Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve looked at availability of movies and TV shows that came out in the past year. But what about movies that came two years ago? Are those more available today than they were a year ago? Let’s look at the data.

2010: Box Office Winners availability

A year ago, I went through the list of box office winners and looked at their availability online. I pulled the information again in January 2012, a full year after the initial data set. The 2012 data looked like this:

Aggregate Rental data

When you tally it up, the rental only chart (excluding movies you can purchase) looks as follows:

The data seems to show that hits from over a year ago are still difficult to get. Netflix fares best, capturing 26% of the titles but pay-per-view services like Amazon, iTunes, and Vudu turn in a paltry offering with only 15% of the 2010 box office winners being available for rent on these services.

So, having run the data for 2 years in a row, are we seeing improvements in the market?

The picture here actually shows something fairly disastrous to people who hope that things are improving in terms of availability of movies along the long tail. While Netflix turns in a stronger performance, more than doubling availabilities of 2010 box office winners from 10 to 26, all other online services are seeing availability drop by 31% or more. This means that almost one third fewer 2010 box office winners are available this year as rentals as compared to last year. The strategy here seems to call in question the existence of a long tail in terms of media availability as far as rentals are concerned.

While the cost of storing a movie is a marginal one, it appears studios prefer to not make titles available as rentals online. There is some humor in the fact that whatever corner DVD rental place is still in existence near your home probably has a higher selection of available titles from 2010 than could be found last year because ALL 2010 box office winners are now available on DVD.

Aggregate Rental and Sales data

So, with a strong suspicion that sales numbers may be better, let’s see what happens if we had movies that may not be available for rent but can be purchase (ie. are more expensive to get)

The first one notices here is that the number of titles legally available online is still relatively low a full year after all the titles have been released. While DVDs have come out, legal online streaming services online offer a bit over half of the 2010 box office winners, with Amazon having the most extensive catalog. The availability of legal movie streams, when compared to DVD, is still a challenge.

But have things improved since last year? To figure that out, let’s look at the availability of the same titles over the last couple of years:

My initial hunch was that we would have seen improvements in the sales of legal streams from one year to the next, just as we would would have seen for DVDs because of availability.

But the picture is actually surprising as the availability of legal streams for 2010 box office winners has dropped in the last 12 months. On their face, one might expect sales of legal online streams to see patterns similar to sales of DVDs, even if they would trail the plastic medium. But what’s surprising here is that it appears studios have decided to pull their movie catalogs back offline.

There is still a long way before legal online streaming matches DVD sales as it appears movie studios are still addicted to selling pieces of plastic than they are to selling movies in any form available.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Streaming held back. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Last week, I looked at the availability of 2011 movie box office winners as legal internet streams. The results seem to incense Netflix supporters, who pointed out that the comparison was unfair because Netflix was more focused on TV fares. This week, I turn my attention to availability of popular TV shows as internet on-demand streams.

Approach

As I did a year ago, I pulled the data from Deadline.com’s Broadcast series ranker and cleaned it up. I took out every live and reality TV shows as the archival value of such show is limited since they are primarily marketed as “events” and, as such, loose most of their value to the viewer after the initial broadcast.

Where part of one of the seasons was available, I gave the service a partial availability. Where seasons prior to the 2010–2011 years were available, I did not give credit if the 2010–2011 season had no availability because I was focusing the effort on availability of last year’s shows.

From a service standpoint, I focused on services that allowed for streaming to most internet-enabled television. This meant that Netflix and Hulu were the main subscription based offerings and Amazon on-demand and iTunes were listed as pay-per-view services.

The list

With­out fur­ther ado, here’s the list of top 2011 TV shows avail­able for stream­ing on the internet:

While it is fun to check if your favorite show is available or not, the real interesting trending data only comes when you re-group the information. For this purpose, I looked at two different sets of data: first, I looked at whether all the episodes of the 2010–2011 season were available for a given series. Then I re-ran my research, giving full credit to the service for having “some” episodes from that season.

The results were as follows:

As one would expect, the pay-per-view services are doing better than the subscription based ones but what is surprising is how little content is actually available on the subscription-based services: Hulu only offers some episodes of half of the most popular shows, while Netflix barely has any offerings, clocking in with just above a third of the shows having some kind of stream.

When trying to access full seasons, the data is even worse, as Netflix offers full seasons on only 9 (or 18%) of the top 50 shows, while Hulu gives you access to the 2010–2011 season for 18 shows (or 36%). The amusing thing is that Hulu appears to give you access to as many full seasons as Netflix has as partial ones. The data shows that if you want access to popular TV shows via subscription, you’re better off going with Hulu than you are going with Netflix.

What seems to be hurting those services is the fact that CBS, one of the large TV networks has decided to go it alone when it comes to their own shows and show them on their own sites instead of making them available to stream aggregators.

Another interesting thing is that Netflix seems to pick up cancelled shows more readily than any other service. In my research, I found that if a show had been cancelled over the last year, it was more likely to be available on Netflix than on any of the other services.

On the pay-per-view side, Amazon and iTunes have now reached parity, as both service offer 43 (or 86%) of the shows on either per-episode or per-season fees. Their pricing seems to be roughly the same, with shows average between $.99 and $3.99 per episodes and full TV seasons passes going for $20.99 to $40.99. I would not be surprised if next year, we saw those services having the full set of shows available for instant streaming.

Breaking it down

Looking at the distribution, one might wonder how each of the services fares on sub-sets of the overall group. Furthermore, in terms of getting a better sense of trends, if is useful to overlay this with last year’s data and see whether progress has been made:

Overall, it looks like top 10 shows are less available onall-you-can-eat  subscription-based services this year than they were last year, while there is an increase in availability on pay-per-view services.

Netflix continues to trail other services in terms of making full seasons available and it seems it is a gap that will not narrow any time soon as Hulu, Amazon, and iTunes continue to aggressively grow their catalogs. In fact, the big story in this graph may be the big push Amazon is making in adding new titles to its streaming library. It has now matched Apple’s iTunes store in terms of offering, closing the gap it had last year.

When looking at partial availability, we are still seeing some differences:

Here, Netflix appears to have actually list some ground when it comes to the top 10 list, while all the other players have made substantial progress. This may point to another weakness for Netflix moving forward. Also of note is that while Apple used to be the go-to source for all TV series, Amazon has closed the gap in the last year, establishing itself as a strong second player in the market.

Conclusion

Many people look to online TV streams as the key to increasing the number of people cutting the cord from their cable companies and moving to internet-only offerings. This year’s data seems to indicate that it is now possible to do so but that the costs associated with such a strategy may not necessarily represent a huge saving for people who consume a lot of TV content.

The greatest amount of available content in terms of legal online streams can be found on pay-per-view services and subscription-based services like Netflix and Hulu still have some ways to go before providing a TV-like selection (this may explain why both of them are starting to turn further in the direction of producing their own content). However, viewers who watch only a few select show may be able to get this content from services like Amazon and Apple iTunes for a fee.

People watching this space should pay closer attention to Amazon’s aggressive push in this arena. As the company continues to expand its digital offerings, it seems to have earmarked video as one of the areas in which it is willing to go big and it has quietly grown its catalog over the last year.

Meanwhile, while Hollywood is trying to push for laws against online piracy (things like SOPA and PIPA), creating frictions with the tech community in the process, maybe it should focus on making content available through legal channels first, before complaining that people are stealing content. One of the reason people may be drive to piracy is the lack of availability of the content through legal means. Fill that gap, and you will see substantially less piracy of content happening on the internet.

Next week, I’ll take you through last year’s box office winners and how available those are. There are more surprises there, I promise; so stay tuned.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Legal streams for 2011 TV hits. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Before we kick in a new year of post, I want to take a quick look back at things I covered on 2011 as I still believe many of those represent important trends and inform some of my thinking.

I kicked off the year with the usual prediction list (and closed it out with a review) and was surprised by how many of the themes I highlighted ended up making their way through other entries.

I had set a goal for myself to do a post a week and decide to create a framework that allowed me to do so efficiently. My process is to capture simple ideas in a backlog and then dig through them once a week, sometimes tying the story to a recent development. Every Friday night or Saturday, I then crank out a post that covers that top in as broad a way as I could.

I write mostly for myself, as a way to get a better sense of my own thinking on a topic and then get feedback on how wrong (or occasionally, right) I am. This allows me to refine the strategy behind Keepskor and get a better sense of where our industry is heading.

While I never set a narrative for what is being covered on TNL.net, one seems to emerge when I look at the work I produced over the last year.

An emerging New York

I kicked off the year by making a bold prediction about a re-emerging and re-invigorated New York technology scene.  A year later, I feel ever more strongly about the things I highlighted in that series of posts: New York has emerged as a major player and I suspect that, within a generation or two, New York has a chance to displace the valley as the center of the US tech industry (note that the longer view is something I articulated later in the year but has been a dominant theme on this site for a decade).

The series created quite a stir when it came out and was one of the most trafficked group of entries this year (in fact, it still gets a decent amount of traffic a year later.)

If you’re on the East coast, you no longer have to relocate south of San Francisco to make it. New York provides an environment that rivals San Francisco and has a few extra advantages I had not covered in that series. For example, being halfway between London and the Valley, New York is the perfect place to manage a business that is not solely aimed at the US.

Myth-busting in startup land

This feeling from the ground, as I started re-entering the startup world, got me in the direction of thinking about the broader trends relating to startups. I a series about startup myths, I debunked the ideas that startups are risky, expensive, idea-based, smooth rides where everyone makes money.

My reason for doing this series of post was to archive thoughts on this that I could send to people when they brought up those myths (and as someone who spend too much time on Wall St., I’ve been exposed to quite a few of those people.)

Financial Markets

Using some of the skills I did pick up on Wall St., I’ve been trying to make sense of the financial markets and get a better understanding of the overall economic picture. This first led me to analyze whether internet valuations were getting over-inflated (they weren’t.)

As internet companies started testing the IPO waters again, I checked to see if LinkedIn was overvalued and highlighted some concerns around the GroupOn offering and later in the year, I started thinking writing more about digital currency.

The Internet War

The concept of digital currency is but one of the hot flashpoint between the current world and the internet one. Over the past year, we’ve seen increased activity from hacker groups and the rise of the internet as a political philosophy. Calling for an end to apathy on the part of our industry when it comes to policy making, I tried to make the case for the creation of a new set of definitions and protocols to control the internet of the future.

This is in reaction to an increasing privatization of large parts of the web, balkanizing the open web,  as companies try to monetize their user base to return value to their investors or counter suspected threats by new entrants. Along the way, those companies are redefining identity ownership through surprising terms of service agreements.

A resurgent Microsoft

Meanwhile, another story that has made its way through my narrative has been a massive comeback: Over the last few years, Microsoft has become a symbol of technology decline. But 2011 has shown us a resurgent company, first in its agreement with Nokia, which will bear fruits in 2012; then with the bets its placing on the web as a core component of the next version of Windows; and then through the success of its revolutionary Kinect device.

