Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

21st century problem: “Who inherits your iTunes library?”

Posted on by

If you have made a will, don’t forget to include your digital music and ebooks:

Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.

And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. “I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,” says Evan Carroll, co-author of “Your Digital Afterlife.” “Legally dividing one account among several heirs would also be extremely difficult.”

Part of the problem is that with digital content, one doesn’t have the same rights as with print books and CDs. Customers own a license to use the digital files—but they don’t actually own them…

Most digital content exists in a legal black hole. “The law is light years away from catching up with the types of assets we have in the 21st Century,” says Wheatley-Liss. In recent years, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Indiana, Oklahoma and Idaho passed laws to allow executors and relatives access to email and social networking accounts of those who’ve died, but the regulations don’t cover digital files purchased.

Another reason to buy the physical version if you really like the music or book.

Thinking more broadly, this extends to a whole host of digital content. What happens to your Facebook information if you die? Your Dropbox account? Accessing your email? Stories about these circumstances tend to stress the lack of formal legal or corporate agreement of what should be done. How about a “dead digital user bill or rights”?

Sociologist: even the homeless need a phone to access social network sites

Posted on by

Here is an example of how prevalent social networking sites have become: a sociologist argues the homeless need a smart phone to be able to access such sites.

Art Jipson, an associated sociology professor at the University of Dayton, says the homeless may not have a place to live, but the one possession that’s becoming somewhat indispensable is a phone to connect on social networks.

“Our posts become the commercial property of corporations that will do everything possible to generate revenue in the form of value for the company and stockholders rather than for the users,” Jipson said. “But, for homeless users of social media – which is a growing population – the value is for the online community itself, which is very egalitarian.”Jipson’s inspiration for the project came by happenstance. Also a researcher of the sociology of music, Jipson has a weekly radio show on the campus radio station, WUDR. When Jipson asked for one caller’s name and location, he was surprised to find the caller was homeless but has a cell phone. Jipson later contacted the caller and found he used the phone for social media – checking and writing messages on Facebook and Twitter.

He also found Facebook was necessary to solve practical problems — the next meal or a warm place to sleep.

He also found homeless people who are tired of defending the fact they’ve got a cellphone.

This makes sense as access to information and online communities is quite helpful today. The homeless aren’t the only ones who need this these tools: recent studies have shown that some users even have physical withdrawal symptoms if they don’t have their smart phones with them.

I wonder if we could take this further and ask where smart phones or Internet devices rank on the list of necessary items for life today. Water, food, shelter, clothes…and then something that allows you to connect to the Internet? I suppose you need electricity (unless someone invents some endless batteries) before you can have functioning devices…

 

Buying followers on Twitter

Posted on by

The New York Times examines the market for buying followers on Twitter:

The practice is surprisingly easy. A Google search for “buy Twitter followers” turns up dozens of Web sites like USocial.net, InterTwitter.com, and FanMeNow.com that sell Twitter followers by the thousands (and often Facebook likes and YouTube views). At BuyTwitterFollow.com, for example, users simply enter their Twitter handle and credit card number and, with a few clicks, see the ranks of their followers swell in three to four days…

“And it’s so cheap, too,” he said. In one instance, Mr. Mitchell said, he bought 250,000 for $2,500, or a penny each…

Twitter followers are sold in two ways: “Targeted” followers, as they are known in the industry, are harvested using software that seeks out Twitter users with similar interests and follows them, betting that many will return the favor. “Generated” followers are from Twitter accounts that are either inactive or created by spamming computers — often referred to as “bots.”

When numbers are taken as a measure of success or popularity, why should we be surprised by this? It is also interesting that people figured out how to discover the fake followers. Here is what one tool revealed:

If accurate, the number of fake followers out there is surprising. According to the StatusPeople tool, 71 percent of Lady Gaga’s nearly 29 million followers are “fake” or “inactive.” So are 70 percent of President Obama’s nearly 19 million followers.

So if paying for followers is supposed to boost status, could discovering that they have a lot of fake followers reduce their status? Lady Gaga is frequently cited as having the most Twitter followers; how would her brand be reduced if that wasn’t really true?

I am struck by the contrast with Facebook. While the term “friends” has been roundly panned, it does denote a stronger relationship than “follower.” Facebook users tend to look down on other users who accumulate too many friends. After all, Dunbar’s number suggests we can only have 150 friends in the offline world. Perhaps Facebook got this more right than Twitter…

Illustrating the issues of food, technology, and human interaction at Chipotle

Posted on by

Chipotle has clearly staked its place as a progressive fast food restaurant (though they would claim they are between fast food and sit-down restaurants) with no antibiotic meat and organic fillings but it too struggles with some basic issues present in today’s economy: how much should companies rely on human employees versus using cheaper technology?

