Ideas & Insights on Technology & Life..

There is a post on TechCrunch today about the Top 10 Reasons The Apple iPad Will Put Amazon’s Kindle Out of Business

Certainly the iPad will give some competition to the  Kindle - especially the $489 model - but put it out of business ?  Highly unlikely.    Here are the top 10 reasons why the iPad will NOT kill the Kindle :

1) Price: The price point to compare is the $269 Kindle vs the $499 iPad.  The $269 Kindle works pretty well for reading books. And if  Amazon drops the price to $199 - there is no competition.

2) e-Ink : Makes reading a pleasure. Enough said.

3) Glare :  The backlight on the iPad makes it difficult on your eyes for extended periods of reading. Plus you can read a Kindle in broad daylight with no problems. Try that with an iPad.

4) 3G connectivity: is built in and free for life on the Kindle - with  no monthly fees, ever ! And anywhere in the world. First the iPad will cost  $130 more for the 3G option.  Second it  requires you to shell out  $30 (or $15) per month to AT&T to be able to use 3G.   Three negatives right there for the iPad  - the hassle of signing up, the cost  and AT&T’s awful connectivity.

5) Amazon vs iTunes : You can download almost any book on Amazon - and are not locked perpetually into the Apple/iTunes jail.   Apple hates giving up control on anything -  and that is not likely to change in the near future.

6) Size : The Kindle is smaller and more portable than the iPad.  Makes it easier to carry it around just like a book. The iPad - though portable -still feels like you are carrying around a tablet or a laptop.

7) Weight : It is only 0.6 lb compared to the 1.5 lbs for the iPad - another plus that makes it easier to carry around.   And you can therefore  hold the Kindle for extended periods with one hand without your hand getting tired.  Try that with the iPad.

8) Battery Life : You can easily use a Kindle for almost 2  weeks with a single charge.  That makes it the perfect device for reading books on long airplane trips  or vacations.  The iPad claims 10 hours for the battery life - we all know that the actual battery life  will be probably half that.

9) Touch : The iPad is a touch device, which means you will need to constantly wipe the greasy fingerprints  on it resulting from all that page turning when reading books.  No such problems on the Kindle.

10)  Fragility : Finally, I  could easily give the Kindle to a five or ten-year old child without worrying that they may drop and break the screen. Not so with the iPad’s expensive and fragile panel.  In fact, the Kindle may be the perfect replacement for all the heavy school textbooks that kids have to carry these days.

So what do you think ? Your comments and feedback are welcome.

The last time there was so much hype about a tablet, was possibly when Moses came down the mountain with one made of stone !   Steve Jobs - who has almost attained the same legendary status in the tech world  - officially announced  the much-anticipated Apple Tablet today and it is called … the iPad.

The pre-launch buzz around this event was so massive, that when Apple finally made the announcement today, it was actually a bit of a let-down. Although the die-hard fans may not admit it - you could sense the disappointment in the posts on blogs and on Twitter.   The device is certainly beautiful, sleek and impressive, as all Apple products are, but is it truly revolutionary as was promised ? A few years back maybe - but certainly not today.    The first impression of many was that it is  a giant iPhone/iPod combination.  It  has nothing that we have not seen before -  there is no single feature that is truly groundbreaking.    Of course, when expectations are so unreasonably high it is not surprising that they have not been fully met.

Update :   There are many wonderful attributes of the iPad and they are highlighted everywhere including Apple’s website.   Apple also claims that the iPad  is  “the best way to experience the web, email, photos, and videos. Hands down.”    But is it really ?  There are some serious drawbacks to the iPad  that  make that claim ring hollow. And there are a few others that may well  prevent it from becoming the game changer that Apple hoped it would be :

• No support for Flash in current iteration.  While Flash may ultimately be phased out by HTML 5/CSS 3, it is ubiquitous on the web right now. Not supporting it is a serious drawback for any serious web browsing.
• No support for Multitasking. This is understandable on the iPhone but is a serious shortcoming for the iPad.
• No SD I/O,  USB ports or HDMI connectors   - which are industry standards for any such device to interface with your camera, external storage or TV.  (To do so you  will need to purchase an extra - expensive -  adaptor from Apple)
• No video camera.  This is surprising considering that even the most low end phones today come with these built-in.
• 4:3 Screen Aspect Ratio : Again a surprising drawback.  Most HD Movies are widescreen (16:9) and will  not look great when displayed in the 4:3 ratio (which is used by older standard TVs).
• Locked to iTunes & Apple : The iPad is a closed Apple eco-system - you will not be able to download and run movies, videos, songs, MP3s or any applications from anywhere on the web except  from  Apple’s iTunes store .   That is a severe restriction that is a huge drawback.
• AT&T 3G data connection :   AT&T’s 3G data connection has  notoriously spotty and unreliable coverage. It is puzzling that they did not chose Verizon for this.