Microsoft’s bet on the web as the core of Windows is a smart one. HTML5 is enjoying wider support and new technologies like WebGL are bringing the web to new levels, levels that could be matching native apps soon. I will probably write more about these trends in 2012.

Internet and TV Colliding

Another item I have covered extensively in 2011 is the merging of television and the internet. Last year, I looked at where 2010 box office winners were streaming, how available popular TV shows were, and whether there was a delay in availability.I also looked into why live TV streams were not available online, explaining how some of the missing pieces of the puzzle could fit together. This provided readers with a stronger understanding of where the market stood. At the time, the results showed that availability was getting better but still had a long way to go.

I will start revisiting a lot of this information next week to gauge how much progress has been made in making movies and TV shows available on the internet.

My interest in this as a trend is that it provides us with a better view into whether internet TV is ready for primetime as a new internet channel (Netflix getting into the content production business was a major event in that direction, opening the door for other internet companies to offer something on that third screen… and for a few players to become new gatekeepers if we are not careful.)

I suspect this collision is part of the reason we have seen the entertainment industry rally behind SOPA, as it has seen first the music and now the book industry getting impacted in radical ways as media increasingly become mobile and can be consumed on phones and tablets.

Other trends

However, I was surprised that I had not spent more time covering some other trends I’m seeing emerging.

My archives did not include any mentions of bitcoin, though I think that virtual currencies are one of the hot topics currently sitting below the surface. While I am not convinced that bitcoin is the one that will win in the future, I do believe that we will see increasing traffic in that arena soon.

I also strongly believe that a new manufacturing age is upon us. The revolution behind 3D printing, 3D scanning and more customized and micro-produced materials is something that we will see on the edge this year and probably in the mainstream by end of year or early next year. This will have a substantial impact on our economy in the long run and I will keep an eye on it.

Conclusion

While I have deliberately chosen not to focus my writing on a narrow area, it appears there are broad topics that I return to on a regular basis. The intersection of media, technology, business and politics are part of the broad trends I follow around here and generally form the core of what I write about. My friend Anil defines his own writing as being about culture and I believe that broadly, he and I write about some of the same things.

Over the next year, I will revisit a lot of the work I did in 2011 as I wanted to establish a few foundational posts from a trending standpoint. But as we become more public about Keepskor, I will also write about some of the things that led to its creation and some of the thinking behind it. As someone who spent a lot of time dealing a dual life as blogger and Wall Streeter, I haven’t really said much about what I’m working on but I’m sure that readers will be interested as it taps into some of the trends highlighted above and a few that I haven’t talked about yet.

2012 is going to be a very exciting year and I will try to have a body of work at the end of it that matches what I’ve accomplished in 2011.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2011: The year that was. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

With a new year kicking in, it’s time for a new batch of predictions.

Business

One of the easiest predictions to make is that Facebook will go public this year, and it will manage to do so in a very successful IPO. I suspect that this may actually be the high watermark for the current boom cycle as Facebook is the most successful of the companies that were born of the Web 2.0 cycle. In a fashion similar to what happened with the Netscape IPO in 1995, the Facebook IPO may create a small window of opportunity for many other companies to go public.

On the private end of the spectrum, I think we will see the following companies see some form of liquidity event via either acquisition or IPO: Twitter has a strong chance of being acquired by Apple, which will quickly merge the offering into all of its products; Another possibility is that Twitter and Tumblr merge to create a mico-blogging powerhouse spanning both ends of the country. Meanwhile, Foursquare will either IPO or be acquired by Facebook or GroupOn in a share-only deal. Meetup will go public, creating another great story for the New York technology scene.

When it comes to Google, we will see the company continue its integration of Google+ into everything it does, with the biggest impact being the move to migrate all Orkut users to the new service. This will create an outcry in countries like India and Brazil, where Orkut has been popular but will leave many in the American media to wonder what the big deal is as Us customers have mostly left already.

Meanwhile, a lot of the companies that went public in 2011 will meet some strong headwinds as the rigor of the public market make it much more difficult for them to maneuver. Expect some changes at GroupOn and Zynga, with many people questioning their business models and long term viability.

Media

For a couple of years, there’s been a slow ramp up to the integration of the Internet with television. The rise (and to some extent fall) of Netflix, along with the entrance of new players like Hulu and Amazon, have made video distribution on the big screen one of the areas where the Internet and television have already intersected.

However, other areas of interaction have, so far, not been quite as successful. Apple is still treating AppleTV as a hobby, Google has mostly failed so far with GoogleTV, and other players like Roku and Boxee have, to date, been only adopted on the fringe.

In 2012 all that changes as the TV screen takes center stage in a way that a new generation of smart phones arose after the 2007 iPhone announcement. First of all, we will see some increased standardization around how to deliver content to TV screens, with agreements from TV set manufacturers like Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, and Vizio agreeing to some level of standardization. Apple will also announce a large screen product it will position in the TV market: The set will have AppleTV’s technology built-in, be accessible over WiFi, and connect directly to the iTunes store as well as integrate with the iPhone and iPad and other Airplay compatible devices. The set will run iOS and will be managed by a remote that runs on iPod touch, iPhones and iPads.

Meanwhile, cable companies will start opening up their platforms with some software development kits allowing to access content on the set top boxes they use. Once the Motorola acquisition is completed, Google will start transitioning the Motorola set-top boxes, which are a large part of the cableTV market, to GoogleTV, increasing the footprint of the service in the marketplace. Along the way, we will also see GoogleTV become more streamlined and less ambitious, focusing on delivering Android apps to the big screen instead of trying to rebuild the whole TV industry.

The concept of cord-cutting will continue to gain support but will not yet jump into the mainstream consciousness. With shows now being available exclusively on the likes of Netflix, we might see some interesting positioning whereas some TV carrier will offer Netflix as a premium service.

Politics

Social media will dominate the political cycle in 2012, with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, and Meetup becoming part of the political operative tool belt. However, traditional electoral models will continue to be disrupted by the rise of distributed networked organizations like Occupy Wall Street, Wikileaks, or Anonymous. Except those players and new ones built on a similar model to have a substantial impact in terms of registering new voters and getting those voters to the polls in elections in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.

In the US, the 2012 electoral cycle will see Republicans select Mitt Romney, a candidate most of their electorate is not very excited about, to run against Barack Obama. With the unexpected support of Occupy Wall Street and its splinter organization, Obama will win re-election as issues around economic disparities and job creation continue to be big topics of discussion.

In Europe, expect to see incumbents toppled in many countries: with major elections coming up in France, Spain, Russia, and Finland, it is possible that we will see a major change in political alignments across most of Europe, along with an increase chance of protest in those different countries. In Russia, in particular, we may see the internet play a crucial role in organizing protest if there are questions regarding voting irregularities.

The continuing protests in the middle east region may also lead to substantial changes in governance in several countries including Bahrain, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. During the presidential elections in Iran, we will see increasing clampdowns on internet sites as the government tries to shut any means of communication available to large groups of protesters.

… and of course, the easiest prediction to make is that the media industry will continue to push for more restrictions on the Internet, leading to more activists pushing back.

Technology

2012 is going to be an explosive year for technology.

First of all, we will see HTML5 roaring back, as many companies realize that it is cheaper to build in HTML5 and that the gap between platform specific code and HTML5 is shrinking. The introduction of WebGL, and proper implementation of geolocation and caching within mobile devices will give developers the ability to develop applications in HTML5 that can rival some of the offerings of native code. This is a move that will be resisted by platform makers like Apple and Google as it will loosen their stranglehold on their respective platforms; however, the split side of this is that effort is that some large companies will look to free themselves from said control by creating HTML5 instances of their own products.

On the mobile end, the Microsoft/Nokia will get some real traction with Windows Phone becoming a strong third player in the mobile market. Apple and Android will continue dominating the market with Microsoft still being a distant third. RIM’s position in the market will substantially worsen and will either be sold or go into bankruptcy.

Enterprise cloud strategies will continue to grow, leading to a growing divide between companies that can get efficiencies through the use of cloud computing and companies that are kept by different regulatory frameworks from being able to realize the financial gains offered by such model.

3D will be a hot buzzword, with the introduction of consumer-oriented 3D scanners and 3D printers that will push the idea of scanning and printing your own plastic parts. This will lead to some controversy around the concept of 3D objects piracy popping up in the media, with little actual evidence to back those fears. On the 3D projection end, we will see the rise of designer 3D glasses and the first glasses-free 3D television hitting the market, as we as a few consumer-grade 3D cameras. At the same time, we will see more and more technology to upscale 2D to 3D, in an attempt to develop a larger consumer market for 3D technology.

On the PC end, netbooks will disappear as a category and the hot new trend will be to offer thinbooks that mirror much of what Apple is offering with the Macbook Air product line.  Solid State Drive will aso increasingly become standard on new computers and we will see Apple actually announce they are getting rid of traditional hard-drive in all their product offerings. This will lead to their being able to announce that all their hardware can now run for at least 7 hours on a single charge.

Any which way, we will be revisiting those predictions at the end of the year and see how well (or badly) I did. I wish you, dear reader, a very happy new year and look forward to a continued dialogue in 2012.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The 2012 Crystal ball. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

A small christmas diversion (sang to the tune of “The 12 days of Christmas”):

On the first day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
A like and a retweet too

On the second day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the third day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the fourth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the fifth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the sixth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the seventh day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the eighth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the ninth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
nine quora thanks
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the tenth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
ten wordpress entries
nine quora thanks
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the eleventh day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
eleven google +1s
ten wordpress entries
nine quora thanks
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the twelfth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
twelve youtube videos
eleven google +1s
ten wordpress entries
nine quora thanks
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

Happy holidays.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The 12 days of Social. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Every year, I make a set of predictions as to what the new year is going to bring. At the end of year, I also review how close or far off the mark I’ve come. It is now time to review the 2011 edition of predictions, which I made on the 3rd of January of this year.

Politics

Last year’s leading internet political story was the rise of wikileaks and, as such, my views were impacted by it. Surprisingly, there has not been that many wikileaks-like organizations arising on the internet. This may be due to the fact that there just aren’t that many people leaking information.

The power of wikileaks, however, could not be denied, and my predictions of protests arising out of cablegate were right on the mark. This year, cablegate highlighted some of the abuse of governments in Tunisia and Egypt and some of that evidence was part (but only part) of what led to radical changes in those northern African countries.

On the regulation end, the FCC has indeed gotten more aggressive, with its more visible move being its attempt to block the acquisition of T-mobile by AT&T. However, to my surprise, there hasn’t been that much complaining from either political party about this rejuvenated enforcement effort.

