Matter/Anti-Matter

(Credit: The Tech Herald)

Is it a presentation tool? Or a visual storytelling tool? Visualization software? Or a zooming editor? Budapest-based Adam Somlei-Fischer, founder and lead designer of Prezi, and Peter Halacsy, founder and CTO of Prezi, were interested in soliciting feedback on their product’s category when they visited frog design’s San Francisco studio last week and demoed their tool. Having marketed mind-mapping software previously in my career, I felt sympathetic: At the time, we went through a similar exercise, and after endless discussions and focus groups we ended up with a label only a committee could come up with: “enterprise productivity software.” Yawn. One must not be concerned that the Prezi guys will get trapped by the lowest common denominator – they’re too smart, too opinionated, and too small (ten people).

Suppose, though, Prezi is a presentation tool – as the name (and Techcrunch’s praise: “the coolest online presentation tool”) may well imply – then of course it faces a mighty contender: PowerPoint is the dinosaur in the room. Microsoft's program has been around for 25 years, and by some estimates 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created every day. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any major company that completely foregoes using it, despite its disputed benefits and “Death by PowerPoint” claims that accuse the software of being an all-too-convenient prop for poor speakers. Edward Tufte, one of the most vocal PowerPoint critics, in a famously agitated essay (“The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”) even drew a causal relationship between NASA’s PowerPoint slides and the Challenger crash in 1986.

For PowerPoint haters, Prezi surely offers hope. Unlike Keynote, which is highly popular among designers because it offers higher visual fidelity and a better user experience, Prezi differs radically from PowerPoint in that it requires an alternative mental model: Information is displayed in a non-linear fashion. That’s also true for mind-mapping, but Prezi offers additional linear paths, knowing that “time is linear” when you present, as Adam Somlai-Fischer put it. Users can jump in and out of these paths and are thus given enormous flexibility in storing and presenting information.

This very flexibility, however, presents a serious adoption barrier: Many first-time users, as the two Prezi founders would readily admit, struggle with the challenge of filling a “blank canvas,” as they can become overwhelmed by the freedom (and pressure) created by a level of user empowerment they’re not used to within the strict confines of PowerPoint templates. Prezi is asking you to literally think outside the box, but there is a real danger that the brilliance of the tool can get in the way of your content. I saw several conference speakers rely on Prezi this year, and while some of them used it so masterfully that I didn’t even notice the software, some were deliriously inundated by Prezi’s rich possibilities and went gaga with dizzying “jump cuts” from topic to topic, disrupting their presentation and confusing the audience. At the end of the day, you still have a story to tell, and Prezi’s simple way of putting information anywhere you like can ironically lead to the very information overload it aims to avoid – it is just too tempting to create mega-maps and add more and more data to them. But that’s just a minor concern, and some training and (self-imposed content discipline) will make you easily forget about PowerPoint.

Prezi has a lot going for it. Backed by TED and solid VC-funding, with a soon-to-open new office in San Francisco, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey as advisor, and a ton of media buzz, the company is poised to aggressively grow adoption in the mainstream corporate world. Power to Prezi!

http://www.prezi.com

Learn Prezi in five minutes

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are facing some dilemmas about what to do with their OSes when it comes to Netbooks.

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, is the first real competitor to Google.

I rarely use Google. Or rather, I rarely use Google.com. Because Google is embedded into Safari, I just use the search box there, which creates huge stickiness that's hard to displace. Of course, Microsoft has the same option now for embedding Bing into Internet Explorer, assuming it's allowed to by the courts. But the very short amount of time I've spent with Bing has me rethinking my search engine options seriously for the first time.

I know a lot of people gush about Google's user experience, and certainly there are a lot of nice things about using it: speed, accuracy of results, and things like weather, which give instant contextual results. But from an aesthetic point of view I've found its minimalism to be on the drab side, rather than the chic side. It's utilitarian, not fancy, and mostly not that fun.

Bing has had the courage to say "to hell with eking out the last millisecond of page load time," which both Google and, historically, Yahoo have always emphasized. In today's world, and moving forward, it's just not that important (mobile being an exception, but for that you can provide a custom experience).

