ownership of some of the most popular cable networks. Of the top 25 cable networks, a surprising 17 (68 percent) are owned by content carriers.

Why you can’t legally get content online

The current content carriers have been eyeing the internet with some level of worry as internet protocols tend to turn what they impact into a commodity: we’ve seen that scenario happen for landline phone service (VOIP won those out) and music (offerings like iTunes and Pandora, decimated the music industry margins); We’ve also seen many other industries get decimated by contact with the Internet. How many travel agency were closed as a result of online travel booking becoming easier? How many stock brokerage firms found themselves competing with inexpensive online brokerage accounts. The internet has become a great equalizer and many of the incumbents are seeing this as a potential problem.

This is part of the reason offerings like Hulu or Netflix do not include recent shows in their offerings. It’s also why Google may have a hard time in its negotiations with TV content owners. Their corporate owners would probably welcome Google with less than open arms. The general view in many of those companies is that they do not want to be discounted as mere pipes and they will use their hold on content to ensure that the most favored pipes the content is running on is their own. To see a new player enter the market is, to them, an unwelcome feeling.

A different approach

But that feeling is one that is largely out of touch with the times. Increasingly, content consumers are looking to the internet as the place to go for content and the bundling of pipes with content is losing some of its allure. The first level of aggregation being created there may, in the end, be a losing strategy as the price of carrying content will continue to drop and, eventually, one of the players in the market will be smart enough to realize that they can gain market share by offering a lower cost alternative to consumers. We’ve seen that scenario in other countries; For example, in France, Free has emerged as one of the dominant providers of phone, TV, and internet service, on such a strategy.

Meanwhile, the content owners (the channels) have to realize they are sitting on pretty hot properties and should start offering online streaming of their stations for a fee. Today, they charge the distributors, who pass the fee on to the customer. But learning about their end users could be valuable for them if they were to go to direct charging for online streaming.

In a world where the most expensive basic cable channels fetches $4.08 per month, a content owner could easily charge $7.50 per channel for online streaming and make as much money than they currently are.

Many people may think “how is $7.50 the same as $4.08? Where did the other $3.42 go?” In the scenario I envision, the other $3.42 would go to building out and maintaining the infrastructure required for online streaming. I deliberately went with a high number to dismiss the argument that costs are too high to justify such an offering. I suspect the number would be truly be lower and eventually could lead to a $5 per month offering (also, remember that most channels do not get as much money as ESPN does so their offering could be adjusted downwards too.

Today, customers are paying a premium for channels they may or may not watch. By offering streaming for a fee, content owner could open up a dialogue with end customers that lets the free market decide which channels live and which ones die. But today, those same companies are using near-monopoly franchises in one field (distribution) to subsidize another… and internet live streaming of their stations could threaten that monopoly.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title No live TV streams: Here’s why?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Mark Andreesen and the IMG tag

The evening of February 23, 1993 was mostly unremarkable around the internet. But on that evening, a brash young man by the name of Marc Andreessen sent an email that would drastically alter the course of history. In order to fully understand what happens there, one has to think of the internet prior to that day.

Before that message made its way through several mail servers, the internet was a mostly text-based medium. HTML, the source code for the web, may have linked to images but the idea of mixing images and text was not part of the internet experience. In fact, the idea of mixing anything just didn’t exist: a movie stayed a movie and was linked to independently but embedding it into a page was a concept that would not come to fruition until several years later.

Sound, images, moving images, text were all living in separate silos. Yes, they could be linked to but they mostly worked as dead ends as they could not move forward from there (think of a browser that would link images instead of having them embedded into the page and when you got to that image, your only available navigation would be to move back). And because they were mostly dead ends, they forced the web into a relatively hierarchical model. Text was free to cross-link but other media were not.

Andreesen’s stance was that they would implement the tag as proposed and were sending it to be discussed as part of a future implementation of the HTML standard (remember that, at that time, HTML was not yet a standard).

