billso.com

This New York Times article describes a software project called Viewfinder. The goal is to help Internet users post pictures of buildings and landmarks directly into an application like Google Maps, or into a web mashup application. I discussed mashups in two billso.com articles in 2007:

• 12 February 2008: More web mashups
• 8 February 2008: Web mashups

The usability issues in mashup design can be tricky, as programmers are taking data and applications that might be related but aren’t directly compatible. An app like Viewfinder has to deal with location data, the map images, the user’s image, and a variety of visual issues including perspective and orientation.

See the official web site at the University of Southern California for more details. Here’s a video demo from the site.

In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Sara Corbett has a long article about the mobile phone’s growing importance in global and local economics. The article is also a great example of how qualitative research and ethnography can be used by larger corporations. When I teach research methods courses and supervise professional papers, I often recommend that graduate students investigate these methods.

The article follows a Nokia researcher named Jan Chipchase as he collects field notes and photographs from around the world. His research data is sent back to Nokia’s designers, so they can determine how to add features that will stimulate mobile phone adoption in lesser developed countries.

Can you see me now?

Some of these features have nothing to do with software or hardware. In rainy regions, a mobile phone might require a hook to keep it off the wet floor. Inexpensive phones must be durable.

Corbett also discusses something I’ve seen more frequently over the years: mobile phone users who arrange their meeting place by phone in real time. Instead of meeting at a set hour in a specific spot, an appointment becomes a game of tag, as the two people give each other landmarks until they actually see each other.

Mobile microfinance

There’s a long discussion of how mobile phones might be used to help microfinance schemes become scalable. Microfinance involves loans of relatively small amounts of money, usually arranged by face-to-face meetings. Mobile phone applications such as text-messaging could be used to make the loan and repayment processes easier and faster. Swift repayment is a key success factor for these plans, and Vodaphone has been implementing mobile banking systems that would work well with microfinance ventures.

Once concern that I have is the cost of these microloans. Eight days earlier, this New York Times article discussed the backlash against Mexico’s leading microfinance firm, Compartamos. Economist Muhammad Yunus, who won the 2006 Nobel peace Prize for proposing the microloan concept, wants non-profit groups to arrange microloans.

Compartamos is a for-profit company that is launching an IPO, based upon the massive interest revenues the company has generated. The IPO keeps microloan customers from participating in the group’s success. This Business Week article from December 2007 has some more information about the IPO.

Mobile telecom firms are likely to use microloans as a way to subsidize inexpensive mobile handsets for their customers, which as only an indirect benefit to the microfinance community.

Phones or food?

Today’s New York Times published a long article about global hunger. There are some heartbreaking stories in this article, including the growing market in Haiti for flavored dirt. One quote from the article really caught my attention:

President René Préval of Haiti appeared to taunt the populace as the chorus of complaints about la vie chère — the expensive life — grew. He said if Haitians could afford cellphones, which many do carry, they should be able to feed their families.

Are the world’s poor being asked to choose between mobile phones and food? It seem farfetched, but the surging cost of basic staples in some countries has forced the question.

Sunday’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin features an investigation of the Honolulu City Council’s travel expenses for the mass transit project.

Council member Todd Apo had an interesting quote:

“We’re making a huge decision… If people have not made the effort to get themselves fully educated, then I’d be concerned.”

Perhaps Apo was referring to fellow council members Charles Djou and Barbara Marshall. Both Djou and Marshall have argued against the project.

Marshall hasn’t spent a dime on travel related to the proposed project. Is it possible that she hasn’t been on one single trip to study transit systems in other cities?

Thrifty or shifty?

Djou has made several trips but has only charged the city US$26. He paid for his own travel:

“It’s a very expensive project and I’m trying to be careful with taxpayer dollars… These transit trips paid for by the taxpayer and by the transit manufacturers are nothing more than junkets.”

It helps to keep an open mind about these trips. Vendors do want to fund these trips, but that does not mean that council members would be swayed towards their bids.

Yes, the travel expenses could have been used to fill potholes. But common sense dictates that our council members should be studying existing systems that resemble the current proposal. Isn’t that the Council’s job?

Djou recently declared his candidacy for Neil Abercrombie’s congressional seat - in the 2010 election. If Abercrombie needs to go, why doesn’t Djou run now, in 2008? Djou has been plotting this run since 2006. He ran unopposed for reelection, but he still ran political advertisements telling voters to “[r]emember the name, Charles Djou”.

