Barack Obama will be the most shadowed president in history, and it won't be just the Secret Service and press corps surrounding him.
Citizens and paparazzi armed with camera phones and a variety of other multimedia devices will chronicle every movement he makes in public and post it online.
President-elect Obama visits a Chicago deli to pick up some corned beef sandwiches. According to various reports, Obama and troop arrived at Manny's Cafeteria and Deli at 12:29 p.m. and walked out at 12:45 p.m. with two cherry pies and three corned beef sandwiches, paying $48.34 in cash.
(Credit: Change.gov)Obama's visit on Friday afternoon to Manny's Cafeteria and Deli in Chicago was treated as a major event. Some footage was recorded by the Associated Press (see below), and in the background you can see employees, as well as a horde of press members, pointing their cameras at Obama. With half the planet in possession of increasingly capable camera phones, Obama's life will fill enormous disk space in the cloud.
Politico is also keeping track of Obama's daily life with its "44" blog, documenting the president-elect's movements and important announcements during the transition to the White House. The forthcoming Obama White House will be treated like a reality TV show or West Wing, broadcast 24x7 on the Internet.
(Credit:
Politico 44)
Other presidents, including George W. Bush, have been similarly tracked online, but the Obama presidency brings a more finely tuned understanding to this phenomenon. Obama's pre-inauguration site, Change.gov, is providing its own play-by-play of Obama's activities, including briefly detailing the deli visit with a photo slideshow.
Posting its own version of events is a way for the Obama team to gain some control over the chaos and messaging in the midst of the incessant Obama lifestreaming that will occur over the next four or eight years. The disciplined, focused, and modulated Obama has already had a lot of practice on a big stage. Now the spotlight is all on him. Every gesture and word from Obama accessible to the public will be recorded and posted online, from a multitude of sources and points of views. His lifestream will be endlessly scrutinized and measured for meaning.
The Obama office of communications will be very busy building on the lessons learned from the campaign. Obama will likely hold more press conferences than his predecessor, but his team will continue its use of the Internet to directly reach the American people, as in Obama's weekly radio address, which is also a Web TV show that reached nearly 900,000 YouTube viewers with the November 14 edition.
Dan Manatt of PoliticsTV offers some useful suggestions--such as making the U.S. budget comprehensible to mere mortals--to the Obama communications team in a blog post on TechPresident.com:
The president's budget should become a multimedia document that makes the numbers--and the policy questions--accessible to the average citizen. The budget should be released online--not just as a pdf, as it is now, but as a multimedia, dynamic document with Web apps, widgets, and appendices applying Quicken-style functionalities, dynamic charts, etc. That way Americans can visualize and understand where their $3 trillion in tax dollars (minus the $1 trillion deficit) goes to. (Perhaps not surprisingly, private sites, including Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget, offer citizens better digital tools to understand the budget than the White House and the OMB, http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/).
Given the lack of confidence in the economy and the measures taken by the current administration, as well as Congress, providing more transparency into the budget process and bailouts would be helpful to the national psyche. You can expect Obama to use his online TV channel to further change the course of history.
(Editor's note: Due to production issues, some readers may not be able to access this podcast. We hope to have the problem resolved soon. Please check back to hear the podcast.)
On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss Yahoo's new CEO vacancy and the newly launched BlackBerry Storm. We also talk about the grim economic outlook for the holiday shopping season, which will be great for bargain hunters online and offline.
On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I talk about the tanking economy, the challenges facing an Obama administration CTO, and Microsoft's search quests with Verizon Wireless and Yahoo.
The holiday shopping season is looking grim as Circuit City files for bankruptcy and Best Buy lowers its forecast for its fiscal year. When will it ever end?
President-elect Obama has called for a national CTO. Given the complexity of technology infrastructure, the abundance of projects, the squeeze on budgets, and policy controversies, this will be an extremely challenging position.
We also discuss Microsoft's next moves to increase its share of the search market, with Verizon Wireless or Yahoo, or both.
On Tuesday, October 28, I will be participating in a roundtable discussion on the state of online video pulled together by Beet.TV impresario Andy Plesser, with executives from AOL, MySpace, Yahoo, MSNBC, CNN, Microsoft, Akamai, The Washington Post, Dow Jones and several other companies. Tune into the live Webcast at 9:00 AM EST.