Netscape proprietary approach and forward motion

A few years later, Andreesen would continue on the same course with the company he co-founded, Netscape, pushing for new extensions to the HTML standard and then extending the browser even further. With every new browser introduction, Netscape would push out new features.

With much of the internet being widely open and standard-based, Netscape’s introduction of new things at a fast and furious rate rankled some of the early maintainers of the web. There was widespread worry that Netscape was “breaking” the web through its use of non-standard implementation. Among some of the things Netscape would introduce over this period would be things we cannot imagine not existing on the web.

For example, Netscape was the first to introduce web-cookies, which not only gave rise to the kind of tracking that most of the advertising industry relies on but also simplified and sped up the way in which pages could be customized or logins were remembered.

https, which is used to ensure that communication between your web browser and a remote server is encrypted so no one can break into it, was another such innovation, which gave rise to e-commerce and e-banking.

And then, there’s Javascript. In December 1995, Netscape announced Javascript as a programming language for the web that could run either on a server (but only on Netscape’s brand of web servers) or on the client. The world of programming was in a furor over the announcement, calling the language a horrible kludge and generally being unhappy that they had not been consulted to make the language more pure.

Every step of the way, developers started adopting Netscape’s innovation, giving rise to sites showing a “Best viewed with Netscape” icon. This, in turn, led the Netscape browser to be the most used web browser on the Internet, at some point being used for nearly every 8 or 9 out of 10 web page views on the internet.

Most of Netscape’s inclusions eventually made it into other browsers as they tried to capture market share from Netscape, and eventually, most of those innovation were standardized, ensuring their continuation moving forward. Netscape’s leadership and willingness to stand up to the rest of the industry in order to move forward may have eventually led to its death as a company but its impact is still felt daily.

Microsoft and AJAX

One of the companies that tried to mimic Netscape’s strategy was Microsoft. In order to make its web browser, Internet Explorer, more relevant to developers, Microsoft tried to introduce changes that were mostly proprietary to its web browser. Among those was a technology called ActiveX, which was Microsoft’s proprietary approach to plug-ins. Trying to differentiate its Office suite and Exchange server, Microsoft introduced the XMLHTTP ActiveX component, which allowed web applications to become much more interactive, in 1999.

Whether it was hatred of Microsoft or lack of awareness, the technology did not really get widespread adoption until Jesse James Garrett named the technology AJAX, for Asynchronous Javascript And XML.

The lesson in this is that to break a standard is not enough to get things moving forward. A way to brand that standard so it becomes easily understandable to a wider public goes a long way to garnering support for new technologies, whether they are standardized or not.

HTML5 needs a posse

Previous history points to progress on the web being largely made because people were willing to take a stand and move things forward, standards be damned. But it seems that few are willing to move things forward in a drastic way. To date, complete support for existing standards has been a challenge and it seems there is some level of calcification around breaking new ground.

The wonderful set of underlying technologies making the core of what we know as HTML5 may not be perfect but it’s the best thing we have so instead of crying about the poor implementation of this or that component, instead of asking why it’s missing certain pieces, let’s go out, as developers and stretch the limits of what is possible in a browser.

Break new ground and break old browser. Once you’ve done so, ask the others to implement the features you’re leveraging.

To implement in a standard-compliant way may be smart if you want to cater to the masses but if you want your app to be exceptional, you have to be willing to take the hits. Go ahead and break new ground by looking forward instead of staying to the shores of yesterday’s standard compliance.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Pushing beyond standardization. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What is WebGL?

At its most basic level, WebGL represents a set of extensions to JavaScript that allows developers to write code that can use the processing power of a user’s computer to create 3D graphics that update in real time. The standard is supported by Apple, Google and the Mozilla foundation but Microsoft has not yet lent its support to the nascent standard (I suspect it’s only a question of time as most of the browser world has announced support for the format). Today, you need a fairly recent computer and the latest version of either the Chrome, Mozilla, or Opera web browser.