Like others in similar positions, he’s got a wide palette of gee-whiz technologies at his disposal — tablets for ordering, mobile payment systems, in-store ATM-like machines for ordering that replace cashiers. Yet he eschews most of them. He’s in no rush for tech to dramatically change the Chipotle experience at its more than 1,300 stores worldwide.

He hasn’t found the perfect solution yet. And, besides, he likes the human interaction.

That said, Chipotle, based here, happens to have a wildly popular app, a free tool that shows you where the nearest location is and lets you order and pay on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Nearly 5 million customers have signed up since 2010 and use the app to go straight to the front of the line to pick up their orders…

But that’s about as far as he wants to go. A future where all orders are made digitally?

“I hope not,” Crumpacker says. “I hope the experience of coming into Chipotle and ordering on the line is substantially superior to ordering on the phone. There’s all this communication as you watch what’s being made.”…

Meanwhile, Crumpacker hopes his next in-store tech play is a mobile payment system so customers can shave a few seconds off the checkout process by paying for menu items on smartphones. He’d like to see a standard on all phones that would support his in-store system…

“Consumers go to restaurants to be served,” she says. “The human element is part of the restaurant experience.”

This is an interesting explanation of the restaurant experience: people like the human element of service (though they are clearly paying for it). I suspect this may not really be the human element that people enjoy about restaurants. How many people really enjoy interacting with the waitstaff and other employees versus the opportunity the setting provides to interact with those at the table and to be part of and observe the social scene taking place around them. This could be a big difference between the Chipotle experience and eating at an urban cafe: Chipotles are often located in suburban settings where one may be able to sit outside or look outside but the primary view is of parking lots and speeding cars. In contrast, a full service restaurant offers more of a scene, particularly if located in a more urban setting where there is a mix of activities. Perhaps we need a sociological experiment to tease this out. Such an experiment could be based on a three by two table: fully mechanical food delivery versus human preparation (Chipotle) versus full service and then placed in a more dull setting versus a more happening location.

The article makes mention of Chipotle’s dropping stock price since mid-summer and I wonder if this is what will ultimately force the chain’s hand: if they need to demonstrate higher earnings and labor costs are too high, technology might be the way to close this gap. Or what might happen if Chipotle employees start demanding higher wages and/or more benefits? At that point, perhaps human interaction simply becomes too expensive, a luxury, as consumers might miss being served but would also not like to pay higher prices.

More on Twitter co-founder and his teardown vs. neighbors in San Francisco

Posted on by

I recently wrote about Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’ fight with his San Francisco neighbors over his proposed teardown McMansion. Here is more information about the story:

“We don’t want nouveau riches McMansions sprouting up all over our ridges,” one resident wrote to San Francisco’s Planning Department.

And here, at least, is one local example of the side-effect of a tech boom that the city has fought hard to fuel. San Francisco worked hard in particular to convince Twitter to keep its headquarters in town in hopes that it would amp up the tech scene north of Silicon Valley. Williams, who is 40, was Twitter’s CEO before stepping down in 2010 to support more tech startups…

The strife started after Williams and Lundberg Design, the design firm hired by Williams, contacted neighbors about the couple’s plans. A couple of longtime residents quickly began circulating a handwritten flyer around the neighborhood, decrying the “APPALLING” plan to demolish a “widely coveted, unique and historic (to most) house.”

“TEAR DOWN is NEEDLESS, WASTEFUL, POLLUTION, DISRESPECTFUL,” the flyer said in all caps. It asked people to send in one letter per person if possible because “volume counts.”…

Williams isn’t alone in his neighborhood woes. Other high tech moguls have run into opposition from neighbors, including late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who was trying to demolish a Woodside property and rebuild as well, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who sued his Pacific Heights neighbors last year for their overgrown trees. Ellison’s Pacific Heights residence was, coincidentally, designed by Lundberg Design.

Sounds quite contentious. The columnist suggests San Francisco might have to change a little if it wants to keep important firms; what if the Twitter co-founder threatened to move away, taking away tax revenue and jobs? Communities compete against each other by offering tax breaks or other incentives so couldn’t corporations and their leaders make stipulations about housing issues?

Employers to applicants: not being a member of Facebook means you are suspicious

Posted on by

Beware job applicants: not having a Facebook account could cast suspicion on you.

On a more tangible level, Forbes.com reports that human resources departments across the country are becoming more wary of young job candidates who don’t use the site.

The common concern among bosses is that a lack of Facebook could mean the applicant’s account could be so full of red flags that it had to be deleted…

It points out that Holmes, who is accused of killing 12 people and an unborn child and wounding 58 others at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and Breivik, who murdered  77 people with a car bomb and mass shooting, did not use Facebook and had small online footprints…

And this is what the argument boils down to: It’s the suspicion that not being on Facebook, which has become so normal among young adults, is a sign that you’re abnormal and dysfunctional, or even dangerous, ways.