Rafe Needleman at CNET Webware and Katherine Boehret at WSJ both have good write-ups on the niceties of Bing, so I won't repeat them here. It does some things differently than Google, breaking some ingrained habits, and while there isn't much that's significantly worse, there is quite a bit that is considerably better. The results that come back are somewhat different, sometimes more on target, sometimes not. I'd say the jury's out on that, especially since this is a just-launched service (assuming it's not just a reskin of Live, I don't know what's under the hood), and assuming it will improve as users contribute with clicks. (Like Google, it lists this blog as the top search when I self-search, so that's a plus.)

It presents the search results in a nicer way than Google, especially image search (multisize thumbnails and grids, different choices of detail, filters by image size, colors, etc., and overall a presentation that focuses on the images themselves). I love how sounds and videos are embedded into search results and how there's a mouse-over for a small preview. Hovering over the right edge of a search result description pulls up more information without having to click through to the page.

I like that the front cover photo changes each day and how you can float over it to find the hidden Easter eggs that lead you on unexpected paths (one is shown popped up in the bottom right of the above image). Ask.com tried the splash-image approach but that was more of a skin, but Bing's approach is more engaging and encourages you to actually visit the front page, rather than bypass it as quickly as possible to get to the results.

Bing avoids two traps: One, it doesn't just try to ape Google. Two, Microsoft hasn't overstyled it and thrown in the kitchen sink of aesthetics and functionality. There is clearly an editorial hand at work that hasn't allowed it to get focus-grouped to death. Kudos to Microsoft for that.

I'm going to drop Bing into my toolbar bookmarks and give it a whirl for a while. Who knows, maybe it will be enough to displace the 800-pound gorilla.

The web is all atwitter today with news of Eric Schmidt's dismissive response at yesterday's Morgan Stanley Technology Conference here in San Francisco to a question from Eminence Capital analyst, Josef Jung, of whether Google sees Twitter's real-time search as a threat. An explosion of schadenfreude-laden articles and a furiously defiant pile of tweets have already responded to Mr. Schmidt's comments that demonstrated a clear lack of understanding of both the present value AND tremendous future potential of the twitter platform. The contrarians at Motley Fool are holding out hope that it was a strategic maneuver pointing to a planned acquisition. But no matter whether a monumental miscalculation or shrewd strategy, the move is a classic page from Ballmer's book of wins and losses, and signals Google's metamorphosis from David to Goliath.

Really, there's no right answer to to the sucker punch of a question. "Yes, it's a threat" would provide an exponential boost to Twitter's credibility and value, while "no, it's not" can only be dismissive of what is clearly a major growth trend and new behavior. But the real mistake was going into enough detail to incorrectly (VERY incorrectly) compare Twitter to existing (and arguably old) technologies (email and IM, specifically), without recognizing the differences. That is what paints Schmidt as out of touch, the wrong generation of leadership, and that is what moves Google into the territory of a Microsoft that either dismisses or acquires the new technologies it doesn't, itself, understand.

Google stock was down 2% (or $2B in market cap) as of this afternoon.

(Credit: SXSW)

It's freezing in Austin (39 degrees last night....) but nonetheless SXSW Interactive is about to kick off today. There is no doubt that the conference is hitting the mainstream this year (with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg as keynote speaker and most of the big high-tech players participating). The program, which is notoriously hard to navigate, has grown even more in terms of depth and breadth.

SXSW has therefore teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub that facilitates real-time conversations around conference events while also providing an easy-to-us panel calendar. The Silverlight-based application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.

Check it out: http://pulse.sxsw.com

(Credit: SXSW)

Next weekend, just a couple of days after the dust of the primary campaigns will have settled, national media attention will return to Texas as Austin is turning into party central for the annual South by Southwest Festival (SXSW, March 7-16). SXSW Interactive, added in 1994 to the music festival, has evolved into one of the most influential tech conferences in the country and beyond. While somewhat geeky in its first years, SXSW Interactive is now considered a must-attend venue for big tech players (Google, Microsoft, Seagate, etc. all have a strong presence at the show), start-ups, creative agencies, software developers, futurists, designers, artists, media, and bloggers alike, all of whom are chasing the next big digital thing. A key contributing factor for SXSW's success may have been that the initially narrow meaning of "interactive" has expanded its relevance to more industries, media, and platforms over the past few years and now serves as the modus operandi of all business, no matter how creative or digital it is. With its more solid business underpinning, SXSW Interactive has overtaken both the Push conference in Minneapolis and Wired's Nextfest in terms of relevance and commercial success.