The applications can now run and modify fairly complex 3D web-based applications. This is going to be a huge boon for online games, as can be witnessed from early examples like the recent implementations of web-based versions of Quake and X-wing, and also have substantial other uses. For example, the Google body browser allows users to get a better sense of how the human body works and someone put together a very convincing webgl photo editor that can handle a substantial amount of the basic image editing needs most people have. In science, a lot of representation can now be fred so scientist can experiment with different views of the data on an experiment.

In the future, one could see a lot of data set being presented in 3D using this technology, with the ability to access and manipulate data in real-time and see rich representations of that data immediately.

The bigger picture

For a long time, web applications have been limited to running within the context of a browser and thus sandboxed away from the rest of the operating system. With WebGL, we’re seeing that barrier broken down for the first time and is creating a precedent for the future growth of web applications.

In a way, this is an interesting return to ideas that existed almost 15 years ago. Back then, Microsoft was interested in merging their browser with the operating system. Early alpha versions of IE 7.0 actually had a deeper level of integration with Windows but fears around anti-trust regulations led the company to pull those extensions out.

To open up the web to deeper level of integrations with lower level processes could mean a variety of new possibilities. While web applications have long been limited by the browser sandbox, webGL now opens the door for a substantially improved experience as it gives the web access to a lot of the power that has been resident on users’ desktops. For a couple of decades, the web has been sipping that power through a straw but with WebGL, it’s as if the straw had been replaced by a firehose when it comes to graphic processing power.

For almost two decades now, many people have tried to make 3D on the web a reality (a little known fact, for example, is that Mike McCue, the man behind TellMe and now Flipboard, got his web start with a plugin that allowed the Netscape browser to display complex 3-D models) but many of those effort failed. A large reason for those early failure was that the different solutions presented were often limited to what the web browser could handle and until recently, it was considered a big no-no for the browser to access any low level processes.

But a few entrepreneurs had a more long term vision. In the 1990s, Marc Andreessen quipped that his browser would reduce the Windows operating system to “a set of poorly debugged device drivers”. While many have laughed this off as bravura on the part of a young man (he was in his 20s then), the concept of the web browser as central to computing experience is no laughing matter and it appears that the browser is now getting to that point where it could truly reduce operating systems to what he had envisioned in the 90s.

While 3D processing is but one frontier being broken by WebGL, it is an important one because, for the first time, web browsers are given access to low level processing without requiring plug-ins or authorization from the end-user. This will, of course, represent a set of new security challenges as code that is interpreted by 3D rendering engine gets pretty close to the heart of the machine (and traditionally, the code that has been allowed this privilege has been tightly controlled at the distribution channel level, with 3D gaming being mostly manufactured and distributed by a few people. By contrast, the whole web is mostly open to everyone with few or no limitations, opening it up as a potential attack vector).

Now that this frontier has been broken (and one could say that the door was initially opened when HTML5 was allowed to do geolocation), imagine what some of the next offerings that will build on this precedent could bring: in the future, we could see web applications being allowed to access cameras, microphones, accelerometers, and other parts of electronic devices across all web browsers. This could mean that applications that now run on your desktop could truly break free from that format and run exclusively from the web.

In the past few years, the idea of breaking down applications into smaller and smaller components to be distributed through an app store has taken hold of the computing industry, potentially challenging the idea of applications running from the web itself. With the rise of WebGL, the graphic rendering portion of those applications is something that now has accomplished feature parity. Sound will be next and access to device components will probably follow.

Web applications’ future has been challenged by apps and the web has answered the challenge, allowing for a set of offerings that will be richer and will present themselves in a way that will make it hard to differentiate between a native and a web application, Eventually, we will see WebGL being implemented on mobile devices browsers (the processing power is there and I suspect it’s something we will see appearing within a couple of years), radically reshaping the web app vs. store app debate.