In this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss the flailing economy. The CFOs explaining the financial results on tech company earnings calls echoed the sentiments and uncertainty of every other company and industry. As Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell stated:
We're not economic forecasters, and there is a high degree of uncertainty in outlook based on the state of the economy. As a result we've adjusted our guidance approach as follows. At the top end we're assuming a mild recession, and a relatively modest growth rate for all IT-based products. While at the bottom end we're assuming a deeper recession in the economy and end-season lower growth for IT.
Even Apple's Steve Jobs had something to say about the economy: "Your next-door neighbor can likely predict what is going to happen as accurately as we can."
We also preview what's coming next week at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles next week.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos loves to talk about the Kindle e-book reader. He's even got media mogul Oprah Winfrey pitching the device: "I'm telling you, it is absolutely my new favorite thing in the world," she recently said.
Every time I go to Amazon I am greeted with a huge Kindle ad that takes up most of the screen space. Amazon's computers know that I have seen this ad hundreds of times but they persist in showing it to me instead of products that are based on my viewing and purchase history and would have a higher probability of getting me to spend money.
At the same time, Amazon refuses to talk about the number of Kindles sold, but willingly discloses that the wireless device provides instant access to more than 185,000 books, blogs, newspapers, and magazines.
Apple, on the other hand, is happy to let the world know that 6.9 million iPhones and 11 million iPods were sold in the last quarter, and the iTunes catalog has 8.5 million titles.
One can only presume that Bezos worries that the sales numbers are not sufficiently stellar to share with the world. Disclosure of what could be perceived as lackluster Kindle or e-book sales would heap a lot of negativity on the fledgling device on Amazon, which pulled in $4.26 billion in its last quarter.
For Bezos, the Kindle is a second revolution. He started Amazon more than a decade ago as an online bookstore, and gradually added other product lines. As iTunes and Netflix took off, Bezos moved into digital music and movie delivery, and with the Kindle he is laying the groundwork to empty Amazon's warehouses of physical books.
During the Q3 earnings call, Bezos downplayed any cannibalization of print book sales by the Kindle: "Kindle's effect is additive to physical book units. Post the purchase of a Kindle, owners buy 1.6 times as many book titles and the same amount of physical books."
Reading his statement, it's apparent that Kindle buyers are already book lovers, and haven't yet weaned themselves off of print. But Bezos is very patient, and clearly willing to invest long term in his Google-like vision--digitize the world's information and sell it through Amazon.
Perhaps with Oprah's help and a new and improved version due next year, the Kindle will achieve escape velocity and Amazon can stop showing me the annoying Kindle ad and disclose how many units have been sold.
As for eliminating physical books from the warehouses, books are lagging music and video. The end of print is not near, but the writing is on the virtual wall. The economics of the Internet, as well as technology innovations such as improved virtual paper, instant translation, and always on, fast connections to a universe of knowledge indicate that Bezos is on the right track, just as he was in creating a virtual shopping mall for physical goods in 1994. And, he will have lots of company, or competition, as the digital age gets into full swing.
In the midst of the financial meltdown and a contentious upcoming election, you might think the U.S. government and taxpayers are just funding wars, bank bailouts, and bridges to nowhere or somewhere. But this is the same government that funded the Internet way back when and is also funding the next generation of technologies that will make the current Internet seem like a Model-T.
Over the last several years, the U.S. government--via DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) grants--has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in PAL, an acronym for "Personalized Assistant that Learns." Smarter software and networks and augmenting human intelligence are useful in times of war and peace.
As part of the PAL project, more than $200 million of DARPA money has been poured into CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) over the last five years. CALO has been run out of SRI International with the assistance of 25 research organizations and 400 researchers.
At this point, Siri's management is being secretive about what the company is developing. The elevator pitch goes something like, "Users' online lives are becoming more complicated and getting out of control for mainstream users. What if there was an easy way for normal users (non-power users) to ask the Internet to help them."
According to the Siri PR pitch, the product is "a new interaction paradigm for the consumer Internet experience that applies intelligence at the interface." The company expects to release a beta version of its initial product in the first half of 2009, according to Dag Kittlaus, a former Telenor Mobile and Motorola executive who is a co-founder and CEO of the company.