Meanwhile, the rise of SOPA is clearly in line with the prediction that the entertainment industry will push for more internet regulation.  However, it is relatively easy to predict such thing as it appears the entertainment industry is forever locked into the concept of a more regulated internet. They basically see the internet as competition and would love nothing more than to strangle it to death.

So looking at the political end of the spectrum, I’ll give myself points for good prognostication.

Business

In that category, I decided to stick my neck out on the concept of a public-less IPO and while it was essentially something that happened with Facebook, the concept did not really take off for other companies as they decided to go the public route instead. My expectations were really that IPOs would not come until very late into the year and I was surprised by the likes of LinkedIn, GroupOn, and Zynga managing to get into the market relatively early.

Furthermore, I was pretty much off the mark when it came to NFC. NFC is (and has been) a promising technology but 2011 was not a breakout year for the technology. At this point, only a few select Android models seem to support it and there seems to be little traction from the market around it. While Intel invested in NFC, it may be a technology that grows into usage without having a particular breakout year.

The rise of cord-cutters did happen but not in as large an amount as I suspected. While this is a trend that continue to grow, it is still sitting on the edge and hasn’t gone mainstream yet. However, its a trend I will continue to monitor closely as I suspect this will move to the mainstream in relatively short order.

All and all, my predictions on business were off the mark. Maybe I’ll do better next year.

Technology

Gamification continues to grow but did not really have the big breakout year I expected. While more and more companies are continuing to integrate game-like behavior in their applications and workflows, we are starting to experience a period of consolidation in the space, with bunchball being one of the larger players. This seems to highlight that this space is one where only a couple of major players will arise and smaller players are already running out of steam. The focus around developing gamification models for computer-based applications may be part of the reason for this failing to move forward as the trend is increasingly to more and more applications moving to a mobile-first model.

The scan and shoot revolution I predicted quietly made its ways into the mainstream, with smart phones being the new weapon in every shoppers’ belt this christmas season. It’s one of those quiet revolution that arrived in 2011.

And finally, the big bet I had made on a Microsoft Nokia partnership came in mid-february, when Nokia announced that it would focus all its efforts on developing exclusively for the Microsoft platform.

The internet backlash I was expecting for this year did not come to pass. There may yet be more power in the current positive cycle that has been covering our industry and, as such, it appears that the possibility of a backlash against our industry remains a remote but slim possibility at this time.

So all and all, I’d get a barely pass on the technology side.

Arts and Entertainment

The recent multi-billion contract extensions for NFL broadcast rights are in line with my prediction that big event entertainment is becoming the core focus of the broadcast entertainment world. The continuing effort to support the existing model will increase this trend, giving more and more power to producers of real-time events.

Remixing, and Danish coolness, did not come of age in the past year, however. While groundbreaking on Bjarke Ingels first American project happened in New York, Danes haven’t really moved to the center of popular consciousness. The same is true of remixing: while supercuts are still making their way through youtube but, as a whole, remixing is still not something that has made it into the mainstream.

Maybe I should keep to the margins when it comes to making big predictions around arts and entertainment.

All and all, for this year, my performance at predictions has been average. I will try to do better for the 2012 year.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2011 Predictions: The scorecard. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What is digital currency?

At its core, digital currency is a type of currency that only exists electronically. It is not traded as coins or paper but rather as electronic exchanges on computers and computer networks.

Since the early 1990s, a wide mix of libertarian and cypherpunk thinkers have been trying to figure out a way to make an electronic version of cash, complete with its anonymity and liquidity features available. While the anonymity part had, for the most part, been resolved by the early 1990s (cryptographer David Chaum, who founded Digicash, the pioneer in the field, had research papers on those aspects as early as the late 1980s and had implemented the core basis of an anonymous currency by the very early 1990s), the challenge for digital currency has been one of transaction volume.

With some small changes, systems that were originally planned for all-digital currencies were eventually adapted to support existing legacy currencies like dollars and euros, leading to the rise of companies like Paypal, with a centralized clearing system not dissimilar to those in more traditional payment systems like Honk Kong’s Felica–based Octopus smart card payment system, which is probably the most successful implementation of a store-and-forward payment system in the world.

Similarly, in the US and Europe, recent deployment of store-value cards and NFC technologies have established a potential infrastructure for building out a possible way to eliminate physical cash over the long run. Over the last decade, the rise of internet payments, electronic deposits, and electronic debits has lowered the reliance individuals and corporations have had on paper checks, leading to a substantial drop in the amount of business done around check-related product lines. It is assumed by many in the financial industry that checks are on their last legs.

So what about cash?

Cash has a very long history and seems to have gone from one technological revolution to the other without being drastically impacted. In fact, a history of cash seems to point to cash being closer to a concept that can attach itself like a remora to the latest technology. So while coins used to be the only way to transact cash prior to the invention of the printing press, cash eventually came through the first information revolution stronger as currency became something printed on bills and thus became easier to carry around.

With the advent of the telegraph system, cash started being delivered more as a concept, using a store and forward approach whereas one could go to a telegraph office and send a promissory note over the air. The sender would pay the telegraph operator and the telegraph operator would then work out credits and debits between the different offices, only moving physical cash when actually needed. The same concept basically moved from telegraph to telephone to fax machines to the internet and now to mobile phones. Different modes of distributions but fundamentally the same concept.

The introduction prepaid cards (also known as stored-value cards) in the last decade has made it possible to move cash into a fairly anonymous plastic container that can then be used to make payments wherever the currency it has been filled with is accepted. With players like Visa and Mastercard in the game, it is easy to find networks that support such offerings.

Back to the Euro crisis

For countries in the Euro-zone, there is now a choice: either agree to a more centralized management of their economy from the European Union or decide to strike out on their own.

The former would lead those countries to become more like states in the United States, where they have some level of autonomy but also must ensure alignment with a larger federal entity. The net result, in the long run, for the countries that decide to go down that route, is that they will help forge a United States of Europe, with closer cooperation and eventually a concept similar to federation making its way through that union (I’d put the probability of this happening as fairly high within the next 25 years)

The latter is a more interesting case, from a technological standpoint, because it would mean figuring out how to fill the gap and this is where a digital currency makes sense. If you look at the USA, which came of age in a time when paper currency had become common-place, the vast majority of the cash being trafficked is through bills in denominations as low as $1 (there are $1 coins but they are not very commonly used.) By comparisons, Euros and other European currencies do not have a bill for a single unit of currency and still hang on to coins for that purpose: this is due to the psychological concept of money of more tangible and since the lower end of currency is handled more often, people may want to feel it in their hands.

So what if a country that decided on building (or rebuilding) a currency from the ground up were to do so in today’s day and age?

First of all, we are dealing with a world where electronic payment systems have become more common, with ATM and credit card readers reaching near ubiquity in everyday commerce. At the same time, we are dealing with a world where mobile phones are becoming something that everyone carries. Looking at those factors, is it too much of a leap to imagine a world where a currency could be added and subtracted from phones or pre-paid cards. Why would one need physical cash in today’s world? Are there use cases where the legal transfer of money from an individual to a company and vice-versa could not exist in an all-electronic world?

I’d warrant that no. There is no reason why cash needs to remain a physical component. For starters, the government could distribute e-wallets to any of its constituents relatively cheaply (today, the cost of a pre-paid card with no value on it would be measure in cents in the US) through bank networks. Some ATM might have to be retrofitted reloading of cards but that would be about it (they can already read the cards today). And with just such a move, a whole country would have moved from a physical currency to a digital one.

So the question now remains as to which country will be bold enough to make that first move. To go electronic would probably be substantially cheaper than any other alternatives a country would have to consider if it decides to create or relaunch a currency… and that’s why this option should be the top on the implemetation table for countries that are leaning in that direction.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title From Euro to e-uro. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Electronic Consumer Hardware

If you have a stereo or a set of speakers in your house, you’re dealing with technology that hasn’t really changed that much in almost a century. In the same way, TV sets have seen little evolution in the way of being smart over the last 50 years: when you think about it, the biggest steps in TV have moved from black & while to color (in the 70s), cathode ray tube to plasma and LCD (late 90s), and analog to digital (early 2000s). In each case, the focus has been on the picture and not so much on the logic to receive and display information.

While new models of television of radio are introduced on a yearly basis, the fundamentals behind them are essentially the same and the features that are introduced are, for the most part, marginal improvements.

However, over the last 4–5 years, a quiet revolution has been underway in the hardware business with the addition of two apparently innocuous components making their way through into a lot of the more recent version of new devices: USB drives and internet connectivity (either wired or wireless). This has made it possible for the core software components of those devices to be upgraded, either by downloading the upgrade on a USB drive and plugging it into the consumer device or automatically in the background via the internet, opening a whole new world of possibilities.

The remote experience

A radio station in the 1920s used a knob to find the right signal and today it’s a button. The clarity improved by moving from AM to FM and HD radio but the user experience is basically the same. For TV, the experience has moved from having to turn a knob on the TV screen to turning a knob on a device that was connected via a cable to the TV to pressing a button on a wireless remote control. The interface has not changed much, except for adding more buttons to allow access to more complexity.

Meanwhile, an increasing amount of touchscreen devices are starting to populate home, whether they are mobile phones or tablets and there is now a slew of software that allows for operating some of the more complex technologies out there. Using simple infrared adaptors, those devices are now allowed to share their own smarts with TV sets and radios, pushing the creation of simpler and more adaptable interfaces for remote controls to increasingly becoming software based solutions. As software evolves, it can be upgraded easily and include new functionality without getting rid of the devices that consume it.

Hardware is a platform

In this instance, we are seeing software trumping hardware. Short of the dependence on certain physical components being natively included in hardware devices (for example, the ability to support certain forms of communications like infrared or short range radio), the hardware does not really need to get upgraded unless its primary function (eg. showing a picture or playing some sounds) is itself in need of an upgrade. And one could see a time when the receiving hardware would receive software upgrades that allow for this interoperability to be a smoother experience because hardware is a platform.

A group of technologies around interoperability have made it easier for this phenomenon to happen. While few people care about such standards at HTML5, HTTP, TCP/IP, WiFi, and DLNA, they can serve as the building block of the future.

Imagine a television, for example, where every channel would be served through an internal web server that rendered everything on the screen via a web page with an HTML5 embedded video player. All of a sudden, the TV screen would become a giant web browser in full screen mode, allowing to not only access any content on cable or broadcast TV but also any content available on the internet.

Add a layer that would allow for throwing HTML5 applets on top of that screen and you would have a standard compliant approach to developing things for television. Throw a webGL interpreter in there and you have something that is drastically more advanced than what any TV in 2011 can currently do. Now make this layer addressable as a web service standard and you could not only see other companies incorporate it but also see an explosion of support from the development community.

Standardization is they key to TV’s future

Today, developing for television (or send streaming audio to a stereo) is an often frustrating experience, forcing developers to encode content so that it meets the requirement that each TV or set-top box manufacturer has set forward. This often complicated landscape has left most developers avoiding it because the return on investing in a single platform just isn’t there. A way to battle this is through standardization of the underlying interfaces. Since the 1990s many people, myself included, have pushed for a standard language to merge television and the web.