With WebGL, we’re seeing a future that renders the web exciting again. It’s a technology worth keeping and eye on. Now may not be the time to develop on it (unless you’re developing web-based games for computers) but within the next 12–24 months, it is a skill that will be required of most Javascript developers.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title WebGL and the future of the web. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Demands

At its core, it seems the message of Occupy Wall Street is one grounded in change. Much has been made about the lack of demands and the second issue of the “Occupied Wall Street Journal” seems to answer some of the questions: one article highlighted that they would not make a list of demands because

We are speaking to each other, and listening.
This occupation is first about participation.

This is an interesting development in that the focus here is on the network more than the leadership and, in that sense, Occupy Wall Street (or #OWS) is probably one of the first protest movement for our era, based on a leadership model that relies on networks instead of top down infrastructures, on participation instead of inaction, on sharing instead of agreeing.

Because of that model, #OWS is a rejection of the current institutions, with Wall Street probably serving as a stand-in for a lot of the top down hierarchies that have been controlling much of the political dialogue for decades. I had initially thought of them as being the left-wing equivalent to the right-wing led Tea Party but #OWS is substantially more important as a movement because it redefines engagement.

The movement is increasingly based on a simple message: “we are the 99 percent,” which highlights the movement’s right to exist and its willingness to find a way to help most. It ties, to a large extent to the American ideal of a country where we can always do better and, in that sense, seems to be politically aligned with every movement that has helped the country move forward in the past.

The Network

#OWS also reminds me a lot of the Internet and while most people focus on how the movement is using Internet tools to spread its message, what’s been interesting to me is how internet philosophy seems to be at the center of a lot of the movement’s approach to spreading its message.

Whether it is by design or not, the movement has taken an approach that is steeped into some of the core beliefs of the internet founders. For example, in 1993, John Gilmore was quoted by Time magazine as follows:

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

As the protest grows, it appears it has increasingly seen some of the laws as damaging and has managed to route around them.

For example, the protest was initially planning to set up camp near the JP Morgan Chase Tower but when it was turned back, it settled only a few blocks away, on a public/private park that happens to be open 24 hours a day (the status of public private open spaces has worked to the movement’s advantage as its usually hazy legal status, which is traditionally leveraged by corporations to justify locking things up is now one of the main reason for which the city cannot shut the protest down at this time).

Another example came earlier this week, when the owners of the park attempted to evict the protesters because it needed to clean the park, the protesters routed around the challenge by cleaning the park themselves.

And a third example is the practice of the human microphone, which allows the group to make announcements without the permits needed to operate amplifying equipment in a park. This ensures the group is able to make widespread announcements without breaking the law nor creating the possibility of having a permit denied, which may create a situation allowing the law to disband it.

Another way in which one can find similarities to the organizing principles of the internet, is the lack of leadership to define the movement. On the internet, no site has any precedence over any other, and no traffic is considered more important, thanks to a principle called net neutrality. This feature means that any point on the internet is as important as any other point on the internet in terms of moving traffic around. This has been dubbed the rise of stupid networks by David Isenberg, in comparison to the controlled environments of traditional telecommunication companies. Isenberg’s principles were derided by traditional network executives as simplistic and naive when they were first published but have come to become the way in which most telecommunication is happening today.

In the same way, the lack of leadership in the #OWS movement has been derided by the traditional powers that be, who have claimed that the group lacks organization because it fails to have the kind of command-control structure that has been the way things have been run over the last few centuries. The appropriate answer to that challenge is simply to ask about how a disorganized group could be accomplishing as much as this one is and extending as much as it has in as little an amount of time as it has.

Visiting Zucotti Park was a fascinating eye opener when it comes to self-organized systems. The park has communal planning with clearly delineated areas for living quarters, eating, communication, art, etc. There is also some level of organization around how the group manages its different activities, from direct actions to the internet. The leaderless feature seems to actually be an advantage for the environment as the chaos that exists consistently enables anyone to make logistical decisions quickly while matters of planning and speaking on behalf of the group require a substantial level of communication.