Facebook is the new normal, but the idea that people not on Facebook are necessarily suspicious is a gross overgeneralization, particularly when tied to just two tragedies. I can imagine a variety of good reasons for being a nonuser that doesn’t indicate one is a psychopath.

The interest employers have in Facebook certainly is interesting. I blogged a while back about some employers wanting the password of applicants so they could look over their profiles. How does looking at a profile stack up against other ways of getting information such as reading a resume, doing a background check, and checking references?

 

Facebook’s company town gets a new Main Street

Posted on by

Disneyland has its own Main Street, Walt Disney’s vision of idyllic small-town American life, and now Facebook’s campus is getting its own version:

Unlike the days of Henry Ford and George Pullman, when industrialists built towns surrounding manufacturing operations, Facebook is bringing retail shops onto its sprawling private campus on the outskirts of Menlo Park where there are few commercial establishments other than fast-food joints.

The company is subsidizing the construction; handpicked merchants will offer discounted prices to employees.

“It is the 21st century company town,” said Silicon Valley futurist Paul Saffo, managing director of foresight at investment research firm Discern Analytics…

But Facebook had to come up with new carrots when it moved its headquarters a few months ago to a suburban outpost at the edge of tidal mud flats and salt marshes cut off from the rest of Menlo Park by a six-lane highway. It’s so isolated that when former tenant Sun Microsystems occupied it, the campus was nicknamed “Sun Quentin.”…

“It’s just a great perk: ‘My company has created a little city for me,’ ” said Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile, coauthor of “The Progress Principle,” who studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance.

The comparison to company towns is fascinating: as I remember it, these towns didn’t last long. Pullman, for example, might have been viewed as efficient but workers ended up seeing it as paternalistic. So why exactly is this “21st century company town” strictly a perk – because Facebook is cool? Because the jobs don’t include manual labor manufacturing work and are creative class jobs that pay well? Because Facebook is reclaiming this brownfield of sprawl? Couldn’t the Main Street be viewed as controlling and an inducement to ask people to work even longer hours?

Two other quick questions:

1. What would happen if employees didn’t like the Main Street, stopped going, or started protesting? It is company property so I assume activities are somewhat restricted though a company like this doesn’t want to alienate all of their workers.

2. It is interesting that Americans like to hearken back to small town life even when we as a country have rapidly moved to an urban (and often decentralized) landscape. Is this Main Street more like a theme park, akin to Disneyland? Perhaps Facebook should start including some dormitories so that Main Street could have more activity around the clock.

Quick Review: Alone Together

Posted on by

I finally got around to reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together after hearing about it from another friend. Here are some thoughts about this book that explores our relationship with technology.

1. I’m generally sympathetic to Turkle’s arguments that we need to think more about what technology does to our lives. If you were to sum up her argument, it would look something like this: we need to make sure we master technology rather than letting it master us. It may offer some benefits but it also has downsides and we have a choice to make.

2. Turkle has a fascinating background in studying human interaction with robots, everything from Furbys and Tamogatchis to robots intended for care for the elderly. I think she does a strong job in her discussion about using robots to care for the elderly: do we want to be a society where fellow humans don’t want to care for people because it is more efficient to use robots? As Turkle suggests, discussions about technology shouldn’t just be about efficiency; we need to weigh the lost human component.

3. Some critiques:

a. Turkle talks about phenomena that don’t apply to everyone and then implies that it could happen to everyone. Take Second Life as an example. Turkle discusses the implications of people creating alternative personas that end up not just providing an outlet for people to try to improve themselves (say by learning to be more assertive) but become preferred alternatives to human interactions. Second Life is indeed a unique space and maybe such spaces could become more common but it has remained relatively limited. According to Wikipedia: “In November 2010, 21.3 million accounts were registered…” Compared to Facebook and other programs, this is a drop in the bucket. And it doesn’t exactly work this way in Facebook – while users clearly have and take advantage of space to present themselves in a certain light, they don’t typically create complete alter egos and their profiles still contain some truth.

b. I felt Turkle could stress the positives of technology more. It is interesting that she admits that she too has given in to these things such as using Skype to communicate with her daughter who goes abroad for a gap year. She tends to talk about what could go wrong without discussing what usually does happen. For example, she talks about what can go wrong with Facebook without discussing why people continue to use the site. Indeed, my own research shows that teenagers are well aware of the dark sides of Facebook and take some steps to minimize issues like privacy concerns or who they become friends with. Sure, users could become friends with strangers or completely misrepresent themselves in their profile but many do not.