These efforts need the support of TV manufacturers and the understanding from said manufacturers that open standards will not only lift their industry but potentially fuel another area of growth for their offerings. As more and more applications get developed on top of a standard compliant deck, there will be increasing demands on the part of the developers to give access to other parts of the hardware, which could be completed via paid software updates. Hardware manufacturers would then find themselves in a world where they could make money on the initial hardware they sell but also add extra revenue by turning on extra functions through software sales.

Lack of standardization creates a winner-takes-all market

Apple has an early lead in the audio market, with Airplay (and its support from many hardware vendors). For example, in our house, we have equipped several rooms with Airport Express adaptors connected to powered speakers or stereos. Apple had initially locked Airplay to Apple only devices, but an ingenious company called Rogue Amoeba put out a piece of software called Airfoil that allows us to play from any source we can find on a computer. It would be nice to get such functionality on our mobile phones and tablets but, because Apple is locking up its system, it is unlikely that such thing could happen unless allowed by Apple.

An open standard that reproduces such functionality could not only hamper Apple’s ability to lock people into its ecosystem but could also help proliferate the rise of inexpensive devices that can be addressed from the internet.

In this case, as in the case of TV, we could see a single closed proprietary standard emerge and create an early lock-in for the owner of that standard. However, if there is one lesson the internet has taught everyone in the computing industry, it is that open always trumps proprietary in the long run. Early platforms may get early wins, but eventually, the open standard disturbs their marketplace and destroys the proprietary aspect.

Some people may consider the the receiving devices for new content as dumb devices but I would argue that they would fall in the category of smart devices: after all, isn’t the smartest person in a room generally the one that first listens and only speaks their mind after receiving appropriate input. Maybe we should create a new category, calling those wise devices instead of smart ones.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Interop: the future of hardware. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Kinect and the gesture based world

Last year, Microsoft unveiled the Kinect, a revolutionary new device that allowed Xbox 360 users to use their bodies as the way to interact with computer games. With the Kinect, Microsoft solved a substantial interface problem that had been slowing down the success of any computing-intensive efforts on the TV screen: How does one increase functionality on a large screen without requiring more complex remote controls.

It was already a given that computer keyboards and mice were not the way to interface with a large screen, as the added complexity they added to a living room setup were making for a more annoying user experience than simple TV remotes. In a world of users being already annoyed by the proliferation of TV remotes.

By introducing a mode of interaction that allowed to get rid of contact with the screen, either through a remote control or by directly touching it (a mode that works for smaller screen like phones or tablets but gets more complex when the screen is larger and thus farther away from the user), Microsoft created a whole new interaction language for computing devices and has made it possible to grow substantially beyond the traditional mode of interfacing with a computer interface.

The kinect interface is something that was predicted as far back as the early 1990s, when AT&T ran its now famous “You Will” TV ad campaign in the United States, and was later popularized by Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report movie. The idea of gesturing in the air took substantial hold in the collective consciousness and when the iPhone and iPad were introduced, people looked at that multitouch model as the answer.

But there has long been a challenge as to how to deal with larger screen. It is difficult to consider users stepping up to a 42 inch (or larger) TV screen and touching the surface of the screen in order to get what they want. So the next challenge became how to get rid of that last piece that stopped the users from interfacing. Nintendo first advanced the idea by putting a sensor in the joystick to the Wii.

 But the Wii still required some component to interface with the system. The real genius of the Microsoft solution was that it did away with every interaction components. In returning to a basic approach using only our bodies, Microsoft created a model that will continue to impact computing for decades to come.

Siri and the voice-driven world

Meanwhile, Apple had also been considering how to get rid of direct touching of a device. Their research led to an innovative company that was doing interesting things in voice-related controls: Siri, Inc.

Upon seeing the company, Apple promptly acquired it, realizing that the approach Siri was taking to voice-enabled interfaces was one of the next components of the future of computing.

There has been many other efforts at doing voice-controlled interfaces, dating back to the 1990s and it has long been assumed by the mainstream that voice-controlled interfaces were the way computing was headed. In Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A space odyssey”, we all met HAL, a computer that could handle conversations with human beings with some disastrous effects for the human. With the possible exception of Star Trek, the ability for a computer to carry on a conversation with a human being has generally been presented as a disastrous thing for humanity: a long strand of movies showed computers and robots (basically humanoid computers, as far as movies are concerned) have shown that the ability to carry a conversation with a human being is the first step to a computer deciding to rebel against his owner. Whether it is HAL in 2001 (1968), Delos Control in West World (1973), Master Control Program in Tron (1982), Edgar in Electric Dreams (1984), or Skynet in the Terminator franchise (1984, 1991, 2003), humanity always seems to be endangered by talking computers.

When technological fears are represented in media forms, they merely represent the farthest the imagination of a society can go when it comes to imagining the peak of what is possible with technology. So computers being able to carry on conversations have long been a holly grail of the computing world… and now Apple owns something that may point to the right approach.

A question as to whether this type of technology will become more than just something that can be found in Apple products is going to turn not on technical merits but on juridical points as Apple may have locked up most of the potential roads forwards by patenting substantial portions of the space. Unless they decide to make the technology available to others, it may find itself locked into the Apple ecosystem with no way to get out for a long period of time.

However, Apple’s competitors including Google and Microsoft will probably consider this an important enough space to attempt to go after it with all their might. As voice driven interfaces have long been seen as a high mark on the technological and technical advances scale, those companies will not want to be left out of what may be the next big thing.

Lessons in hidden complexity

What Siri and the Kinect have in common is that they have managed to package up a lot of complexity into what appears to be a very simple solution.

The Kinect includes infrared projectors, an infrared camera, a video camera, motion sensors, several microphones and motors to track individuals and enough processing power to handle audio and video recognitions into a sleek black bar that sends infrared light all over a room, records where the light is not showing and based on that makes some guesses where bodies are located while at the same time tracking audio and video cues to direct whatever program is being used with it.

Siri records what its user says to it, sends the recording to a server which turns that recording into text it translates it into actionable material before identifying the right information database to retrieve information from,  getting the necessary information, packaging it into a file that will be read back by the device and sending that file back to the phone (all this in a matter of a few seconds).

The big secret in the success of these offerings is that they do not scream about all the innovation and complexity. In fact, they go out of their ways to hide that complexity and there is a lesson here for most startups: it is not because things are complex that you should display them as such; quite the contrary, as new companies should address complex problems and go as far as possible to shield users away from that complexity.

Disappearing devices

The other important thing to pay attention to here is that we are seeing the increasing disappearance of the interface. In the early days of computing, the keyboard was the way to enter information into a machine (I know some will gripe that there were punch cards before that but I’m talking about the modern era of computing); that was eventually augmented by other devices like the mouse and touchpad, which remained the dominant form of interaction with computers over almost 3 decades; more recently, we have seen a more direct interaction with screens as touch interfaces have gained prominence on new form factors like mobile phones and tablets. Each step of the way, we are seeing the friction between a user’s input and the computer’s response slowly fritting away, with less and less being between the user and the device.

But in each case, the interaction was between the user and the computing device itself.

With whole-body and voice interfaces like the Kinect and Siri, that last amount of friction is disappearing and we may be entering a new era of ubiquitous computers, where the computing devices just disappears. I think the current direction of those technologies points to a potential future where we could see the iphone nano, a new screen-less version of iphone that would take the form factor of a simple pair of headphones with no extra wires. All interactions would be handled via voice command with hardly any need for a screen.

Meanwhile, in the living room, your TV will be both voice and motion aware, turning itself off when no one is in the room and completely controlled without requiring any physical remote control (something that will guarantee high acceptance as the proliferation of remote controls in the living room has become a modern annoyance).

That future is not too far away. As an eternal optimist, I would put its promise at somewhere around 5 years from now but as a realist, I also need to warn that it is likely this could take as much as a decade to reach the mainstream. So get ready for new interfaces and if you want to beta test the future, grab a Kinect or a new iPhone 4S: they are the first of many such devices that will populate our world within the next decade.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Beyond touch interfaces. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

On what time horizon do you work? With 20 years of the web now behind us, our field has a fair amount of history, which has left us with a few theoretical barnacles to shake loose. But it also raises questions as to the time horizon over which predictions ought to be made and roadmaps designed. And it raises questions on what our industry obsesses about in the here and now as opposed to what it could think about in the long run.

History will teach us… something?

When Tim Berners-Lee first demonstrated the technologies behind what came to become the world wide web, he had little idea of the impact his invention would have. But what has happened since may allow us to look back and better understand how to look forward. While it took a couple of years for the web to move from academic and research circles to a more mainstream and commercialized space, some of the early battles are still reflected in what we see today.

For example, there is a constant struggle for control of the viewing experience on the internet. In the earlier days of the web, that struggle was represented by the browser wars with a large fight exploding between the dominant browser creator at the time (Netscape) and the dominant Operating System vendor at the time (Microsoft). The same fight can be seen today in the struggle over whether web applications or dedicated platform specific applications ought to rule the roost in the future.

The death of Netscape left the web barren for a few years as few contender to the supremacy of Internet Explorer emerged until the Firefox project finally found its footing. Over those years, the web largely stagnated, partly as the result of a deflation of the financial bubble that had arisen over the previous year but also partly as a result of the lack of a credible contender to the dominant browser brand.

Looking forward by looking back

When looking at the future, we can be a lot more hopeful today, because the odds of a winner-take-all have been lowered in some segments of the market. For example, the rise of iOS has been counterbalanced by the rise of Android and an increase in the number of web-based apps. With such a diversity in the mobile space, it also will make it difficult for new entrants to succeed. Marketplace tend to reward only a couple of groups and we are already at a point where we have 3 players. This is bad news for Microsoft and Nokia who are trying to play this from behind and have a real uphill fight to gain any serious traction, no matter how great their offering is.

In the tablet space, the story is a little more worrisome. Apple’s current domination of that market could lead to a new stagnant space unless a contender is identified. Amazon’s positioning of the Kindle Fire as a potential alternative may present opportunities to restore a balance, forcing all players to bring their best game. At this point, it appears that the marketplace has widely rejected other offerings in the tablet space so Amazon’s entry makes this an interesting case. The question at this point is not whether Amazon will topple Apple (it won’t) but whether it will introduce a product that appeals to a segment of the consumer market and forces Apple to keep improving its offering (and here, I would present the iPod roadmap as an example of how innovation dies in a marketplace, even if that marketplace is dominated by Apple: from a product standpoint, the iPods sold today have not really changed since the introduction of the iPod Touch four years ago).