"We have to be careful at this stage," Kittlaus told me. "We don't like to play these games, but we need to keep a tight lid on what we are specifically doing. We have some original ideas of what the product is going to do, but we don't want to spark ideas among potential competitors." Those competitors would likely be masters of the Internet with large Internet footprints and research prowess like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
Kittlaus did allow that Siri has more than a dozen partners, presumably large, well-established distribution players that can help build a consumer market for Siri's product. Unlike most Web start-ups, Siri has a business model, Kittlaus claimed. "We have good business models, both existing and emerging. We think CPA (cost per action) is the future, and this specific application is good for CPA and we are partnering on that."
He also touted the pedigree of the company's current cadre of 19 employees. "They are mostly engineers from Yahoo, Google, SRI, NASA, and Xerox PARC," he said. The chief architect of the CALO project, Adam Cheyer is a co-founder and vice president of engineering at Siri, and Tom Gruber, a well-known artificial intelligence and semantic Web expert, is a co-founder and CTO.
Cheyer described CALO as superset of what Siri is developing. "The CALO project is building an automated assistant to help manage and improve your life. The technology spans all aspects of interaction--natural language processing, speech recognition, and planning and reasoning capabilities--and interfaces with all kinds of systems, such as email and contacts," he said.
(Credit:
SRI International)
"Learning in the wild is core focus," he continued. "We want it to improve over time and learn from users with no coaching and without changing any code. We are taking the key elements from the project to commercialize it in a form that will delight users. We are not building systems that do things but that learn how to do things."
CALO sounds like a representation of the famous Apple Knowledge Navigator video from 1987.
"Siri is a subset of that concept," Cheyer said. "We have to keep in mind existing user behavior. It will feel like something close to what people use a lot. We will add speech recognition and other features as we go. We don't want to take such a leap that people cannot identify with it. We'll do things similar to but more advanced than what we do now. The longer term vision is the Knowledge Navigator, although it is an early chapter now and it might look different than that."
According to Gruber, intelligence at the interface allows the computers to make recommendations, like a personal assistant:
The interfaces we use to interact with the world's information are getting smarter. Web portals gave us someone else's idea of the content we should see. Then came search engines, which let us tell the system what we want, one query at a time. We are about to see the next wave -- intelligence at the interface -- in which the system knows about us, our information, and our physical environment. With knowledge about our context, an intelligent system can make recommendations and act on our behalf.
(Credit:
Tom Gruber)
Siri may be working on more intelligent Web interfaces that can make inferences based a wide variety of user activities (the "lifestream"), learning over time on its own, and then taking actions on behalf of users. For example, if you are booking travel or looking for a restaurant, Siri would know your preferences and about travel sites or restaurants, integrating data and context from multiple sources to deliver personal assistance. This could be especially useful in mobile scenarios where you don't want to wade through pages of search results or deal with complex interactions.
Tom Gruber: "If we want our technology to have world-changing impact, bring it to the interface: get useful knowledge from all those intelligent people on the Internet give the benefit of this knowledge to everyone. "
(Credit: Tom Gruber)We'll have to wait for next year, if the company stays on schedule, to see whether Siri can really define a new paradigm for experiencing the Web.
The pile of digital data is growing, doubling every 18 months or less. That pile is the new gold, drawing data miners hoping to strike it rich by finding patterns and uncovering insights that can lead to more efficient markets, higher productivity, safer streets, and the much loved increased profits.
Stephen Baker's new book, The Numerati (Houghton Mifflin), introduces some of the data miners, or numerati, who are leading efforts to probe the depths of the global data dump.
He profiles several numerati, focusing more on the personalities and potential use cases than the arcane details of the computer science and mathematics. Baker, who has written for BusinessWeek for more than 20 years, paints a rich portrait of how the flood of data and the efforts of the numerati will transform shopping, marketing, politics, health care, matchmaking, work, medicine, and other disciplines.
"Just as they've helped medical researchers find genetic markers pointing to certain types of breast cancer and Huntington's disease, they might tell grocers what type of fruit to promote to buyers of canned food or what kinds of magazines dog-food buyers tend to read," he wrote.
IBM researcher and featured numerati Samer Takriti is building detailed mathematical models of 50,000 of his colleagues. Baker describes Takriti's ultimate goal as follows:
"The goal here is to build entire models, complete with each person's quirks, daily commute, and allies and enemies. These models might one day include whether they eat beef or pork, how seriously they take the Sabbath, whether a bee sting or a peanut sauce could lay them low. No doubt, some of them thrive even in the filthy air in Beijing or Mexico City, while others wheeze. If so, the models would eventually include this detail, among countless others. Takriti's job is to depict flesh-and-blood humans as math."