Djou and Marshall need to stop voting “no”, as they risk joining former council member Rene Mansho on Honolulu’s transit hall of shame.

Where the rubber meets the road

Honolulu needs mass transit solutions now. Our city has tried and failed to select a comprehensive fixed guideway solution twice before. In today’s Star-Bulletin, council member Romy Cachola states he may support fixed guideway buses instead of steel-on-steel rail. He also wants construction to start with a segment from Aloha Stadium to downtown, via Salt Lake Boulevard. That’s through his district.

Cachola used his swing vote last year to get the system rerouted away from Honolulu International Airport and through his district. For many taxpayers, this move made no sense. The proposed mass transit system would help tourists and residents get to and from the airport, and avoid high parking fees. Any reasonable proposal that gets more rental cars of the road would be welcome on Oahu.

Cachola is also ranked number 2 among council members in terms of their travel spending for the proposed project. Romy’s op-ed piece this morning is another veiled threat that he may vote “no”, because he is placing his district’s needs ahead of the island’s.

Related posts on billso.com

• 2 April 2008: Still on track?
• 20 March 2008: Like a fifth wheel
• 21 February 2008: Delhi catches monorail fever: Is Honolulu next?
• 6 February 2008: Hawaii has highest car ownership costs in the USA
• 21 June 2007: Mayor: state could pay for airport mass transit line
• 19 June 2007: City council, planners still arguing over mass transit routes, modes

Wikipedia is a great place to look for a quick answer, but graduate students need to find credible sources for their papers. After all, graduate students are training to become credible sources in their fields.

The Economist published this article in the magazine’s Technology Quarterly supplement about Wikipedia’s editing policies. Two factions are battling for Wikipedia’s very soul:

• Inclusionists want Wikipedia to have articles about any and every topic, with even the most trivial details of real and fictional items;
• Deletionists want Wikipedia editors to exercise a more selective policy, which would require the deletion of many articles and trivial details.

A third moderate faction, the mergists, is seeking compromise. There are more details in the Wikipedia article on this inclusionism.

Nicholas Carr addressed this debate in his 5 September 2006 and and 8 September 2006 articles in his blog. Carr recommended “forking” Wikipedia into deletionist and inclusionist versions, which brings to mind visions of Unix. He also mentions the mergists and 18 other factions. Perhaps Monty Python should write a skit about Wikipedia.

This article by Nicholson Baker in the New York Review of Books has another perspective. Baker reviews Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, and Baker’s article is a long, funny look at how Wikipedia has evolved in the last 7 years.

Baker also includes a link to Reid Priedhorsky’s scholarly article on Wikipedia article creation and deletion.

• 27 January 2008: Authority and convenience
• 15 January 2008: Wikipedia is 7 years old today
• 6 December 2007: The Truth
• 7 December 2007: Wikipedia co-founder recasts his advice
• 24 November 2007: Citing Wikipedia
• 7 March 2007: Wikipedia promises to review writers and editors
• 7 March 2007: Fake professor stops editing on Wikipedia
• 24 January 2007: Microsoft wanted to pay for Wikipedia edits
• 24 January 2007: More thoughts on cheating, copyright and paraphrasing

Last night, every Starbucks store in the United States closed at 1730 local time for a three-hour training session. See this New York Times article about the training project.

I’ve written a long article, so you might want to get comfortable and find a tasty beverage.

The company’s CEO, Howard Schultz, wants Starbucks to return to its roots: making excellent coffee beverages, slowly. But Starbucks is working harder than ever to turn its miik-and-coffee shops into WiFi-enriched media listening lounges. It’s a plan that’s rife with assumptions about how the digital consumer entertains themselves.

Starbucks’ fascination with recorded music has never made much sense to me, because most fast food chains try to maximize customer turnover during the day. Serving customers faster should mean additional revenue per hour. A corporate playlist, slow service and comfy chairs should have the opposite effect.

Then again, most franchised burger joints don’t have merchandise displays on the floor. Starbucks stores do, and I often wonder who buys these items. If the service will be slower, and the company is returning to its roots, why doesn’t Starbucks remove the displays so that more customers could stand in line?

In the end, Starbucks wants its customers to spend more time in the store. It’s a core piece of the company’s strategy. If these customers have the means to afford a laptop computer or an iPod, they might buy a dessert or an extra beverage.