The lack of leaders seems to represent a substantial part of the clash between the police and the protesters. On one side, the police has a highly structured model and is trying to provoke the protesters into confrontation. A defining traits of the protests is how few people have taken the bait (it seems Gandhi’s principle of non-violent protest runs deep within the movement) and how many assaults and arrests the police seem to have pushed. It will be interesting to see if any charges will actually stick once they go through the legal system.

The protest

Where #OWS seems to have failed in leveraging internet technology is in the way it has spread its protests out. In the Tahir square confrontations earlier this year, the organizers decided to break their protests out in smaller protests all over the place. The goal there was to deal with the fact that each protest would get broken out and people would spread out from each of the small protests. What was not broadcast was that a smaller protest was designed completely offline to be fed by the breakout of all the other protests. The Tahir movement used Google Maps to then figure out the optimal path for that smaller protest so it could grow as each of the smaller ones was broken out, feeding into the main one.

#OWS has germinated into an occupy everywhere movement and continues to grow, with new protests arising daily. There appears to be some level of coordination globally, when it comes to dates and times but little is being done in terms of focused messaging for each effort.

The lack of central message has been the most frustrating part to traditional media. Media thrives on conflict and the lack of conflict has led most traditional outlets scratching their collective heads as to how to cover this. A few have focused on the police brutality but so far the protestors have done two things that are making it difficult for traditional media to cover them:

• They have refused to engage the police and have attempted to follow the letter of the law
• The have refused to take direct actions against any specific target other than “the system” as a whole.

Imagine what would happen if they decided to organize boycotts, as Bernie Sanders suggested. Imagine what would happen if, on a particular day, they were to announce that occupy wall street would “occupy” Wall Street by keeping them busy, due to a run on the banks, with hundreds or thousands of protesters pulling their money out of the largest banks and putting them into smaller community banks. Such a “run on the banks” would get wide coverage and probably provoke substantial confrontation, giving media a chance to deride the move as destabilizing. But the #OWS movement has been either smart enough or disorganized enough to avoid creating that kind of confrontation, which would probably lead it to either condemnation or failure.

If there seems to be a message behind the protest, it may that people still have the right to protest. A question I may have on this is how long this message can go on. It’s clear that people are unhappy (you don’t need to follow the antics of #OWS to understand that as poll numbers after poll numbers show discontent across the board) but what will come next?

To #OWS, it seems what is to come next is something better than what we have today. How one defines that is the secret to what this movement is about.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title An Occupation. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Will Google become the new Microsoft? Today, I present the case that would answer this in the affirmative.

A branding problem

Google has become synonymous with search and that was great for the company when search was its main business but with company growth came expansion into new markets like office suites, mobile, and video, the company may have a problem explaining what it brands stands for. John Battelle put it best last April:

you could argue that Google still means a great search environment. But the brand also means far more. It’s the brand which stands in opposition to the iPhone — the Android Pepsi to Apple’s Coke. The same is true in the office suite — Google Docs are the Pepsi to the Coke of Microsoft’s Office. Google Chrome? The Pepsi to Internet Explorer’s Coke. And there’s a ton more — photo sharing, blogging platforms, social networking, ecommerce solutions, enterprise platforms, media (YouTube, Knol, etc.).…well you get the picture.

And Google = Search doesn’t cover all that.

Google has grown to be much more than search in the same ways as Microsoft in the late 1990s had grown to be so much more than Windows and Office. And it is faced with the same difficulty of highlighting what its own brand stands for.

A messaging problem

Going beyond the brand, however, is also what sits at the core of Google’s message. Google’s mission, per its corporate site, is phrased as follows:

Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Under this model, where would something like Google+ fit? What about Google chat? They are social tools that provide a lot of value and should be part of Google’s offerings but neither of those tools really help organize the world’s information nor make it universally accessible and useful (for example, isn’t the whole point of circles in Google+ to limit access to information instead of making it universally accessible?)