On the standard front, we are seeing some fierce battle lining up in how browser supports new features of HTML5 and related technologies. As I pointed a couple of weeks ago, this is a good thing. The current diversity of browsers in the marketplace forces every player to attempt efforts at being on the cutting edge. This is the kind of thing that will speed up adoption of new technologies across the landscape as a whole and will help the open web become a strong contender for the future of computing. Technologies like HTML5, CSS3, WebAudio, and WebGL are helping the web become more operating system-like and, as such, increase its chances at becoming a strong player on any platform.

Roadmap 2025

But looking at today and looking forward, we are seeing a marketplace that is increasingly fragmented. So what’s a startup with limited resources to do? Should one put all their eggs in a single basket and bet on a single platform? Should a company look at introducing fewer features across all platforms, spreading their product roadmap over a longer timeline? Or should developers go to the lowest common denominator and target through the web browser?

The answer is it’s complicated but, at its core, one needs to think about what is needed to move the company forward and get it to reach early measurement markers while still focusing on the future.

At Keepskor, we call that Roadmap 2025.

I know it sounds extremely ambitious for a company to think to 2025 when it doesn’t yet have a product in the marketplace. But the issue for most startup is not ambition but the lack of such thing. By focusing on Roadmap 2025, we get a sense of how the marketplace is evolving and how we want our product to evolve accordingly. Frequent readers of TNL.net know that this column is not really concerned about the next few months and tends to focus more on the underlying cultural and business trends that can have decade-long impacts. This is why things like the impact of DVRs on the television business were discussed here over a decade ago, or more recently, I looked at what challenges existed for books and television. The 2025 consumer market will be impacted by those changes and the way in which applications designed on the internet interact with that will also be impacted. As will the dominant platforms, one of which, we hope, will be Keepskor.

But how does a Roadmap 2025 look in the present? Well, put quite simply, the present is an early alpha. The minimum viable product the marketplace will accept for something much larger. But the MVP for a platform that will exist in 2025 is substantially bigger than the MVP for a simple app. And building it requires higher levels of abstraction than a normal product. For example, no one really knows what the winning front-ends will be in 2025. What we know is that they will be different than the ones we are used to today. So we design our platform to ensure that input and outputs are separated from everything else. In the short run, this creates an added layer of translation that increases latency (measured in milliseconds) to every transactions but a slowdown we consider acceptable for now.

Iterate backwards

The basic agile method of development looks to scrums that are moving the product forward in an iterated fashion, tackling one component or another over short cycles. The level of clarity as to what will happen in the next scrums is generally dependent on how far forward you’re looking as each scrum can move a product to the adjacent possible. In a long roadmap model, one iterates backward. For example, if you are looking at what your product looks like in 2025, do you know what it looks like in 2024? You may have a rough idea as to how the product should evolve along the way. Maybe you get a sense of what it looks like in 2020 or 2015?

I call this backwards iteration. Move from the ideal state and start planting base camps backwards. It’s a strategy I learned from long-distance skating (I’ve done runs of up to 65 miles on a single day). No one wins a long distance race by focusing on the end point. The win is only by focusing on the next 100 yards and iterating those forward. But before you do so, you need to have a sense of what you need to do by each of those 100 yard markers. And that means considering how tired you will be and how much slower you will be at the end of the race and working backwards to assess the best balance of expanding and depleting energy vs. yards won.

In a business, this allows you to build a model that is pretty accurate for the first couple of years, and only mildly less so afterwards. It also allows you to go back to the roadmap when major events happen and identify whether they will have any impact on your business (and if they do, whether this impact needs to be mitigated now, and can be mitigated by moving an item forward in the roadmap).

From a communication standpoint, it also makes it easier for people getting involved in your business to get a sense of where you’re looking to go. This may mean that some investors are not interested because they don’t buy into your vision (and that’s OK because those investors would be an issue further down the road if you’re still going down some of the same paths) and also means that some people will not be interested in joining the company because they don’t agree with the steps moving forward. I consider that early filtering as it ensures that your company gets proper buy-in from all stakeholders, thus lowering the chances that employees will leave once they are fully committed.

Study the past, understand the future

But a roadmap 2025 plan is not something that one pulls completely out of thin air. What it is, more than anything, is a set of assumptions based on close study of part events. For example, the majority of the Keepskor roadmap can be explained by events that have already happened. This grounding in history and historical trends helps us ground the business into models that have been proven to work in the past and which, when combined, turn out to be substantially bigger than the initial ideas.

When looking more closely at history, I get a sense that most areas of history have some cyclical component to them, with a pendulum swinging in one direction or the other but always moving us forward ultimately. The study of previous cycles is probably the greatest tool one has in understanding what the future can look like.

However, there is one thing to note: The distant future is easier to prognosticate than the closer one because things actually do change at a much slower pace than most would expect. In the 1990s many dotcommers, present company included, made what looked like wild statements about the future and how the internet would change everything. Circa 1999 and certainly in 2001, those seemed like crazy pronouncements but, in hindsight, the world we described as coming to bear at the turn of the century is pretty much the world we live in today: the revolution has just taken longer to take hold.

A personal note

For years, people have asked me why I was writing TNL.net as I didn’t seem to derive any real income from it and the things I wrote about were, on the whole, only tangentially related to what I do. Over the last year, I’ve come to discover that the writing of TNL.net is a somewhat selfish act. First, it allows me to crystallize a lot of my own thinking: the process of writing and editing an entry forces me to focus on a topic area very closely. It also forces me to review source material and historical data to ground and inform my thinking. And then, there’s the part where you, the reader, enter. Your emails or discussion help me get a better sense of some of the flaw in my argument.

Update: I generally start writing early in the week and fill the entry up over time until it gets published on Sunday evening. This week, Fred Wilson posted “Long Roadmaps”, a great entry that covers some of the same ground. I guess there must be something in the air here in NYC that gets us to think about those things.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The long view. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Mark Andreesen and the IMG tag

The evening of February 23, 1993 was mostly unremarkable around the internet. But on that evening, a brash young man by the name of Marc Andreessen sent an email that would drastically alter the course of history. In order to fully understand what happens there, one has to think of the internet prior to that day.

Before that message made its way through several mail servers, the internet was a mostly text-based medium. HTML, the source code for the web, may have linked to images but the idea of mixing images and text was not part of the internet experience. In fact, the idea of mixing anything just didn’t exist: a movie stayed a movie and was linked to independently but embedding it into a page was a concept that would not come to fruition until several years later.

Sound, images, moving images, text were all living in separate silos. Yes, they could be linked to but they mostly worked as dead ends as they could not move forward from there (think of a browser that would link images instead of having them embedded into the page and when you got to that image, your only available navigation would be to move back). And because they were mostly dead ends, they forced the web into a relatively hierarchical model. Text was free to cross-link but other media were not.

Andreesen’s stance was that they would implement the tag as proposed and were sending it to be discussed as part of a future implementation of the HTML standard (remember that, at that time, HTML was not yet a standard).

Netscape proprietary approach and forward motion

A few years later, Andreesen would continue on the same course with the company he co-founded, Netscape, pushing for new extensions to the HTML standard and then extending the browser even further. With every new browser introduction, Netscape would push out new features.

With much of the internet being widely open and standard-based, Netscape’s introduction of new things at a fast and furious rate rankled some of the early maintainers of the web. There was widespread worry that Netscape was “breaking” the web through its use of non-standard implementation. Among some of the things Netscape would introduce over this period would be things we cannot imagine not existing on the web.

For example, Netscape was the first to introduce web-cookies, which not only gave rise to the kind of tracking that most of the advertising industry relies on but also simplified and sped up the way in which pages could be customized or logins were remembered.

https, which is used to ensure that communication between your web browser and a remote server is encrypted so no one can break into it, was another such innovation, which gave rise to e-commerce and e-banking.

And then, there’s Javascript. In December 1995, Netscape announced Javascript as a programming language for the web that could run either on a server (but only on Netscape’s brand of web servers) or on the client. The world of programming was in a furor over the announcement, calling the language a horrible kludge and generally being unhappy that they had not been consulted to make the language more pure.

Every step of the way, developers started adopting Netscape’s innovation, giving rise to sites showing a “Best viewed with Netscape” icon. This, in turn, led the Netscape browser to be the most used web browser on the Internet, at some point being used for nearly every 8 or 9 out of 10 web page views on the internet.

Most of Netscape’s inclusions eventually made it into other browsers as they tried to capture market share from Netscape, and eventually, most of those innovation were standardized, ensuring their continuation moving forward. Netscape’s leadership and willingness to stand up to the rest of the industry in order to move forward may have eventually led to its death as a company but its impact is still felt daily.

Microsoft and AJAX

One of the companies that tried to mimic Netscape’s strategy was Microsoft. In order to make its web browser, Internet Explorer, more relevant to developers, Microsoft tried to introduce changes that were mostly proprietary to its web browser. Among those was a technology called ActiveX, which was Microsoft’s proprietary approach to plug-ins. Trying to differentiate its Office suite and Exchange server, Microsoft introduced the XMLHTTP ActiveX component, which allowed web applications to become much more interactive, in 1999.

Whether it was hatred of Microsoft or lack of awareness, the technology did not really get widespread adoption until Jesse James Garrett named the technology AJAX, for Asynchronous Javascript And XML.

The lesson in this is that to break a standard is not enough to get things moving forward. A way to brand that standard so it becomes easily understandable to a wider public goes a long way to garnering support for new technologies, whether they are standardized or not.

HTML5 needs a posse

Previous history points to progress on the web being largely made because people were willing to take a stand and move things forward, standards be damned. But it seems that few are willing to move things forward in a drastic way. To date, complete support for existing standards has been a challenge and it seems there is some level of calcification around breaking new ground.

The wonderful set of underlying technologies making the core of what we know as HTML5 may not be perfect but it’s the best thing we have so instead of crying about the poor implementation of this or that component, instead of asking why it’s missing certain pieces, let’s go out, as developers and stretch the limits of what is possible in a browser.

Break new ground and break old browser. Once you’ve done so, ask the others to implement the features you’re leveraging.

To implement in a standard-compliant way may be smart if you want to cater to the masses but if you want your app to be exceptional, you have to be willing to take the hits. Go ahead and break new ground by looking forward instead of staying to the shores of yesterday’s standard compliance.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Pushing beyond standardization. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What is WebGL?

At its most basic level, WebGL represents a set of extensions to JavaScript that allows developers to write code that can use the processing power of a user’s computer to create 3D graphics that update in real time. The standard is supported by Apple, Google and the Mozilla foundation but Microsoft has not yet lent its support to the nascent standard (I suspect it’s only a question of time as most of the browser world has announced support for the format). Today, you need a fairly recent computer and the latest version of either the Chrome, Mozilla, or Opera web browser.