If at first you don’t succeed…

A few years ago, Starbucks experimented with CD burning kiosks in a few stores. Here’s some articles from Business Week in 2004 and KioskNews in 2006 about this dubious idea. I loved Howard Schultz’s quotes from the 2004 article – he was an enthusiastic champion of he projec.t Customers rarely used these stations, which housed a touch-screen Hewlett-Packard computer that helped users assemble their own playlists from an inventory of digital music. The service was slow, and the prices were about the same as itunes and other online merchants. The few customers that tried the kiosks usually figured out that they could burn their own CDs at home.

A recent New York Times article discussed an updated version of the media kiosk. Instead of a disc, customers would insert a USB memory stick. The payment and transfer process could take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending upon the quality and size of the files involved. Flash memory transfer can be slow, after all.

The Starbucks kiosk project was designed to induce customer to try downloading digital music. The kiosks could hold between 250,000 and a million songs on their hard drives. Baristas aren’t known for their computer troubleshooting skills, however. When the kiosks malfunctioned, customers could not get assistance.

Last year, Starbucks decided to welcome Apple as a partner. After all, iTunes is the dominant digital music service in the USA, as I pointed out yesterday. There’s a legion of iPod users who already use iTunes at home to download music and videos.

Serving up slow coffee and fast downloads

It makes sense to ditch the kiosk and its limited inventory, and offer the entire iTunes inventory in each Starbucks. But video files are much larger than audio files, and Apple keeps adding more content to the iTunes store every day. Customers might be more likely to view and buy digital media at Starbucks if the download speeds are as good or better than their residential Internet connection.

Starbucks had to develop a way to offer the entire iTunes inventory without excessive bandwidth costs and slow download speeds. TUAW.com reported earlier this month that Starbucks may be installing edge servers in its stores. This type of server stores or caches content at the edge or end of a network, to give users faster access to files and services. An edge server is a good way to reduce bandwidth demands and manage latency by storing popular audio and video files inside the Starbucks store itself.

During the day, AT&T WiFi customers would use the WiFi access point at that Starbucks store to receive and buy audio and video content from Apple’s iTunes Store. Content would be saved to customers laptop computers, mobile phones, iPhones and iPods.

Popular audio and video files, including new releases, this week’s TV shows and best-sellers would be stored on the store’s edge server, so the user would receive their files at WiFi speed, instead of a much slower transmission from AT&T’s GSM mobile network or a remote server on the store’s broadband connection.

The edge server would receive fresh content late in the evening, based on local usage patterns and marketing plans, while the store is closed and bandwidth is less expensive. So Starbucks stores in Honolulu would probably get more Hawaiian music and “Lost” episodes on their edge servers, while Starbucks sites in Texas would store more country music and NASCAR highlights in their edge servers.

What’s the cache?

Akamai Technologies uses a similar approach to cache or store web applications, web pages, audio, video and other content in its global content distribution network network, and iTunes does use Akamai services. Yahoo, CNN, Slide and the NBA also use Akamai servers to mirror content for their web sites. Akamai’s network is designed as a cache for any Internet user, regardless of their connection. I discussed Akamai and latency on 6 June 2007.

Akamai’s network, and similar networks run by competitors, help Web publishers reach millions of users per day by mirroring content. I’ve never had this problem on billso.com, but it’s possible that someday my little web server will be swamped with requests from thousands of users for the same article. Don’t worry, billso.com has a cache feature that I can activate if I need it, so I don’t exceed my monthly bandwidth allocation.

The iTunes store inventory is placed on multiple servers located in major population centers, and connected to several fast Internet connections. Web retailers use these same networks to handle heavy shopping days like Mother’s Day and Black Monday.

Surfing on the edge is very akamai

Content distribution networks can also help remote locations with large Internet user populations. Honolulu is a great example. It makes much more sense for Hawaiian Telcom and Oceanic Time Warner to cache audio and video content on Oahu than to handle thousands of transoceanic requests for the same files. See my discussion on 7 June 2007.

The Wikipedia page for Akamai has some basic information, and links to additional articles and resources, including this 2006 Business Week article, a 2006 article from SeekingAlpha, and this MIT video – there is a play link above the photo on that page. The video is about an hour long, and it requires RealPlayer. It’s a great discussion of how an academic research project can be commercialized, but there’s a lot of technical jargon.