Backblog August 2007

Acer buys Gateway: Goodbye cow boxes
August 31, 2007 By Peter Wolchak
Categories: General ICT Hardware and Infrastructure
One of the precepts that govern my life is that if someone ever offers me $7 billion for any business I own, I will take the money.

It’s a rule that would have benefited the execs at Gateway. Acer recently bought the PC maker for US$710 million, but back in 1997 Compaq was ready to pay US$7 billion. The decision not to sell then was obviously a bad one.

Gateway, once a real force in the PC industry, was hit hard by the 2000 tech slide and then struggled with both frequent changes in its executive suite and disappointing sales when it diversified into consumer electronics, such as TVs, DVD players and home theatre rigs.

The purchase by Acer is a sad outcome for two reasons. First, Gateway was a fun company, and that is relatively rare. It’s computers arrived in cow-patterned boxes and it promised cheerful and friendly customer support. It’s not certain that the cow boxes will disappear but the sense of whimsy that created them is probably gone now.

The second reason is entirely personal. My first PC was a Gateway. I completely bought into the bovine packaging and the spirit of the company.

That sense of corporate fun got me to buy Gateway then and it gets me to fly WestJet now. And we need more companies that don’t take themselves too seriously.

Peter Wolchak
0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email

Intel joins $100 Laptop initiative – finally
August 29, 2007 By Peter Wolchak
Categories: General Green Tech ICT Hardware and Infrastructure
Intel is one of the most powerful and significant players in the PC industry. Its products drive much of modern computing and this gives it a huge voice when standards, prices and future directions are determined.

So it was galling that the tech giant was not contributing to the $100 Laptop initiative of the One Laptop Per Child group (www.laptop.org).

The non-profit organization is run by a consortium of vendors and researchers who want to make an inexpensive and rugged laptop available in developing counties. The laptop, called the XO, has built-in mesh networking and its battery can be recharged using human muscle power.

Companies behind XO include AMD, Google, News Corp. and Red Hat. They believe that once three million orders come in, the per-unit cost will drop from the current US$175 to about US$100.

So it was disappointing that Intel chose not to participate in the initiative and instead offered a competitive product, the US$225 Classmate PC (www.intel.com/intel/worldahead/classmatepc). Intel has signed deals in countries including Pakistan, Nigeria and Brazil.

While the Classmate is fine in and of itself, the price tag is too high and, by splitting the market, Intel was delaying the cost reductions that would follow mass-market sales.

So it is good news that Intel has decided to jump on the XO bandwagon. It looks like the Classmate product line will continue but the needier countries of the world may certainly benefit from Intel’s brainpower.

Peter Wolchak
0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email

One cellphone. Two numbers. Brilliant
August 24, 2007 By Peter Wolchak
Categories: ICT Hardware and Infrastructure
The best product innovations are usually simple and immediately understandable, the kind of ideas that trigger a “Why didn’t I think of that?” A good tech example of this is Webkinz (www.webkinz.com). If you have kids teenaged or younger, you probably just smiled or grimaced in recognition. For you others: Webkinz are soft attractive stuffed animals made by Ganz. They sell for about $15, and that’s a decent price for a regular stuffed animal. But Ganz Webified the concept: for the purchase price kids also get to play with their toy in an exclusive online world. So if you buy a pink poodle toy, online you get a pink poodle. It can move around the online world, play games and interact with other Webkinz.

And kids love the idea. The Webkinz Web site reportedly received 3.7 million unique visitors in May of this year, and few kids own only one Webkinz. It is a collectible craze on the Beanie Babies level.

Why didn’t I think of that?

Which brings us to Rogers. The company just launched a service that is simple, clever and very useful. Its new Second Voice Line Service lets you access two phone numbers with one cellphone.

How many times have you seen someone walking around with two cellphones clipped on? Often it’s a BlackBerry and a smaller, simpler phone. Why two? One is for business, the other is personal.

The new Rogers service will remove that second phone. It can also be used to give one person numbers in two different area codes.

Rogers is not charging an additional fee, beyond the existing cost of the two numbers, and in fact is offering discounts on shared services, such as voice mail boxes. Pay for voice mail on one line, get it free on the other.

If it sounds like I am praising this idea, I am. This is just so smart that I can’t believe no one has offered it until now.

Peter Wolchak
0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email

Cooperation and the prisoner's dilemma
August 14, 2007 By Don Tapscott
Categories: Social Networking
Two prisoners are offered the same deal - if one of them testifies and the other doesn’t talk, the talker will go free and the holdout will go to jail for 10 years. If both refuse to talk, the prosecutor will only be able to put them in jail for six months. If each prisoner rats out the other, they will both get five-year sentences. Not knowing what the other prisoner will do, how should each one act?

This is the classic prisoners dilemma, which provides an important lesson for many budding young economists everywhere. If you (assuming you are the prisoner) talk, you either end up going free or getting a five year sentence. If you don’t talk, you either go to jail for six months or ten years.

From an individual standpoint, this makes it very tempting to talk, even though the best thing for the prisoners is if both keep their mouths shut - hence the dilemma, as the the optimal individual decisions do not lead to the optimal group outcome. To get to the optimal group decision, the prisoners must work together - which in this case means having a strong, established trust.