The applications can now run and modify fairly complex 3D web-based applications. This is going to be a huge boon for online games, as can be witnessed from early examples like the recent implementations of web-based versions of Quake and X-wing, and also have substantial other uses. For example, the Google body browser allows users to get a better sense of how the human body works and someone put together a very convincing webgl photo editor that can handle a substantial amount of the basic image editing needs most people have. In science, a lot of representation can now be fred so scientist can experiment with different views of the data on an experiment.

In the future, one could see a lot of data set being presented in 3D using this technology, with the ability to access and manipulate data in real-time and see rich representations of that data immediately.

The bigger picture

For a long time, web applications have been limited to running within the context of a browser and thus sandboxed away from the rest of the operating system. With WebGL, we’re seeing that barrier broken down for the first time and is creating a precedent for the future growth of web applications.

In a way, this is an interesting return to ideas that existed almost 15 years ago. Back then, Microsoft was interested in merging their browser with the operating system. Early alpha versions of IE 7.0 actually had a deeper level of integration with Windows but fears around anti-trust regulations led the company to pull those extensions out.

To open up the web to deeper level of integrations with lower level processes could mean a variety of new possibilities. While web applications have long been limited by the browser sandbox, webGL now opens the door for a substantially improved experience as it gives the web access to a lot of the power that has been resident on users’ desktops. For a couple of decades, the web has been sipping that power through a straw but with WebGL, it’s as if the straw had been replaced by a firehose when it comes to graphic processing power.

For almost two decades now, many people have tried to make 3D on the web a reality (a little known fact, for example, is that Mike McCue, the man behind TellMe and now Flipboard, got his web start with a plugin that allowed the Netscape browser to display complex 3-D models) but many of those effort failed. A large reason for those early failure was that the different solutions presented were often limited to what the web browser could handle and until recently, it was considered a big no-no for the browser to access any low level processes.

But a few entrepreneurs had a more long term vision. In the 1990s, Marc Andreessen quipped that his browser would reduce the Windows operating system to “a set of poorly debugged device drivers”. While many have laughed this off as bravura on the part of a young man (he was in his 20s then), the concept of the web browser as central to computing experience is no laughing matter and it appears that the browser is now getting to that point where it could truly reduce operating systems to what he had envisioned in the 90s.

While 3D processing is but one frontier being broken by WebGL, it is an important one because, for the first time, web browsers are given access to low level processing without requiring plug-ins or authorization from the end-user. This will, of course, represent a set of new security challenges as code that is interpreted by 3D rendering engine gets pretty close to the heart of the machine (and traditionally, the code that has been allowed this privilege has been tightly controlled at the distribution channel level, with 3D gaming being mostly manufactured and distributed by a few people. By contrast, the whole web is mostly open to everyone with few or no limitations, opening it up as a potential attack vector).

Now that this frontier has been broken (and one could say that the door was initially opened when HTML5 was allowed to do geolocation), imagine what some of the next offerings that will build on this precedent could bring: in the future, we could see web applications being allowed to access cameras, microphones, accelerometers, and other parts of electronic devices across all web browsers. This could mean that applications that now run on your desktop could truly break free from that format and run exclusively from the web.

In the past few years, the idea of breaking down applications into smaller and smaller components to be distributed through an app store has taken hold of the computing industry, potentially challenging the idea of applications running from the web itself. With the rise of WebGL, the graphic rendering portion of those applications is something that now has accomplished feature parity. Sound will be next and access to device components will probably follow.

Web applications’ future has been challenged by apps and the web has answered the challenge, allowing for a set of offerings that will be richer and will present themselves in a way that will make it hard to differentiate between a native and a web application, Eventually, we will see WebGL being implemented on mobile devices browsers (the processing power is there and I suspect it’s something we will see appearing within a couple of years), radically reshaping the web app vs. store app debate.

With WebGL, we’re seeing a future that renders the web exciting again. It’s a technology worth keeping and eye on. Now may not be the time to develop on it (unless you’re developing web-based games for computers) but within the next 12–24 months, it is a skill that will be required of most Javascript developers.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title WebGL and the future of the web. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The end of an era. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

This week, Amazon unveiled a new line of digital consumption devices under the Kindle moniker. Along the way, it may have provided us a view of the future of the book.

A short history of the book

At some point between 7000BC and 4000BC, writing appeared and, along with it came the idea of record keeping. Clay tablets then papyrus made such records more portable but required that each record be manually created. Meanwhile, printing popped up in China in 2000BC and South America around the same time (Chinese had a system to print on wood while meso-American cultures used some kind of loom to “print” using knots). Papyrus was replaced by parchment but still required manual transfers of text, making books a rare good that generally was only available to rich (and therefore educated) people.

At some point between the 2nd and 4th century, paper replaced parchment and monasteries starting generating bigger books, with scriptoriums appearing in many places. Because of their close ties to the church, the scriptorium mostly produced religious texts. The rise of paper over parchment however, made books cheaper, which meant that their diffusion became somewhat wider.

And then it was 1440!

That year, Johan Gutenberg was inspired to combine a wine screw (used to press grapes or olives) with paper and hot type to create the first priting press. Books could now be reproduced quickly and cheaply, allowing for substantially lower costs and more widespread distribution. The rotary printing press was introduced in the 19th century, speeding things further, but apart from that the printed book one gets today is basically produced in the same fashion as it was in 1440.

In the 1930s, the paperback book appeared, making printed goods a complete mass medium. The book world then became stratified with paperback at the bottom of the pile, aimed at mass distribution, hardcovers in the middle as somewhat better produced and more durable, and collectible books, produced in small quantity and created as art objects to be appreciated by collectors.

Then came e-readers!

The Kindle arrives

E-readers were initially a curiosity, offering new technology to read books but mostly without having any content on them. But in 2007 Amazon, which had already established a dominant position in selling printed matter, unveiled the Kindle, an e-reader that had access to a wider collection of new titles than any other. The company introduced a second version in 2009 and the low price of the device, combined with access to hundreds of thousands of books help fire up a new revolution for books, with readers getting more interested in the device.

Barnes & Noble, a large American book chain, introduced the Nook, a competing device that offered e-book reading in color, something Amazon did not have, as it chose e-ink, a technology that reproduces the printed page but is mostly available in black-and-white.

2011 the year the printed book changed

I think future generations will look at this year as the year the book radically changed. Already, the data seems to point to a decline in the sale of paperback books and trends seem to indicate that consumption of certain book types has moved to e-readers as the preferred form. I was recently chatting with a book seller for one of the largest publishers in the world and he remarked that thrillers and romance novels now sold more widely on e-readers than they did in print. Another person recently told me (and a quick check on the New York subway confirmed) that women are the prime users of e-readers right now, with the tablet market being more male dominated.

So if large segments of the population are moving to e-readers, what’s to become of the printed book? Is it the end of the road for something that has existed through most major technological changes? Will centuries of history go digital? Will future generations see the latest Harry Potter volume in museums, scratching their heads as to why someone would think of carrying something as heavy to read it?

Two paths for the book

What I see is something a little different. I think we’re about to see the book split down two paths and people will go down one or the other depending on how they feel about books.

Before I look at the two paths, I must highlight that there are two types of book readers:

• On one side are people who look at the book for its content, only concerned with what stories or facts are contained within the book. Those people don’t care about the distinction between paperback, hardback, or e-text. What they want is the words and sentences, not the other stuff that comes along with the book.  Those people tend to see books as information vessels to be discarded once the information has been consumed.

• On the other side are people who look at the book as a total experience, moving from the cover and its layout into the book, its size, its type, and finally its content. Those people look to book as complete objects that cannot always move to another form without changing. Those people tend to have larger libraries at home, attaching certain time periods and feelings to books.  They may pull a particularly worn tome from a shelf and be reminded of the time they acquired it, the time they read it, the people and locations they frequented with that book.

I am not assigning judgement to either category but I wanted to create a clear distinction because it has relevance to what happens next to the book. And let me get into that now:

• Death of the mass market printed book: I believe the vast majority of people fall in the first category I highlighted. Looking at the trends, it seems that price has generally been an issue with books and people who do consume them tend to consume them mostly as paperback. I’d venture that within a generation, paperback will disappear, and those texts will be moving to e-readers (I’m also assuming that e-readers will continue to drop in price until the point where they may be bundled with a first purchase of a book). This does not bode well for large chains that are selling books as they will see those revenue evaporate as more people move to e-books. In the US, we’ve already seen the death of Border’s bookstore and I suspect that it’s only a question of time before Barnes & Noble suffers the same fate (unless it adapts and finds a way to sell their nook for substantially less than Amazon does the Kindle).

• Survival of the book as object: However, the second group of readers will continue to exist and that group is about to go through interesting times as books become rarer but also more prized. The newfound rise of the book as object is more of a return to the pre-paperback days when libraries were as much status symbol as they were about learning. Books will be produced in substantially smaller quantities to appeal to this crowd, forcing their price up and their margins down. However, authors who are printed will be seen as more influential than authors who are only published digitally.

In the next entry, I will look at some of the impact those changes may have on society as a whole.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The future book. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Open Graph

Before we look at the winners and losers, let’s recap where Facebook is going. A couple of years ago, the company unveiled the “Open Graph API”, which gave external sites the ability to add “like” buttons to their sites, and in the process allow end-users to things they like into their facebook stream, where they would be shared with their friends. This mean that a user could implicitly publish information to Facebook by just clicking a button. At that point, two things really happened:

• First, Facebook created a system that allowed it to better understand what people were reading because every time a like button is pulled down, Facebook can keep track of it and associate the information with the account of a Facebook user.
• Secondly, Facebook offered publishers a way to generate more traffic to their site by publishing content on Facebook that would return users back to their site.

This was a little creepy because it gave Facebook a tremendous amount of power but, in exchange, the company gave publishers access to more traffic so the agreement seemed balanced to everyone but the end users (which doesn’t matter, as we all know that “if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”)

But it seems having access to that data is not enough for Facebook; now it wants more data so it can build better electronic profiles of its users. So this year, the company has decided that “Like” was not enough and they wanted to get users to give them access to anything they read on a particular site. So the company unveiled actions like “read, watch, listen” which allow developers to share all action data from a user after a one-time sign-up to the Open Graph API.

Mining the web… but not giving back

This time, the company is mining the web but the main beneficiary of those actions seems to be Facebook, which gets a better understanding of where users are when they are not on Facebook and what they are looking at. If we assume (and I am willing to take the bet that this will be the case) that most mainstream sites will start offering the new verbs, then Facebook will have one of the most complete understanding of a user’s demographic and psychographic profile. In other words, the data it will get access to is the holy grail of online marketing: users that can be tailored to based on extremely granular preferences.

That data can then be used to send ads that resonate with the user in the channels the user accesses most. Think this is crazy? Well, wait ’til next year’s F8, when Facebook unveils a tool to help external sites monetize their traffic better by targeting advertising based on users’ preferences. If this sounds suspiciously like AdSense from Google, it’s because it is part of the end-game. Facebook is no longer happy to have the largest site in the world, now it wants to have access to people when they are not on Facebook.

