Wednesday, December 29, 2010

The future of books?

Christmas has gone by and some days of rest has been used, which basically means food, family, friends and reading time for me.

Having been lured into the Cult of Jobs and forsaken paper based books for kindle and ibooks on an iPad. I've spent to much time browsing amazon for ebooks to get.
Then somebody I follow on twitter linked to Cory Doctorow's latest release, http://craphound.com/walh/ , which is free as in beer. So as the cheap guy I am, I downloaded the ePub version onto my iPad.
Now, I know of Cory Doctorow, but I have never read any of his stuff, I do not know why, but there seems to have been a certain "it" missing that would make me read it.
And I would probably would not have read it, I currently on read one story and the "essay" by the agent. If it was not for the fact it was mentioned that Mark Shuttleworth had commissoned the a story, I like Ubuntu and I probably got a lower membership number in the Cult of Shuttleworth/Ubuntu than in the Cult of Jobs.

Now the story was very much to my liking, but I also read the next chapter, that was penned by Doctorow's literary agent Russel Galen. And the "essay" was the big eye opner to me, especially the following part:

Publishing economics are ridiculous. Suppose we'd sold this volume to a conventional publisher, and let's call it a $15.95 trade paperback. The author's share would be 7.5% of the cover price, or $1.17. We're leaving 92.5% -- $14.78 -- to bookstores and publishers. There's no room to negotiate a better share for the author because most of that $14.78 goes to people who won't reduce their shares: bookstores, paper suppliers, printers, warehouses, shippers, the owner of the publisher's office building, taxes, and so on.

Now if an author is left with 7.5% of the cover price and most likely Doctorow wold get some what more than an unknown writer. There must be a way or model for the author to collect the same amount of money through other channels? The math is not that hard, to earn 10k with a cover price of 15, todays model dictates that you need to sell 8889 copies.
But lets say you drop the price to 7.5, ie 50% and the author gets to keep 5 and 2.50 is for the cost of digital distribution and payment then the author only needs to sell 2000 copies to earn 10000.

So why are there not more sites promoting ebooks for authors, not everybody cares for the New York Times best seller list, I usually go for my friends suggestions and other word of mouth avenues already, independant web sites would be just as good for me.
With no upsell needs, just "pure" recommendation of ebooks only.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Damn right I got the blues

These are not very good, but I wrote them and I'll stick by it, also by storing them on the cloud somebody else might read them...

--

She was perfect

Actually she was far from perfect.
Yet again she was perfect, I couldnt explain, I still cant.
But my heart skipped a beat each time I laid my eyes on her.
One instance she made me feel like I was in paradis,
and like with a flick of a switch or maybe more like a snap of the fingers,
I was in black hole I couldnt get out of.

Each day I looked at her, saw imperfections normal to any human
and still tought she was the most beautiful woman on this earth.
Wether she dressed for a special occasion, casual clothing
or just walking around the apartement in a sweat suit,
she was still the most perfect woman on this planet.

I woke up with her by my side everyday for awhile,
when I ever I looked over at her, she just seemed to shine.
Or maybe illuminate is a better word, I dont know,
she was blinding, she still is the times I see her.
When our paths cross, instead of my life flashing in front of me,
she does in all the variations and looks she got from the I am tired and hungover
to the hello world look at me I am beatiful and the outcome is still the same

She is perfect

I dont know, is it the way she looks, the way she moves,
the way she speaks, the way she is?
All I know, is that she touched me deeply and crushed me easily.

--

I am alone
I like it alone
I sit alone as time fly
Days go by while I'm alone
I like it alone
I want to be alone
Do I miss somebody?
YES! I want somebody
But I want to be alone
Alone is good
No highs or lows that implodes your heart
Just alone
And the slow trickle of a bleeding heart



--


Paris broken?

When I broke I was dreaming of Paris.
Not sure if it was Rick and Elsa's rainy gloom black and white Paris.
Or Nikita's junkie desperate garish Paris, maybe even disastrous Paris trip with the x.
But it was painful Paris.

Then again, maybe it was the pain of being broken.....