The Soul of the Machine

Yet despite its explosive growth (16,000 overall attendees are expected in Austin this year), "South By," as conference goers dub it, has done a good job evading all attempts to be easily categorized. The interactive part, in particular, has somehow managed to remain its cutting edge. It still offers a wildly eclectic bazaar of topics, trends, opinions, and applications, and one can truly say that all of the tech conferences out there it is the one best positioned to explore "the soul of the machine."

The organization is professional but there is still a lot of room for the unexpected, below-the-line, grassroots eccentricity that gives the conference its special flavor. A big part of this can be attributed to Austin, which has emerged as a thriving hub for creative people and embeds SXSW in the kind of community fabric that doesn't tolerate any over-spin or sell-out. The organizers have also made a point to add many community elements to the event: web 2.0 for web 2.0sters, if you will. For example, this year, they pioneered a "panel picker" that allowed users to vote on submitted panel proposals and essentially democratized the entire programming. I'm not entirely sure if this is the best application for the "wisdom of crowds" since there is a real danger that the panel selection turns into a popularity contest or an easy target for PR professionals and speaker bureaus. I, for my part, am old-fashioned and prefer conference programs to be curated by a curator, simply because it is otherwise daunting to ensure the right balance between diversity and cohesion. Anyway, it's too early to tell -- we'll see how it turns out.

In addition to the panel picker, SXSW has teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub for the conference. The application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.

But not everything at SXSW will be user-driven. In fact, some of the program highlights were carefully chosen: Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, will give the keynote on March 9. Other keynotes include Frank Warren (March 10) and Jane McGonigal (March 11). Opening Remarks (March 8) will be delivered by Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson, and Michael Eisner, former head of Disney, will be interviewed in a special session on March 11.

Searching for the Killer App

As eyeballs wander towards Austin, it will be interesting to see which digital innovations this year's conference will bring. Google's Dodgeball blew up at SXSW Interactive in 2006, and last year, a hitherto unknown service called Twitter enabled attendees to chat about panels in real-time and in public, and as instant as the format was its proliferation in the blogosphere: Twitter became the app de jour at SXSW and then, quickly, the rage of all digerati.

So who will be this year's Twitter? Practically speaking: Meebo. The instant messaging service is the official sponsor for live chat at SXSW 2008 and has stepped into Twitter's footsteps, which is kind of ironic. Meebo as Me-too. And philosophically speaking? Who knows. It seems safe to place a few bets on models around the new "Digital Green." The conference will be hosting five panels devoted exclusively to sustainability issues (five more than in previous years, if you're counting), among them "10 Ways to Green-ify Your Digital Life" and "Green Software -- Really?" Another big topic will be how gaming, virtual worlds, mobile and contextual web will converge (yes, convergence is resilient!) in the "Age of Engage," including discussions on OpenID and hardware mash-ups ("the long tail of gadgets"). And then there are interesting sociological tangents such as "Sexual Privacy Online," "Self-Branding," or the existential question for the attention junkie: "Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?" The most exciting domain for disruptive innovation right now is probably news (which, as we know, is broken), and several panels will discuss the future of Internet radio, Internet TV, as well as crowdsourced, hyper-localized models of news production and aggregation.

Or maybe, after five days of "geekspasm" and partying, ReadWriteWeb's prediction may come to pass: "The killer app in Austin might just be beer."