What’s fascinating here is that the data goes into Facebook but there is precious little information as to how to get it back out, making the word “open” a headscratcher as it is unclear how Facebook defines openness. To the Palo Alto company, it appears that openness is a one-way street: you open up your data to Facebook and in return Facebook “simplifies” the online experience by keeping your app on its platform. This is somewhat similar to the app store model offered by Apple and Google, where it’s OK to play as long as it is within their rules. Facebook is doing to the open web what Apple and Google have often been accused of doing, sticking another knife into its imminent demise.

Also of note is the fact that Facebook’s approach to getting all this data makes it impossible for anyone to create valid HTML5 pages as the Facebook code does not validate under this framework. So Facebook is also hampering the future of the web by making it nearly impossible to live by the ideal of the new web standards if you want to play in the facebook arena. This seems to shape up another fight between Facebook and the open web.

Another company has had similar ambition and it staked its approach first on offering superior search products and then on using the search data to target advertising on partner sites and eventually offer such capabilities to anyone who was willing to give them a percentage cut of ad revenue. That company, Google, has realized the limitations of its model and is busy trying to ensure it can get more data by building up offerings for ways in which people access the internet: so they’re pushing Android for mobile phones and Google Chrome as a better web browser because they want to be able to access data relating to where people are on the web, data that can then be used to create more customized ads.

Facebook at $150 billion?

This week, Google’s valuation sits around $150 and the highest Facebook has ever been rumored to be worth is $100 billion. I’d venture that people are selling the company short and that it is worth something on par with Google. It has masterfully played fears from online publishers and other sites and parlayed that in a potential position of power in the online marketing world.

The only thing that could make it more powerful than it is about to be is if it were to pair up its data with Google’s. A merger of the two of them would create an unparalleled database of internet users, containing just about anything about people’s intents (from Google’s search), their interests (from Facebook’s data), the amount of time they spend on certain properties over others (from either Facebook or Google’s data), and what they liked enough that they would share it with people their know (from Facebook’s data).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The “Open” Graph. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Desktop and the Web as one

Much has been written already about how Microsoft is trying to be all things to all people by offering a single operating system for both tablets and computers. The company announced an operating system that marries a lot of the tablet experience as presented by the likes of the successful iPad, and the many other contenders for the crown currently on the market, with what has more traditionally been known as a windows PC.

Along the way, Microsoft has introduced Metro, a new way to interact with Windows that brings much of the tile-based experience they first unveiled with their Windows Phone 7 operating system. Like them or not, tiles are Microsoft’s attempt at getting a spot at the mobile table and they are now taking this mode of interaction from the phone to tablets and PCs. The Metro UI is probably the single largest change in the way Windows has looked since Microsoft unveiled Windows 1995, an operating system that was a significant user-interface departure from its predecessor.

Lost in the commentary has been the fact that tiles are programmable using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, three core technologies used by millions of developers around the world. With this, Microsoft is basically saying that the languages that power most of the user interfaces for the web should be the languages that power most of the user interfaces for Windows. This is both a radical departure from mainstream thinking (although Palm tried to go down that route with WebOS) and a return to the source for Microsoft.

Looking back, looking forward

In 1997, I had the privilege of being among the people selected as launch partners for Internet Explorer 4. As such, I was able to see the product evolve from idea to release, seeing along the way many false starts and ideas that did not make it into the product. One of the most intriguing idea at the time was that of replacing the UI shell with a web browser one, essentially allowing for HTML  widgets to run directly on a user’s desktop.

I was smitten by the feature and heartbroken when I learned that it would not ship for reason that went beyond the technical. Around the same time, Microsoft was in a major war with Netscape and rumors of an anti-trust lawsuit being launched against the company were swirling. At hand was the idea that Microsoft’s ability to tie the web experience to its near-monopoly on operating systems gave it an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

While it is true that Microsoft had the leading position in the operating system, there was little evidence of the success that resulted from it tying other components to it: its web browser offering were poor and had made little headway in the marketplace, where the Netscape browser held a significant lead. So there was little evidence that just tying two products would help lift both. It wasn’t until Microsoft started matching features with other successful browser that their offering started gaining traction.

But none of this mattered in the fall of 1997 and the idea of integrating a user’s desktop with the web was either too ahead of its time or seen as too risky by the legal departments at Microsoft. The net result was that when Internet Explorer 4.0 came out, the feature to connect web and desktop had been reduced to a way to push content to the browser and potentially use it on screensaver, an offering that fell far short of the promise.

Moving forward almost 15 years, Microsoft is no longer seen as a threat on the technology market. The antitrust lawsuit has made the company tentative in its offering, often staying as far away from controversy as it can. The new darlings of the technology world have taken over most of the mindshare that was held by the Redmond giant and only a few faithful follow what the company is about. It is not a significant player in the mobile phone market at this time (this title is split between Apple, with its iPhone line, and Google, with its Android ecosystem) and many see the tablet market as one that is making the personal computer, the very arena where Microsoft is king, irrelevant.

So the house that Bill built had to do something dramatic to regain attention. It had to offer an operating system that would meet today’s users’ needs, an operating system that could compete, in terms of setting the agenda, with the much smaller iOS and OSX produced by Apple.

Along the way, I suspect that somewhere in Redmond, some of the people who had tied the web and the desktop in 1997 started talking about how this could be their time…

… and the result is the Metro UI:

OSX Xeroxing or not?

Many of the Apple zealots have pointed to the Metro UI and the fact that Microsoft can still run a more traditional Windows look in parallel as a showcase of why the company will “fail” in the market. They present this as a example of Microsoft being unable to make the tough decision of separate offerings for separate computing devices. They highlight that Apple is much smarter in its approach because it has decided to create two operating systems: OSX for traditional computers, iOS for everything else.

So I think it’s fair to assume that no one can say that Microsoft is looking to copy Apple here. I think it’s OK to point out that Apple fans have basically said that the idea of marrying a mobile experience with a PC experience is not terribly smart.

That being said, it’s also interesting that Microsoft and Apple seem to be sharing a view of the future. And that view seems to say that smaller, single purpose applications bought from an online store will take over your whole screen, scraping away any piece of the visible interface. For Apple, this is best manifested with the version of OSX they most recently released (Lion) which offers the experience I described above and tries to marry some of what the company has learned from iOS with what has traditionally been seen as their computer operating system.

So the idea of an App store is definitely something where Microsoft is following Apple; the idea of running apps in full screen with no vendor interface is also something where Apple had the lead; the idea of bringing tablet and phone-like behavior to an operating system is something Apple has claimed as its own.

So the only question remaining is really: should we have separate operating systems for separate devices or should we have a single operating system that can be used for multiple devices. For Microsoft, the answer is now the latter; for Apple, the answer to date has been that OSX is for computers and iOS is for everything else. My question to Cupertino might be about how long it will be before they decide that one OS is sufficient for both computers and all other devices.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Windows 8 is Microsoft’s bet on the future. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Methodology

One of the first thing in this effort was to get a decent list of sites. Unfortunately, it seems that it has become increasingly difficult to get a sense of which sites are the most popular when it comes to number of visits. I eventually settled down on Alexa’s Top Sites list because it featured most of the sites people think of when considering what large sites are and includes a few non-US sites.

I then used the W3C Validator against each of the top 25 sites. This allowed me to get 3 different pieces of information:

• Doctype: This is what the site declares as its HTML code version. In other words, how the site identifies what version of HTML it supports.
• Encoding: This is the language the site uses, which gives us a better understanding as to whether they are targeting a particular language or trying to offer a global site.
• Validation: This is how the site validated when tested for errors relating to the HTML version it purported to be offering. It gives us an idea as to how compliant with the standards the site truly is.

Surprisingly, a number of popular Web 2.0 sites were not in Alexa’s Top 25 so I created a separate list for them.

Top 25

Looking at the top 25, here are the results:

Looking at the data, the first thing that is interesting is how many sites have made the switch to HTML 5. Of the top 25 sites, 14 have made the switch to HTML 5. This means than in the last year, 56 percent of the largest sites on the internet have completely modified their code base to comply with a new standard. 6 sites are still left on the old HTML standard and 5 are sticking to the somewhat more recent XHTML standard.

However, it is also interesting to note that none of the sites which have made the transition comply with proper HTML standards. In fact, of the top 25 sites in the Alexa list, only MSN was found to provide completely valid code. Maybe Microsoft could point those people towards their other properties. Amazon was the worst offender, with 516 errors in their code, showing that disregard for standard compliance does not seem to have an impact on economic performance. However, Ebay and Yahoo came closely behind with hundreds of errors in their code, maybe highlighting Amazon as an exception.

Another interesting phenomenon is that most of the large sites have adopted UTF 8, the encoding type that support most languages, as their default language. Once again, over half (56%) of the sites have switched with Amazon and Google being among the rare exceptions. An interesting aside here is that the W3C validator may have issues when it comes to validating chinese sites as it was not able to finish the job.

Web 2.0 Companies

Looking at Web 2.0 companies, the data was surprising:

I captured the data for companies other than those in the top 25 and a few interesting trends seem to pop up. The first thing that came as a surprise is that there seems to be that a lower number of sites have made the transition to HTML 5, with only 5 sites out of 11 (or 45 percent) having completed the transition. There seems to still be a strong preference for XHTML as the way to encode pages.

Also of note is that all sides have plans for globalization, encoding their page in the UT-8 format that can support both western and non-western alphabets.

However, none of the sites successfully validate in any of their preferred standard. It looks like there is still much room for improvement in the world of HTML validation.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The state of HTML validation. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The industrial age: An abbreviated history

The industrial movement initially was born out of a need to integrate several capabilities into a single streamlined model in order to gain efficiencies. Those efficiencies resulted in goods being produced on a more massive scale at a substantially smaller cost and heralded an era of widespread availability of goods to a larger segment of the population. As a result, things that had once been available to only rich people (basic things like soap, shampoo and running water) became available to the masses, improving everyone’s living standards and creating a lot of the world we live in today.

As time went on, however, the rise of the publicly traded corporation and the demand for increasing returns on investments lead to increasing consolidation into larger and larger conglomerates. In the search for improved efficiencies, those conglomerates worked hard to first figuring out how to get more out of their existing production lines. Eventually, the leadership of many of these organizations came to the conclusion that they could not improve efficiency any further on the existing model and found that the salary people who worked for them were the only portion of the system that had not been optimized.

Searching for ways to optimize salaries, large corporations moved their production overseas, where workers in less developed countries could manufacture goods at a cheaper rate than those in more developed economies. In order to effectively manage this new approach, companies had to define new approaches and methods to creating and manufacturing goods, giving rise to a new portion of the economy focused on offering services around small portion of that value chain. Eventually, a lot of manufacturing ended up in the hands of manufacturing specialists: companies that did not necessarily take part in the development of new ideas and products or in the marketing, sales, and distribution of those goods but provided an optimized way to manufacture goods.