"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

My "15 minutes of fame",  @ 3:59 - 4:09 and 5:35 - 5:39 so where is my Oscar? :P





Friday, October 8, 2010

Peace and Business Norwegian style

I've never heard of Liu Xiaobo before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but I assume that since he "won" the award this year, he has done or does something to bring about peace in the world.

China thinks he is a criminal and claims he should not be given the prize,  but my convoluted mind went into conspiracy high alert, when Norwegian media started running stories that China would terminate a new trade agreement deal that was being brokered between China and Norway. Especially when our foreign minister stays calm and says China has no reason punish Norway for this, because the Nobel committee is independent and not under the Norwegian government influence. 
Which is a bit to cool, especially after the minister of Trade and Industry in the past has highlighted it as important for Norway.

Now is this just Norwegian political infighting going on? Or did Norway want to back out of the trade agreement, but let China take the blame? 
Who knows, but I know that many people have voiced concerns about Huawei being the LTE vendor for Telenor (incumbent telco) and what security implications that might have. And according to the latest rumors in the telco business is that Huwei has been kicked out and the "official" reason is that the equipment does not work. 
When the ***** does one spread the rumour with a highlighted official reason tagged on? 

From what I have heard Huawei, can be a bit of a handful to cooperate with if your not experienced with dealing with Chinese culture, but I never heard that Telenor done an equipment does not work 180 on a vendor like this. Especially if their sticking with their LTE is for 2012 goal.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

The upgrade path for your phone will depend on the specific device, manufacturer, operator, and region.

Flash for Android, whether you think its the best thing since sliced bread or the worst thing since something bad :)
The distribution model is utterly broken, fine you need a minimum level of hardware and os requirement, but adding operator and region requirements? Come on its a globalized world, barriers like that is so yesterday in the day of the Internet.

That is the old way of doing it, the broken way they do it with movies and tv series and what not. But Adobe is pushing this stuff out over the internet why the restriction on region and operator?

If we look into the entertainment world, there are tons of service to stream or rent movies and tv's online, but its region based due to old archaic licensing rules made for yesterdays world.
The ones that get global distribution working from a technical standpoint and licensing point of view, probably will be the big media conglomerate of the future.
And if things keeps going as they are, it will not be a western company, mainly because their stuck in their old ways. Many interesting things are going on with OTT delivery and the ones leading the pack are currently not Hollywood based, but they do have the rights for doing Bollywood OTT which probably is better considering their target market segment.
Niche and cultural content will most likely get these companies of the ground and when they have a working delivery vehicle, then the content world is your oyster.

So if their model is  able to deliver none western entertainment across the internet with an OTT model, will they end up being bought by traditional western media or will it be the other way around?

Who ever said content is king, probably lives in a cave, without the delivery vehicle your out of the game, content + delivery are the regents, who will turn out be our new king and queen and where is the kingmaker?

Saturday, August 7, 2010

In general, any form of exercise, if pursued continuously, will help train us in perseverance.

Earlier this year I started exercising more regularly, haven't done much after the available time to practice Eskrima dwindled away. But now I am playing floorball once a week, jogging once a week and going on bike rides  a couple of times a week.

But what got me over the first obstacle of keep on doing it, instead of ending up with it being a one of thing, was my phone. Or rather one of the multitude of smartphone applications that uses the built in GPS to track your progress and creates a training diary. Now with Zephyr Bluetooth Heart rate monitor, it can also record my heart rate during my exercise session.
And for a gadget geek that is a 3 for 1, reason to splash out on a smartphone, extra bluetooth gadget and the motivation to see the progress you make.

And who does not like the rush of feeling physically tired, but in a non stressed kind of way.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

When starting of fresh, I had the idea, that I should take time to scribble down random thoughts and musing a bit more regularly. And I had some snippets of information that I wanted to write, but seems like Google moves faster than I am able to formulate my take on the current situation.
I planned to write a bit about Android and where I though it was going and what I believed Google was trying to do. Then Google I/O 2010 of course ruined all of that and made my musings redundant.