Similarly, in 1997, Microsoft’s stated mission of a computer on every desk and in every classroom had failed to envision the rise of non-computer devices and created an on-going perception of Microsoft as a computer-centric company. While it has made tremendous inroads in the non-PC world (example: The XBox), the company still hasn’t been able to shed the image of Microsoft as a computer company, which may account for its difficulties in adapting and telling the world about its tablet and mobile devices ambitions.

So as Microsoft is mostly seen as a PC-centric company with a little extra stuff, Google is seen as a search-centric company with a little extra stuff.

Microsoft has retooled its mission statement with a noble, if hazy goal:

Our mission is to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.

To be honest, I’m not sure of how the Xbox and its accessories fit under that mission but it doesn’t matter as people have failed to even adopt this concept as embodying microsoft.

Hard time getting heard

The challenge that arises out of this messaging problem is that when new products are introduced, the early adopters have a hard time taking the effort seriously while the mainstream still looks to consume those new offerings. For example, a fair amount of skepticism has arisen in the tech community regarding Google’s effort in the social media space. Google+ was first seen as an interesting toy but soon lost the mindshare of early adopters. However, Google has opened the doors to the public and is growing its social network at an impressive pace.

That Google is failing to articulate how Google+ fits into its overall business is but one of the challenges it faces. With Facebook and Apple as the new darlings of the media and digerati set, Google’s attempt to be a more “social” company has been ridiculed by many, present company included and it has made it more difficult for Google’s nascent effort to be taken seriously.

In the same way, Microsoft’s early foray into the gaming world was seen as an odd pastime but something that would eventually be killed as only companies with names like Sony, Nintendo, or Sega could possibly understand that market. A decade later, it seems clear that Microsoft’s move was a brilliant one, putting it in a strong position in a more consumer focused market and reaping billions of dollars as a reward for that risky move.

While Apple often positions its new offerings as a radical departure from anything that existed before, companies like Microsoft and Google have been more focused on presenting their offerings as an evolution of things they’ve done before. But because people’s perceptions are grounded in the company’s respective monopolies, they have a hard time seeing the transition and dismiss the efforts as flawed.

Assaulted on all sides

The late 1990s might have been the top years for Microsoft: it had successfully completed one of the largest operating system transitions in history, and was starting to show progress on its internet effort. Internet Explorer, then in its 4th iteration, was finally seen as a serious contender to the dominating Netscape browser (at the time, Netscape commanded an 80–90% market share) and the company unveiled the XBOX in 2001. On the dark side, an on-going anti-trust lawsuit made its way through the court system, eventually forcing the company to make some drastic changes.

The next decade, however, saw the rise of web-based applications, mobiles and tablets, making the OS a less important part of the technology stack and thus pushing Microsoft to become a less crucial player in the industry.

It seems this decade will see a similar type of history repeating itself for Google.

Its search and advertising business are dominant today but Microsoft has made in-roads with Bing, its own search offering. Meanwhile, Apple may obviate the need for Google altogether with Siri as it introduced a radical new way to handle search on a mobile device (and with the majority of Google mobile searches coming from iOS devices, the search giant has to worry about this intrusion).

On the advertising front, Google’s database of intention, which leveraged search results to better target ads to consumers is being rivaled by Facebook’s social graph, which leverages what the social network knows about people and their friends to offer a new form of advertising that could be substantially more personalized than anything Google could offer. Meanwhile, other players are leveraging the information sharing of users on networks like Twitter and Facebook to get a better sense of user sentiment and target ads accordingly.

On the mobile end, Google has established its operating system as the top one by number of handsets being manufactured but risks abound as the company is looking to acquire Motorola, one of Android the device manufacturers. This acquisition will most definitely have a chilling effect (and people at some of Motorola’s competitors have said as much behind closed doors), giving Apple a chance to expand its own market share into a domineering position or giving Microsoft a chance to relaunch its mobile offerings in a way that would first make it a viable third player and eventually could lead it to become one of the top 2 players (note that Apple’s position, as far as I see it, will not be threatened).