Links

We will report from SXSW Interactive on this blog, but in the meantime here are a few helpful links to get you in the mood:

Official SXSW Festival Site: http://www.sxsw.com

Interactive SXSW Schedule/Calendar: http://sched.org/

Official SXSW Live Chat: http://www.meebo.com/sxsw

SXSW Insider Guide: http://sxsw.ning.com/

SXSW Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SXSW-Festival/7826953993?ref=s

Unofficial Weblog: http://sxswbaby.com

On a radio program this morning about the possible Microsoft/Yahoo merger, CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos argued that one of Yahoo's problems has been its inability to kill off unsuccessful properties.

Citing Google as a counter-example, he discussed how Google has been able to pull out of less-than-successful businesses, such as its own social-networking tool and Google Video. (I would throw Froogle onto the list as well.)

To be fair to Yahoo, it recently yanked Yahoo photos in favor of Flickr, and just announced it is dropping its music service and transferring subscribers to Rhapsody.

But it's also fair to say that Yahoo has gone beyond being a "one-stop shop" (1990s portal thinking) to a company that neither employees nor customers really know what it's about. I would tend to agree with Kanellos that an unwillingness to draw boundaries around what's in and what's out has a good deal to do with Yahoo's problems. (Full disclosure: both Yahoo and Microsoft are clients of frog design, where I work, though I have no inside knowledge of the merger at all.)

In the book Code Name Ginger, which chronicled the development of the Segway Transporter, there was a great phrase--"drowning puppies"--that describes the mindset necessary when tackling innovative products and services.

The challenge is this: you'll have lots of great ideas, but you will only be able to expend finite resources to bring a small number of them to market. If you try to spread resources across them all, they will all be starved and unhealthy. So you have to prioritize and not fund some of them. This is very difficult because, just like puppies, these ideas bounce around joyfully and are so shiny and perfect and full of future growth and promise. But the sad fact is you have to drown some of your puppies. It's a harsh phrase, but accurate.

Yahoo has continued adding property on property, service on service, but has not done enough puppy drowning to allow for shifting away from less successful areas. Regardless of whether the merger happens, let's hope Yahoo can regain some of its focus both for employees and customers.

(Credit: Seattle Post Intelligencer)

Is Apple's PR wearing thin?

Sure, there was the MacBook Air and the buzz around "thinnovation." But wasn't that--pun intended--too "thin" for a big media splash, especially compared with past years? Now that MacWorld is over, pundits are reviewing Apple's PR efforts, and when the expectations are so high (and a company is so good at it), it is not too surprising that some are disappointed with what they've seen this year. Frank Shaw, a PR professional at Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's lead PR agency, is one of them, and you have to give him credit for being so vocal in public despite his affiliation with the Apple rival. (It would be easy to dismiss his criticism as just a Microsoft cabal.) Shaw is wondering whether Apple's shock and awe, event-focused product launch PR philosophy has lost its relevance in a time of always-on communications:

"The concept of holding news, building expectations, and then unveiling a massive surprise has been super effective, and no more so than last year with the iPhone. It was a tour de force from a communications standpoint. This recent Macworld? Not so much."

He refers to the Feiler Faster Thesis, which states that people's ability to retain and process information has accelerated, resulting in significantly faster news cycles:

"So in this world, is a twice a year news bang sufficient? The answer could be yes--but there is little room for events like today in that world. Apple stepped to the plate today, IMHO, and hit...a single. The company won't be up to bat again for a while...if you are only up a few times a year, you better hit some home runs."

He admits that he's a proponent of "small ball" rather than "home run ball," and it's hard to judge whether that makes him old-school or PR avant-garde:

"I've never been a big fan of 'giving up control of the message' or 'information wants to be free' or 'user generated content will rule the world' or 'it's all about the conversation.' But I'm a huge believer in the value of ongoing communication, to the right audiences, about the topics they care most about, in a regular, sustained way."

iPhone guilt

But Apple products raise more than just PR questions. On the O'Reilly blog, Dale Dougherty takes Apple's 1984 slogan "The computer for the rest of us" as a starting point to meditate on the "rest of the rest of us"--those excluded from our high-tech frenzy and without the means to participate in the Apple universe of godly gadgets. He does so because he feels "iPhone guilt":

"Taking the iPhone out of my pocket in a public place makes me uncomfortable. Some people ask nicely about it: 'How do you like it?' But I'm keenly aware that others don't have what I have and they notice it. The iPhone is a great phone but I'm conscious that it's helping to define 'the rest of us versus them.'"