Of course, Apple may well remedy these shortcomings in later versions of the iPad  based on user feedback.  But the version as demoed today by Steve Jobs,   has certainly received swift criticism across the blogosphere.

[ The coverage for the launch was fast and furious among all the tech blogs - including Techcrunch and Mashable but the traffic spikes brought down Techcrunch several times during the launch (with many  "Database connection errors").  Twitter held up surprisingly well.  Friendfeed crashed several times as well  ]

It is now widely acknowledged that America’s  public school education system  is broken and needs fixing. Numerous studies rank US school children well below other countries in  science and math tests:

“The average science score of U.S. students lagged behind those in 16 of 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that represents the world’s richest countries. The U.S. students were further behind in math, trailing counterparts in 23 countries.”

Studies such as these have raised alarm bells among parents, educators, politicians and the media.  President Barack Obama has made it a priority and said  in a speech last year   :

” The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens — …….And yet, despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we’ve let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us…. The relative decline of American education is untenable for our economy, it’s unsustainable for our democracy, it’s unacceptable for our children — and we can’t afford to let it continue….”

It is indeed a paradox that primary education in the richest nation lags so  far behind the rest of the world on so many  metrics.  As an immigrant to the US ,  who attended primary schools in India, and as a parent with two children who graduated from public schools in America,  I have been intrigued by this apparent paradox as well.  While not an expert by any means, I have given this some  thought.

I believe I have benefited greatly from the education I received from  the schools I attended as a child in India, and I have some ideas on why and wanted to share my insights here.   We did not have spacious, well equipped classrooms, or  audio-visual equipment, projectors, or air-conditioning in spite of the hot weather. Many  classrooms were make-shift and some topped with a tin or aluminum roofs (”tin-sheds” as we called them).  We did not have a large playground, flood-lit basketball courts, a stadium or an auditorium.   We had no access to any of the facilities taken for granted in most schools today.    In fact, this actually makes my analysis easier :  You can see clearly what really matters since you have stripped away all of the  infrastructure elements considered essential for a school’s success.

So here for what it is worth, are my viewpoints for  what I think made a difference :

• We were fortunate to have had great teachers and a wonderful principal.  They were passionate, involved and committed.   They knew each of us personally and cared about what we learnt.  I  remember our English teacher in sixth grade - Mr. Krishnan, who urged us to be creative and original and to  use  our imagination in writing .  Our Hindi language teachers, Mr. Kumar and Mr. Jamuna Rai, had a  passion for literature and poetry that was infectious and passed on to us.  Our principal, Mrs. Visharda Hoon, was an extra0rdinary woman who set the bar high for both our teachers and students in discipline and excellence.

• We took part in a lot of extra-curricular activities and events - including “elocutions”, debates, recitations, essays at  both the  intra-school and inter-school levels.  This was invaluable in shaping our composition and thinking skills.

• There was a lot of writing and very little objective - True/False, mutliple choice type - tests.  I have always felt that this was one key difference between the schooling systems in India and the USA - we wrote a lot more than students here are required to.  I believe the writing was very helpful in allowing us to learn to compose our thoughts and express ourselves.  I also think writing  exercises and develops abstract  thinking abilities better than multiple choice questions.

• We had to learn three languages - English, Hindi and a third language  (Sanskrit in my case).   There is no doubt that this helped greatly and accelerated absorption of a wider range of viewpoints and perspectives - all essential to learning.

• It was actually considered cool to be smart or to be a “geek”.    The words “geek” and “nerd” were foreign to us. Academic success and  braininess trumped social awkwardness. You could always become socially adept later,  school was the time to learn as much as you could.   In the US though,  popular culture, movies, TV shows and celebrities (many who  have dropped out of school),  consider it is not so cool and  people apologize or feel embarrassed to admit if they were ever geeks or nerds.  How can a society, where being too  smart or brainy in your teenage years is disparaged and considered a socially undesirable trait,  ever hope to motivate its youngsters to study hard, learn as much as possible and become smarter ?  Banish this pop-culture attitude in  America and you will increase the average SAT scores !

• As a culture - both at school and outside school, learning is revered and teachers  are considered only next to God, and your parents in importance.  As our  ”gurus”  they are  given our ultimate respect and gratitude .  This is   ingrained by our parents into our young minds from early on and creates  the humility to continue to learn and grow.   Incidentally, this reverence and respect for teachers is common among all Eastern cultures  - including China, Japan and Far East Asia.

• And finally parents were an important part of this equation.   Although there were no PTA meetings or parent teacher conferences - as children we knew that nothing  was more important to our parents than  doing well at school, studying hard  and respecting our teachers. And that was somehow sufficient to motivate and spur us on.