In practical application, data processed by numerati from calendars, instant messaging, e-mail, cell phones, social networks, project records, resumes, and other sources could render a digital portrait of each worker. Machines could handily determine the optimal group for a specific project, taking into account budgetary, geographical, and other constraints.
The data could also be used to ferret out employees who aren't fulfilling their productivity quotient or are bypassing the chain of command. Companies have technology installed to monitor e-mail for spam, porn, and other abuses, they might as well use it to see what people in the company are thinking, Baker told me in a conversation last week. He acknowledged the significant privacy issues that go along with unleashing numerati on the world of data and addresses the issue in his book:
"At work, perhaps more than anywhere else, we are in danger of becoming data serfs--slaves to the information we produce," he wrote.
"Part of what needs to be calculated is how much this freaks out workers. It impacts productivity and the morale of employees. If a big technology company gets a reputation for monitoring every keystroke, the smart people will choose to work elsewhere. Companies have to figure out what works and what is overkill or freaks people out," Baker told me.
He states in his book that the "mathematical modeling of humanity....promises to be one of the great undertakings of the twenty-first century." This concept could be applied to Google and other companies who are extracting and analyzing billions of digital signals generated by individuals and groups.
Just because computer science and applied math makes data divination possible, the means don't necessarily justify the ends. The same technology used to determine the mathematical model of a terrorist or poor performer in the workplace can be used to violate the privacy and rights of unsuspecting, innocent people.
Baker told me in our conversation that we need tools to decide what information to share and with whom. Some of the social networks and major Web sites are working on that problem, but the solutions so far are inadequate. We'll need a generally accepted Bill of Rights for personal data to give the numerati and their overseers guidance on how to avoid "evil" in the evolving digital world. Of course, that is wishful, optimistic, and, perhaps, naive thinking.
So far, the company has 135,000 embeddable objects and 64 million monthly consumers of its widgets, which live on blogs, social-networking sites, and other Web destinations. The most popular widgets are "The Fun Classic Super Mario Game In Flash," BabyTicker: The Baby Countdown Pregnancy Ticker," "Cyber-pet," "Bubbles," and "Idiot Test."
While Widgetbox claims 462 million widget views in a month across 500,000 discrete domains, the big numbers don't add up to a big business. The majority of Widgetbox views are happening on blogs, which led Widgetbox CEO Will Price to become more than a widget supplier.
This week, the company launched the Widgetbox Blog Network, which catalogs widgets in 29 verticals, such as Autos, Music, Sports and Politics. "It's a natural step in the process for us to move away from a pure technology story about widgets," Price said.
The Widgetbox network, which is starting with close to zero unique users per month, will primarily appeal to the long tail of bloggers who lack distribution. Participants include the network channel widget on their blog pages, and Widgetbox applies algorithms to determine which content gets pushed up to the top of the network categories. It publishes leaderboards listing the top contributors.
Widgetbox is launching an ad network, categorizing widgets into 29 content verticals.
"To date, widgets don't have the concept of a network effect. The more people who use them, the more utility is created for individual users. Given bloggers are one of our largest user sources, taking a blidget (RSS feeds turned into a widget) from a single source, and sharing it with the community, and showcasing it in the channel, and having leaderboard benefits bloggers, online content publishers, and advertisers," he added. "The new channels extend reach, drive traffic, improve brand awareness for bloggers."
The Widgetbox network also gives the company an improved business model. Currently, the majority of revenue comes from custom advertising campaigns for companies such as Intel, Wal-Mart Stores, and Apple. But the vast majority of Widgetbox inventory cannot be monetized, Price said.
The company is developing an ad network to take advantage of the categorization into verticals.
"We have 462 million widget views a month, but advertisers are not getting it. We want to target demographics and have a user story--64 million unique users broken into 29 vertical channels, each with 15 to 300 authors," Price explained. "We have to (determine a) domain, categorize them into channels, and understand ad treatments such as drop downs, pop-overs, peel-backs, and rotations, in a way that satisfies users, publishers, and advertisers. It's still early. There are no standard ad units or blueprints to follow, but we are trying to figure it out. The goal for the rest of the year is to answer questions and go into next year with some case studies."
Robert Vamosi and I discuss the new features and browsing capabilities of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 and how it stacks up with other browsers. The new release brings IE up to par with Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and even pushes Microsoft a little ahead of the competition in a few areas.
See also:
IE 8 beta gives other browsers a run for their money
Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 review