Dougherty's moral treatise poses some uncomfortable questions:

"Is the high-tech world indifferent to the problems of the poor? Do we have any competence that matters in helping them find a better life? Or are we just making 'the happy few' that much happier? What is a social network if the people facing the toughest problems are not part of it? They don't need more signs that tell them that they are on their own. The have-nots don't do networking. It doesn't get them anywhere."

"Whether it's the latest from Web 2.0 or Apple Computer, do we need to ask what it means for those who aren't able to take part? Does it help them catch up or put them further behind? That calculation is part of the social cost of any new technology. We might think of it like we're starting to think about our oversized carbon footprint and its impact on the physical world. Is there any way to offset the negative social impact of the technology that we're so busily developing?"

"It's a challenge for the 'best of us' to address."

Over at Micropersuasion, Steve Rubel is making a bold prediction: The portals will be big winners in the social-networking wars.

"Social networking is certainly rising and there seems to be no end in sight to the phenomenon. However, what I do know is that people will jump around from one Myfaceborkutspace to another and not all of them will win," Rubel wrote.

He is referring to Long Tail author Chris Anderson, who points out that all good web sites should have elements of social networking and therefore suggests that social networking is a "feature, not a destination." Rubel believes that the portals' key advantage is that they "own the glue that keeps many of usconnected to our structured social networks (e.g. Myfaceborkutspace) and the looser ones--e.g. a personal network of contacts. And that glue is a trusted communication system that works with every person and social net."

That's true. You could also say that our buddy list is our social network, and we appreciate just plugging it into the most convenient and trusted network of our choice. Call it the "floating network." I therefore also agree with Rubel when he says, "No matter which social network(s) you participate in, even if you float, you're going to turn to your trusted communication system to manage it all. This will include any or all of the following: a) Web-based e-mail, b) instant messaging (which is nowadays integrated), c) RSS and d) telephony tools like Grand Central."

There are good reasons why there is a lot at stake for the traditional portals, and there are good reasons (Rubel names them) to predict they will not just sit back and watch the young social-networking sites own the game, especially now that business has begun facing up to social networks. And yet, I am hesitant to follow Rubel's prediction that the portals will have the upper hand in this conflict. In fact, I think he gets the conflict wrong.

I don't think this is as strict an antagonism as Rubel describes it, and I would even question the "war parties" as he identifies them: On the one side, the emerging social networks that are relentlessly trying to enhance the one main feature they're built upon ("making connections") into a platform. On the other side, the big portals, the AOLs, MSNs, Yahoos, that are seeking to operate more like social networks. This is an over-simplified showdown, for Rubel stages a competition where, in fact, we witness a co-evolution. The portals will adapt the best social-networking features, for example by activating the "dormant social networks" they own (see Yahoo Mash), and the social networks will adapt some of the portals' features; just yesterday AllFacebook and Paid Content speculated that Facebook is preparing to launch a music platform, either as a potential iTunes killer (according to AllFacebook) or a MySpace competitor (according to Paid Content).

However--and herein lies the major difference to Rubel's assumption--both social networks and portals are striving to eventually become something entirely different: the new operating system. Facebook is not shy about its intentions, and you could argue that it has already transformed the site into something much bigger than a social network.

It is a not a social-networking war; it is a race to become the de facto operating system for the social networker. And that is, of course, why Google, which is neither a social network nor a portal, is in the game too. The company is said to be feverishly working on "out-facebooking" Facebook by introducing a meta-platform that integrates not only a suite of Google services (like iGoogle, Gmail, Google Talk, Orkut, etc.) but is also 100 percent open to third-party developers--and other social networks. Google's recent acquisition of mobile social-network Zingku indicates that this uber-platform may have a strong mobile component and the long-rumored free, ad-based phone service. In other words, while social networks and portals are fighting the "social networking wars," Google may be winning the actual competition at hand: to become the dominant operating system for all of our communications. You can also call it the World Wide Web.