In video, Netflix and Amazon are increasing their collections, offering quality content at a low price and therefore putting some potential pressure on YouTube. As more general content become available, it could be that YouTube will have more difficulties growing.

Then, there is the matter of being treated as a monopoly. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before someone finds a reason to bend government regulators ears as to how Google abused its power in the search business. It won’t matter whether the allegations are true (as it didn’t matter when Microsoft was accused of abusing its monopoly position), once the claims are made and the lawsuits are launched, the perception of the company as a big bad wolf will be forever cemented.

Meanwhile, Google will continue making large amounts of money (probably billions) on its current offering but may find it hard to show the general public how it is relevant today. A question regarding its future success will however find its root in whether Google can continue to be relevant in the online advertising business (it is, after all, its core business) or find new revenue lines to replace declining advertising revenue. The answer to  THAT question will define Google’s future.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Google is the new Microsoft. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The end of an era. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

A smaller book industry

Few people know that books are generally sold at a substantially lower cost than the printed one on the cover. I worked in a bookstore a long time ago (back in the pre-internet days) and books were then sold to bookstores for about half the cover price. I think what we’re now seeing is that e-books are sold by bookmakers at about the same price as they were before but it seems that less will be required to make and distribute books moving forward.

People who are currently employed managing the production and distribution of physical books will not be as essential as they once were. With fewer printed books going out the door, fewer people are needed to set the printers up, to provide ink, to make paper, to store books into warehouses for shipping, and to bring the books from one physical location to another. Book chains, which have worked as supermarkets for books will no longer be needed as printed books will only be sought after by people who want their book store to be staffed with like-minded people who care about books. While the independent bookstores will thrive again, the people who treated books as just another widget will mostly disappear from the book production value chain, with no new jobs to replace the ones that were displaced.

In other words, the industry of book creation and production is about to get radically smaller.

Distribution Concentration

A few weeks ago, I highlighted that a market-changing tablet would probably be priced in the $200–250 range so there is no doubt in my mind that Amazon, with its Kindle Fire will succeed in the marketplace. What I do worry about, however, is that the rise of e-reader is something that will leave control of mass market book distribution in the hands of only a few players: Apple, Amazon, and maybe Barnes & Noble (if they survive).

Longtime readers of TNL.net know that I worry about the lock-down of the internet by corporate entities. In my view, the openness of the internet has been a key to the explosion in innovation over the last couple of decades and the internet may be reaching an important crossroad.

But with the rise of e-readers, that debate may become substantially more urgent. If we are dealing with most of the public getting its content through devices that are controlled by a few companies, we may regress to a point where control of information will be substantially tighter. We already know, from recent history, that the government can ask TV stations to be “more careful” in its coverage, leaving a country in a state of war with few images about the sacrifices made by our armed forces. In a future when distribution of most reading material is concentrated in the hands of a few companies, and distribution of other media is also in the hands of a few conglomerates, should we worry about potential censorship?

What about readers?

And what will happen to readers. Anyone who has had school-aged children has learned that an important way to improve reading is to read at home. But in a world where e-readers are multi-purpose devices that can also be used to watch TV and movies or play games, how will parent send their kids the signal that they are reading? And will kids take use of laptops and tablets as signs that the printed word is dead?

Today, it is easy to curl up with a good book and send kids a clear signal that book reading is a form of entertainment. Little mimics that they are, children start reading their own books as a result and I’ve noticed that families that read have children that read and the inverse is true. If reading is an important part of education and growing, allowing kids to build up their understanding of the world, their literacy, and their imagination and creativity, what will happen if children don’t read?

Will future generations only consume video and audio content with little or no interest in printed materials? And, if that is the case, where will the printed words that sit as the scaffolding for video and audio come from? Those are all troubling questions for which I have no answer but, in a world where physical books will become the domain of the few, they could become questions with large societal impact.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title E-reader impact. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.