Which takes us to cooperation, and in a roundabout way to Dr. Nowak. As covered in this NY Times article (free registration required), Dr. Nowak has been using the principles of the prisoner’s dilemma to study cooperation, which he argues is one of the three basic principles of evolution (the others being mutation and selection).

It appears to be a fascinating bit of research he is doing, and the implications of it are great - while enabling and benefiting from cooperation is a key element of wikinomics, Nowak is also using the same principles to do things like seek out a cure for cancer, and wade knee deep into the study of evolution and altruistic behavior.

According to Dr. Nowak, the conditions in which cooperation can arise can be shown in a simple equation: B/C>K. That is, cooperation will emerge if the benefit-to-cost (B/C) ratio of cooperation is greater than the average number of neighbors (K).

Not surprisingly, the real juice for cooperation comes when reputations come into play. By pioneering a version of PD in which players acquire reputations, They found that if reputations spread quickly enough, they could increase the chances of cooperation taking hold. Players were less likely to be fooled by defectors and more likely to benefit from cooperation.

Further… Reputation has a powerful effect on how people play games. People who gain a reputation for not cooperating tend to be shunned or punished by other players. Cooperative players get rewarded.

Do you think there might be some implications from this relevent to the role of reputation profiles in sites like Facebook, Digg, YouTube, etc… and could this type of research help formalize/ structure and analysis for optimizing relationships within an ever evolving peer production community?

Don Tapscott

0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email

Good on Google. Again
August 10, 2007 By Peter Wolchak
Categories: General
There has been a lot of talk in the industry lately about the rising fortunes of Google and the declining stature of Yahoo. The latter is certainly still a great company but the momentum is with Google.

For yet another example of why this is so, visit http://finance.google.ca/finance.

Just launched, Google Finance Canada lets users look up the financial details of a public or private company using its name—or a ticker symbol—and access information including market data, news, financials, interactive charts, blog posts and discussion groups.

All of this information was available before and Google did not invent the financial portal, but by adding its own special sauce the company has done the idea better than others.

For example, the financial charts integrate news stories and users can click through different time periods.

Google is rapidly becoming the only Internet company most people need.

Peter Wolchak
0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email

Product design: it's all about style, baby
August 8, 2007 By Peter Wolchak
Categories: Software Companies
Kids these days: all they care about is fashion and flash, and forget about function.

A survey commissioned by Autodesk concluded the 18 to 29 age group—called the millennial generation—places greater importance on design than did its parents when considering workplace satisfaction, product purchases and even which city to live in. in fact, almost 70 per cent of the americans surveyed said a product becomes a must-have for them when it is well designed, and 55 per cent believe good design can actually improve a product’s functionality.

Peter Wolchak
0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email

Saskatchewan! Connected free Wi-Fi network zooms past Toronto
August 7, 2007 By Peter Wolchak
Categories: Canadian Technology Associations Wireless
Cisco and the Government of Saskatchewan announced in July that the citizens of Saskatoon, Regina, Prince Albert and Moose Jaw now have free Wi-Fi access throughout most of the downtown cores.

The rollout puts these cities more than a year behind Toronto’s One Zone implementation, but Saskatchewan still gets the nod for innovation. Why? Saskatchewan! Connected is free. Toronto Hydro Telecom charges $5 for one hour, $10 for a day and $30 per month.

Saskatchewan’s free network gives citizens of those cities unfettered access to the Web and to e-mail and that means they will use the network. It also means businesses can create cutting-edge Wi-Fi applications. Those two factors could make Saskatchewan a hotbed of mobile innovation.

It was nice for Toronto, for a little while. Being an innovation leader. But hats off to Saskatchewan. Good job, folks. We look forward to seeing this play out. And we wonder which city will be next, because frankly, everyone else is now falling behind.

Peter Wolchak
2 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email

Xerox develops start-to-finish green paper
August 1, 2007 By Peter Wolchak
Categories: Green Tech
Companies all want to be seen to be green nowadays. You can imagine looking at a company’s marketing To-Do list and seeing “Develop some green talking points” listed.

And many are coming out with initiatives that actually look pretty good, but the problem with a lot of these is that they begin and end with the new product: Buy this, because it’s greener than the previous version. The best example of this is new cars. Automakers and some government leaders tell us older cars are less fuel efficient and therefore conscientious citizens should go out and buy a new car. And, as far as the argument goes, it’s true: new cars may use less gas per kilometre than your old car.

But what the pitch fails to factor in is the environmental costs of making that shiny new car. The parts all have to be manufactured, then shipped to an assembly plant, then put together, and then the new car is shipped to the buyer. Each step pumps pollutants into the environment, and any efficiencies that might be gained from driving the new car are more than offset by the environmental costs of creating it.

Similarly, it doesn’t make sense to throw all your old light bulbs in the garbage in order to buy new compact fluorescent units.

So when a press release arrived from Xerox touting its new green paper, I was pleased to see the following: “The new paper for digital printing is made by a mechanical process so it uses half as many trees as traditional paper, is manufactured with less water and chemicals, and is made in a mill using hydroelectricity, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent. Plus, because it's lighter than paper made by the traditional chemical process, it costs less to ship and mail. The new Xerox High Yield Business Paper will be produced in a Canadian mill.”

Details are here.

I am not in a position to assess the overall soundness of this product, but it is good to see a company which claims to have a green product actually factor in manufacturing, greenhouse gas emissions and transportation.

Peter Wolchak
0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email