On a business trip, Telecom Line, I ended up discussing the rumored Google TV project with other attendants in the seminar. Of course Google went public at that time and once again my brilliant rhetoric on the subject was rendered useless.
Only comment I can add to the Google TV, is that I hear Google is having a difficult time in convincing the content owners to hand over their content for free to Google, so that Google can monetize from it with their OTT push.
When I heard the that snip it of information, my first thought was NIH (Not Invented Here) ie Google got their own agenda shining so brightly that they can not accept that others don't see the world in the same way.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Location Location Location

When you move between different parts of the tech ecosystem you usually end up getting your perspectives moved around, a bit, by each place you have been. In my stint in the Telecom/Networking world I've been through a couple of places, Vendor, Service Provider and now Distributor/System Integrator/Value Added Reseller.

In all of these places you pick up the core values/issues/challenges for the current segment of the ecosystem and if you go through enough places you get decently balanced outlook on the business,
compared to if you stay put in one part of the business. When it comes down to it, its all about understanding you partner/customer/clients business model and empowering them to be successful with your products/services. 

Which brings me to the why I started writing this post, I read this blog post and it brings up some very interesting points and most are probably valid, but the old Vendor Systems Engineer in me cringes at the shallow "bandwidth is not a problem anymore" type casting. 
I keep hearing this from many camps, the bandwidth problem is solved, we will have wireless 100Mbps anyday now, just look at LTE, WiMAX, 4G and 5G and what not.

My problem with that is basically, its not correct, most of these new technologies got two major obstacles, they usually are a shared medium and there infrastructure/core network to support these fantastic speeds are not there and the infrastructure upgrade will be very very expensive and hard to do.
Now one common misconception is that we all get 100Mbps from our local LTE Access Point or some other big number. That only happens if you are the only one connected to the AP and you are basically sitting right next to it. Now if you and a friend are sitting right next to the AP and you both are connected, then you only get 50Mbps each. Which by itself is fine and dandy and it sort of scales down linearly ie add one more user and you divide the bandwidth evenly between the users until you reach the maximum number of users that your AP supports. Then comes the part that most people are not aware of, if somebody is further away from the AP and you are close to it, we are getting into a different model all together.

Even in the simplest scenario where everybody gets their fair share you are most likely never going to be able to see 50Mbps to your device in the near future.
Here in Norway, Netcom (TeliaSonera) have deployed their LTE network and trials by journalists reports that the results they, even at this early stage with presumably few customers on the network, indicates the concurrent number of users will most likely be the biggest issue. 
The best result was 90Mbps during a demo, which probably meant only 1 client was connected to the AP. Then after launch, they saw speeds of 20Mpbs, which is good, but this was in area of the city which probably do not have to many early adapters of tech gadgets, since its mostly an area of traditional businesses and not much housing.
But if you droped into the downtown area you got 8Mbps, these numbers are all download speeds, uploads are of course not even close. Yes, 8Mbps are better than many people have on their DSL links today,  but how does you cloud network business model work with these conditions? 

Okay, so we solve that by installing an AP on each street corner so that every person gets to connect to their own AP, again this does not scale, at least on the economic side. But even if the AP was cheap or people actually payed an extra premium to use one exclusively, then we need to feed the AP with the necessary bandwidth, so lets assume we dont overbook the link, since bandwidth is the key facilitator for the success of the cloud services. Then we need 100Mbps fixed links to the AP's, we still need tons of extra equipment to do it, whether we do it with fiber or copper lines it suddenly has a drastic rate of growth in the expense column.  

So we just went from a FTTH (Fiber to the Home) scenario to a FTEAP (Fiber to every Access Point) and there will be a magnitude of more AP's than there will be homes. And most Service Providers today are not able to get a working business model  in regards to FTTH of the ground, unless they have deep pockets and are investing for the long term future.

Personally I hope that we will get to the 100Mbps per wireless device, but I doubt it will be as easy and come as quick as some others are hoping for. Could a Femtocell type of solution with 4 or 5G support be the answer?

But as the Atheros engineers, I meet at the IPTV Worldforum in London, said; "It all comes down to the physics, we can't do anything about that. just work with it. Heat and attenuation, we salute you Newton!" Not sure why they saluted Newton, might be because gravity makes the beer go down easier?
  

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

A fresh start

Hopefully I will be posting more frequently here, my old blog, passed on after being malnourished for a long time. So I made it invite only and looking forward to a new start here.

JPT