c. I was continually struck by Turkle’s psychological and personal approach. A number of the chapters end with Turkle expressing her own misgivings about technology and asking if it has to be this way. While she hints at this throughout the book, I kept hoping she would expand her vision and talk about the bigger implications for society. What happens if we have new generations that accept all technology without questions? What happens if we care for all of our elderly with robots? How will institutions like schools or governments change because of pervasive technology? I suppose this is the sociologist in me. Also, she relies a lot on interviews and personal observations and there is little in the way of large-scale data.

d. This is tied to my comment about the big picture; Turkle suggests at the end that we all need to make individual choices about technology as we can’t stop it all. She is correct…but there are certainly larger-scale things that could be done to make sure we remain the masters of technology.

All in all, this is a thought-provoking book that left me somewhat depressed about our future with technology. At the least, we should heed Turkle’s admonition to slow down and think about the implications of technology before wholeheartedly jumping in.

San Francisco neighbors of Twitter founder don’t want his teardown house

Posted on by

Even people with lots of money can run into problems when they want to build a teardown McMansion:

Williams bought the $2.9m property – hardwood floors, an open plan salon and four bedrooms with breathtaking views over three storeys – last year. It was built in 1915 by the architect Louis Christian Mullgardt and was listed in city records as a “potential historic resource”.

Earlier this year Williams, 40, and his wife Sara revealed plans to demolish the house and, with the help of architectural firm Lundberg Design, build a 7,700 sq ft successor into a slope. It would be 20ft lower than its predecessor and be a “zero net energy” home using solar panels, a green roof and sun-friendly windows.

Even before the application was submitted to city planners, neighbours and critics from as far afield as Canada had filed form letters of protest, a backlash which in another medium might have been called trending. “This is such a unique property and it adds diversity of architectural interest to the neighborhood,” wrote one neighbour, Elizabeth Wang. “It would be criminal to demolish it.”

Some accused Williams of plotting to erect a McMansion. “A complete teardown of such a home would … set the stage for numerous future demolitions that will alter the character of our beloved SF Neighborhoods,” one group, Friends of Parnassus Heights, wrote to the real estate blog SocketSite…

Not all agree. Williams’s defenders, such as property site Sfcurbed.com, said Mullgardt was an “architectural footnote” and that in any case his original design was ruined by a 1970s remodelling. “It may have once been charming, but … has been stripped of its dignity and details over the decades, subdivided into apartments and then rebuilt by architect Thomas Eden in what’s best described as faux-Frank Lloyd Wright with trapezoidal windows.”

Is it still NIMBY if a person in Canada is objecting to a possible house in San Francisco?

It appears that even the green features of the home will not mollify some of the neighbors. If the house can’t/won’t be saved, is there anything Williams could do to make the new home palatable to the neighbors? I wonder if Williams has made any efforts to reach out to the neighborhood. What about an ultra-green house that is built in a similar style to the existing homes?

Of course, one way to avoid these situations or to at least make more clear the process by which changes to homes can be made is to declare the area a historic preservation district. If a majority of neighbors are indeed against new houses, perhaps this is the way to go.

 

The extra-real sound of the Olympics

Posted on by

For those interested in sounds, this is a fascinating read about how the sound from the Olympics sounds so (hyper)real:

For the London Olympics, Baxter will deploy 350 mixers, 600 sound technicians, and 4,000 microphones at the London Olympics. Using all the modern sound technology they can get their hands on, they’ll shape your experience to sound like a lucid dream, a movie, of the real thing.

Let’s take archery. “After hearing the coverage in Barcelona at the ’92 Olympics, there were things that were missing. The easy things were there. The thud and the impact of the target — that’s a no brainer — and a little bit of the athlete as they’re getting ready,” Baxter says.

“But, it probably goes back to the movie Robin Hood, I have a memory of the sound and I have an expectation. So I was going, ‘What would be really really cool in archery to take it up a notch?’ And the obvious thing was the sound of the arrow going through the air to the target. The pfft-pfft-pfft type of sound. So we looked at this little thing, a boundary microphone, that would lay flat, it was flatter than a pack of cigarettes, and I put a little windshield on it, and I put it on the ground between the athlete and the target and it completely opened up the sound to something completely different.”

Just to walk through the logic: based on the sound of arrows in a fictional Kevin Costner movie, Baxter created the sonic experience of sitting between the archer and the target, something no live spectator could do.

Television is supposed be able to bring you live events (I know this doesn’t necessarily qualify for the Olympics) – I know I don’t think much about what technology this requires. But this article suggests the sound is even better than real: there is no one at the Olympic archery range who is even hearing what televisions viewers can hear.

Does this make watching all of those Olympics commercials a little more bearable?