Undoubtedly,  there are many  other factors which I have probably overlooked.  However,  these are the ones that I believe mattered the most in the end.    Money and resources are of course important to improve schools, and no one denies the importance of good teachers and parental involvement.  However,  just as  important may be a subtle but fundamental change in attitudes that needs to permeate  all levels of society and  subliminally signal the importance of learning, teachers and schools to our children.

After reviewing articles from many sources in the media, I have compiled a list of certain  facts and figures regarding   the recent cyber attacks  from China and the subsequent stunning announcement from Google.   Some  of these are surprisingly under reported  in the media so you may not know  them. Here they are in no specific order  :

1. Over 34 companies were targets of the attack and appear to have been carefully selected to be in industries in which China is lagging. Sources say that one aim of the attack was to steal high-tech information in strategic industries to give China a competitive economic edge.   For example,  the attacks on defense companies were  aimed to steal information on weapons systems. The attacks on  technology companies were mainly to get the  source code  of the companies flagship products.
2. Sources also say that the second aim of the  attacks was  to get  politically sensitive information to  ensure the survival of the regime.   This was stated by James A. Lewis, a cyber and national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
3. The attacks revealed the existence of a vast cyber espionage network -  GhostNet - with origins in China — that at last count had  infected  at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries. Of the infected computers  close to 30% can be considered as high-value diplomatic, political, economic, and military targets (including the office of the Dalai Lama, foreign embassies, large corporations and government offices).
4. GhostNet spreads by “phishing” - i.e.  sending fake emails that appear to come from familiar names with contextually relevant subject lines to specific recipients with attachments that contain the malware or Trojan programs that infect the computer and take advantage of known flaws in the software installed on the target computer.
5. GhostNet uses  a Trojan  program  known as gh0st RAT that allows the attackers to gain complete, real-time remote control of target computers.  The  infected computers have been traced  to be   controlled from commercial Internet access accounts located on the island of  Hainan, People’s Republic of China.
6. GhostNet is capable of taking full control of infected computers, including searching and downloading specific files, and  operating attached devices, including microphones and web cameras. The attacker can  not only control but also see and hear everything that is happening at the target computer, remotely !
7. The attackers also exploited a flaw in Adobe’s  Acrobat  PDF Reader.  This flaw was  discovered  on Dec 15, 2009  but was  fixed only on Tuesday, Jan 12, 2009  – the day of the   Google announcment.  (So everyone should head on down to Adobe and download the fix immediately). Update : 1/17/2010 : McAfee reports  that these initial reports about a flaw in Adobe Acrobat are false. The flaw that was actually exploited was in Internet Explorer 6.
8. China currently has between 300 million to  400 million active internet users - more than any other nation in the world including the US.  By 2013, China is estimated to have 840 million active internet users - again the largest internet  population of any nation. Chinese will at that point replace English as the most widely used language on the Internet.
9. The two top internet search engines in China are Baidu and Google. Baidu controls 61% of the market and Google 31% - together accounting for 94% of all  searches done in China.
10. Although Baidu is widely reported as a Chinese owned search engine - its majority stock holders are actually American institutional investors like Morgan Stanley and Fidelity.   It is traded on the NASDAQ (stock : BIDU) and was taken public by American firms.   Its initial funding came from Silicon Valley Venture Capital firms including  Draper Fisher Jurvetson and IDG Technology Venture.  Google itself was an early stage investor but sold its stake when it entered the Chinese market.
11. Google entered China in 2006 with the launch of Google.cn   after much internal debate and after agreeing to censor results in compliance with the Chinese Government’s policies.   However, Google.cn  does display  a message informing Chinese users that their searches  may not display all results in order to comply with the policies of their government.
12. It has been suggested by Peter Scheer of Huffington Post  that the  majorty shareholders who are  US investors could potentially pressure Baidu’s Board to c0-operate with Google and defy  China’s censorship policies. “That would be extraordinary—corporate civil disobedience squared.” he says in a blog post today.
13. Google is projected to earn between  $250 million to $600 million in revenues from China this year, a very small fraction (between 1% to 2.5%)  of  Google’s  $22 billion annual  revenues.
14. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin together own  shares with 58% of the voting power of all shares and have veto power over everyone else, including the company’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt who has less than 10%.  Google’s founders have very strong ideas about ethical business practices. They  even advised people not to buy Google’s stock during their IPO in 2004,  unless they felt comfortable with their unconventional approach to business.
15. Shareholder proposals demanding that Google defy China’s censorship policies have been presented to the board several times since 2006 when Google entered China.  So far, CEO Eric Shcmidt has consistently voted against these proposals  in order to protect Google’s  franchise as China becomes the largest internet market.   Larry Page has also  voted against these proposals.  Sergey Brin  whose family fled communist Soviet Union when he was six, has abstained from voting to show his symbolic support of the proposals.  The incident on Tuesday jas apparently tipped the scale in favor of these proposals.