The near death of the artisans

Prior to the industrial revolution, most goods were manufactured by artisans (or craftsmen) who focused on producing goods manually and generally offered them within a limited geographical range. Because labor was primarily manual, artisanal goods were not mass produced: their scarcity also meant that the produced goods were generally more expensive and not traditionally available to all.

With the rise of industrialization, many artisans disappeared, as their craft became automated and they were unable (or unwilling) to produce goods at ever decreasing costs and in ever increasing amounts.

Some, however, thrived by focusing on smaller and more high-end markets, in niches where goods could not be mass produced. Artisanal work increasingly got praised for its uniqueness and the thought that has gone into its design.

In more recent times, this has meant that artisanal work has been seen as more exclusive because of its scarcity. However, along the way, an interesting phenomenon happened.

The new artisans

Caught in the gap between mass produced offerings of the industrial age and one-offs presented by artisans sat a whole class of potential products that could not previously be made available to people. Those products were the kind of offerings that could appeal to a small portion of the public but may not be appealing to enough people to warrant the interest of large corporations.

At the same time, fewer large entities became interested in taking risks because doing so could potentially end up in failure, thus lowering the returns they made to their investors. This risk-wariness has allowed start-ups to thrive as smaller enterprises concerned themselves with innovating and either failed, grew large, or were gobbled up by the larger players.

Up until the end of the last century, however, most new startups focused on services or offerings like software that required low upfront capital requirements. The manufacturing and delivery of physical goods was still something that was best left to large corporations.

With the rise of contract manufacturing and increasing access to networked resources across the internet, the cost of developing, manufacturing, marketing, and delivering goods has dropped substantially, making it possible to create and distribute an increasing amounts of goods to small er and smaller markets.

The new artisan supply chain

Simplifying the traditional approach to building and selling ones, one can organize things as follows:

• Individual or team comes up with idea
• Individual or team builds and test prototype(s)
• Prototype is tested in the market to assess if there is demand for it
• If there is demand, money is raised to build final product
• Product gets manufactured
• Product gets shipped to warehouse or distributor
• Product gets sold
• Product is shipped to buyer

In this model, a large amount of money is required to manufacture and store the product. In more recent time, the concept of just-in-time manufacturing has lowered those cost but there is still some costs associated with it.

The new artisan model, however, turns the whole process on its head:

• Individual or team comes up with idea (same)
• Individual or team builds and test prototype(s) (same)
• Individual or team does pricing research to assess how much it needs to sell product for
• Prototype is shown in online video to assess if people are interested
• Kickstarter campaign is kicked off to sell product BEFORE it is manufactured
• If Kickstarter campaign is successful, product is manufactured and send directly to buyer

 NY DiY

What’s been amazing to me is that a lot of this revolution seems to be emerging out of New York. Kickstarter is based in lower Manhattan. Etsy, which provides storefront and a marketplace for craft-makers is based in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Adafruit provides inexpensive electronic components to manufacture new gadgets and is based in mid-town Manhattan. Buglabs offers a modular set of electronic components to build complex electronic goods out of a lower Manhattan space. And Makerbot industries offers inexpensive 3-D printers from a space in Brooklyn.

It appears as if the next industrial revolution infrastructure will be coming out of the most unlikely of places: New York city. Now all that is needed is for a marketplace for contract manufacturers to bid on turning prototypes into real products and the whole value chain will be completed. And that appears to be another software problem that could be solved by a New Yorker.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The New Artisans. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Google vs. Twitter

With 750 million users, most of Facebook’s time is supposedly spent on pictures and games. In its initial iteration, Google+ does not seem to support those core components of the platform, which may make one wonder if Facebook really is the target. What it does support today, however, is a better version of Twitter, complete with specific status updates. So, in its current iteration, I would venture that the target for Google+ is Twitter.

Which may lead one to wonder why Google is so aggressively going after Twitter. I believe it is doing so because Twitter search may be starting to steal traffic, and potentially revenue from Google search. In a somewhat unsurprising move, Google decided to not renew its revenue agreement to get access to the Twitter stream. I would venture that this is an attempt to kneecap Twitter and ensure it doesn’t become a serious threat when it comes to advertising revenue.

While the company is generally considered as one that tries to do no evil, Google is also keenly aware that its success relies largely on two near monopolies: search and online advertising. With Twitter emerging as the first serious competitor in the space in a long time, rumored to be racking in $60–70 million a year in advertising revenue that could easily be targeted based on tweets, Google is seeing red and acting accordingly against the threat.

Google vs. Facebook

Meanwhile, there is the fight against Facebook. Facebook presents a different problem for Google in that it has taken an increasing share of online users time and put it in their walled garden, away from the web that Google mines for revenue. This trend is largely built on the back of games and photos so Google+ will try to tackle those things next.

While it is clear that, within the code, are hooks that will allow for games to be hosted on the platform, it is unclear whether that strategy can succeed. The main challenge they will encounter is that, as the owners of slide, Google is not just a provider of platform for online gaming but also a major player in the space. As such, some of the smaller players may be worried that the platform could sway in ways that me be less than beneficial to them. Zynga, because it needs to get rid of its current dependency on Facebook will probably hedge by putting some of their games on the platform but it is unclear as to whether other companies might join in.

On the picture end of things, Google is leveraging its Picasa offering, however, it is clear that it could do more by integrating it better in the + platform.  The mobile integration is a nice piece and may actually do collateral damage to a number of mobile photo hosting applications link instagram, for example.

But the picture offering is not enough. A proper merging of YouTube in the offering might give it some extra power by leveraging their strong presence in the video space to offer something that doesn’t yet seem to exist on Facebook.

Google vs. Apple

Apple integrated the new version of iOS with Twitter, basically matching one feature that has existed on many Android phone for a few years. They have yet to integrate with Facebook but I would not be totally surprised if they were to do so in future versions of their device. Android already supports both Facebook and Twitter integration and is supporting Google+ through an added application.

In order for this integration to work, Google will have to integrate Google+ at a much deeper level than it does today. However, with a social network and a mobile offering, Google is in the interesting position of being able to become the social network for mobile devices. On the other hand, the approach they have taken to date leaves much to be desired. By installing two different apps on the device, the experience feels tacked on rather than integrated. The Android team has to do some serious work to really rethink things over and tightly integrate Google+ into the OS, making the experience seamless.

The acquisition game

With a rumored 4–5 million new users in the past couple of weeks, Google is off to a good start with Google+ but still only reaching one percent of the Facebook world. Building on the back of Gmail may be a solid strategic move at this time, as Gmail can get Google to roughly 200 million users. What what about the more than tripling of that number required to get to parity with Facebook? For that, Google is going to have to do a lot of hard work and it’s unclear how they will go about acquiring more accounts going forward.

It may just be that Google will try to require every user of every service they provide to create a Google profile account moving forward. Today, Android users are required to create a gmail (or google apps) account to sync up their device. This represents one acquisition channel that none of the other players in the social media space have and could be one big area for growth.

Another area for potential growth is in the enterprise space: looking at the Google hangout feature, it seems to me that circles could become a useful way to organize a company and get quick online meetings. In fact, it may be more useful as a working tool than as a merely social one.

Still, at this time, it is hard to see a case where Google could topple Facebook. But the history of social networks is riddled with the bodies of players that were once at the top and eventually superseded by new entrants (think Friendster and MySpace) so it is not totally impossible that Facebook could find itself in hot competitive waters.

What about reputation rating systems?

Last but not least is the question around reputation rating systems like Klout or Peerindex. Those companies have built their model on the back of Twitter and Facebook and must urgently adapt to include Google+. With many early adopters spending more time on Gooogle’s property, the reputation rating game has a new entry point that will need to be urgently included in their calculations if they want to continue being relevant. When I first mentioned this, many people replied that those services are just not good enough as is and it seems that they have yet another challenge to deal with if they want to establish themselves as relevant in the future.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Some thoughts on Google+. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to reassess the network bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of connectedness and of intertwined interest entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the reassessment.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all internet traffic is created equal, that all internet users are endowed by the initial intent of the internet founders with certain unalienable rights, that among these are connectedness, equality, and the right to free speech. That to secure these rights, social norms are instituted among users, deriving their just powers from the consent of the community. That whenever any form of government or corporation becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to challenge it, and to institute new network rules, laying new foundations for a better, more open and more just network offering. Sound judgment may dictate that long established rules should not be changed lightly and hastily; and there have been many proofs that people are willing to give up universal access and freedom of expression for a better user experience than challenge large corporations and governments when they are overreaching online.

But when a long string of abuses, all intended to increase certain people’s control over the unruly internet, it is the people’s right, it is their duty, to openly challenge those attempts, and to provide new ways to safeguard an internet that works for everyone. Over the last decade, there has been a gradual decrease in the people’s hold on the network, and now may be the time to reassess our reliance on the internet and our willingness to all work together for the betterment of humanity. The history of the present corporations and governments is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations of network resources, all having in direct object the establishment of increased control over the network. To prove this, here are a few facts we submit as evidence.

They have refused to follow proper law, using innuendoes instead of law enforcement 

They have refused to give internet custodians the right to help internet people

They have refused to provide access unless it was to approved resources

They have made rules with little input from the community

They have seized servers without prior warning or subsequent explanations

They have supported over-reaching, repeatedly, in copyright lawsuits

They have refused, for a long time, to help correct some of those overreach

They have obstructed free speech, by refusing to enforce laws relating to it

They have made critical groups dependent on the will of one country

They have pushed for higher levels of control

They have spied on us

For protecting potential guilty parties from being sued

For cutting off online trade with all parts of the world

For imposing constraints without our consent

They are, at this time, working on more internet kill switches that may disconnect large swath of the population from the network

In ever stage, we have complained and blogged about it: our repeated tweets have been answered only by repeated injury. A governing model, where those that govern are thus marked by every act which may define tyranny, is unfit to those who care about the internet.

Nor have we been wanting in attention from the mainstream media. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by large corporate entities to extend an underserved control over internet resources. We have reminded them of the circumstances that led to the creation of an open internet. We have appealed to common sense and interest in the public good and we have asked them to help us keep the internet as open as ever. They too have been deaf to the voice of the internet populace. We must, therefore agree to the necessity to restate our dependence upon each others and hold enemies of an open internet, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the open internet, in tweets and other status platforms assembled, appealing to all that is fair and good, do, in the name of all internet users, solemnly publish and declare, that this internet is, and of right ought to be free and independent of control; that it is absolved from control by corporate interests; and that, as a free internet, it is reliant on every user acting responsibly in sharing online resources. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Anonymous and other activists, we mutually pledge to each other our share packets, our open hotspots, and our mutual interdependence.

Enjoy the 4th of July!

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title A declaration of interdependence. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.