Updates :

Sources :

Google’s bombshell  announcement yesterday about its “new approach” to China is still reverberating across the media and the blogosphere.    Everyone is trying  to put this in perspective, assessing its impact and figuring out  Google’s true  motivations and rationale for this drastic action.   However,  most blogs and analysis focused on two important aspects of this story : Google’s tough stance against the freedom and censorship issues in China   and the business implications of this for Google.  But very few address  another equally important aspect :  The warning to the free world of  the clear and present danger of Chinese cyber attacks and cyber warfare .  Here is a quick rundown of some popular reactions :

Many bloggers and analysts are saying that Google deserves kudos for this tough and brave stance against censorship and oppression in China,  and that they are living up to their “don’t be evil” motto.   Rebecca MackInnon has an excellent post  titled “Google puts its foot down” and writes :

“ They are living up to their “don’t be evil” motto - much mocked of late - and living up to their commitments to free speech and privacy as a member of the Global Network Initiative. “

This sentiment was echoed by many bloggers and media analysts and was certainly a factor in Google’s decision.

However,  many including Sarah Lacy of Techcrunch say  this is  “more about business than thwarting evil”

“  Does anyone really think Google would be doing this if it had top market share in the country? For one thing, I’d guess that would open them up to shareholder lawsuits. Google is a for-profit, publicly-held company at the end of the day….”

William Haven asks “Does The Internet Giant Really Deserve Our Praise ?” and writes :

“Google was struggling in competition with Baidu, China’s most popular search engine. Baidu.com holds over 60 per cent of China’s search engine market while Google.cn – at its best - has held just over half that. So perhaps Google is simply trying to spin a business decision. ”

I do not agree as both the above arguments regarding market share are untenable  - 30% market share in a country with 300  million active internet users is still a huge business and very profitable to boot !  Business decisions are based on profits and not market share - unless  you  claim  that Google’s business model requires it to be #1 in every market that it operates in. By that reasoning,  Yahoo which has a mere 10% share of the search market or Bing  which has 5% share should have shut down operations long back.  And Avis should not be in the car rental business !

And here is Robert Scoble  - who makes the same point very well in his blog post :

“ UPDATE: A Google Spokesperson just emailed me this: “This is not about market share. While our revenues from China are really immaterial, we did just have our best ever quarter [in China].”“

So while  a stance against censorship is  laudable, a stance against censorship at the cost of  potentially millions of dollars  in  profits  is  unprecedented in corporate America and is  deserving of nothing short of  a Nobel  Peace Prize  for Larry, Sergey, Eric and the rest of the team  at Google !

But all of this still misses one very  important aspect about Google’s announcement.  The very first reason they cited in Google’s announcement  was :

” First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.”

I think Google intends this to  be a warning about the the dire threat of  cyber attacks and cyber warfare posed by China and should be regarded as an  urgent wake-up call for  America, Europe and the free world.

“The investigation ultimately uncovered a network of over 1,295 infected hosts in 103 countries. Up to 30% of the infected hosts are considered high-value target and include computers located at ministries of foreign affairs, embassies, international organizations, news media, and NGOs. ”

“Chinese authorities have made it clear that they consider cyberspace a strategic domain, one which helps redress the military imbalance between China and the rest of the world (particularly the United States). They have correctly identifed cyberspace as the strategic fulcrum upon which U.S. military and economic dominance depends. “

So I  fervently hope that Google’s bold move will put in motion a chain reaction of counter-measures  that will prevent an  electronic 9/11  from happening.  And more importantly halt  a seemingly unstoppable adversary  from achieving their stated goals of electronic world domination via cyber warfare.     The skeptics will of course call this analysis an over-reaction and paranoia.  But no one believed  that a bunch of 20-year-olds  could fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers either,  although evidence of this possibility was staring at us all the time.   The fact that the most powerful internet company in the world has validated  the reality of this threat should be fair warning to all of us.

In what will surely be remembered as a pivotal and defining moment in Internet history, Google today took a brave stand against China which has so  far dictated how Google  conducts business in that country.

In a post on their blog titled “A New Approach To China”, Google stated that it had detected an unprecedented and highly sophisticated attack by Chinese hackers last month on its corporate infrastructure, and on 20 other corporate entities. The hacking has resulted  in theft of some of Google’s Intellectual Property. Google has also determined that the hackers were primarily targeting the Gmail accounts of  Chinese human rights activists. Possibly there was much more - since Google has only shared some of the information from these attacks. In any case, the attacks appeared to be the tipping point for Google in revising their stance on China.

Effectively this is what Google is saying to China in their announcement  : “We are not going to succumb to your censorship policies  any more and enough is enough   :  So take it or leave it -  we  will either run an uncensored search engine in China on our terms OR  just cease operations there ! “

Putting an economic juggernaut and the next superpower on notice in no uncertain terms  on a matter of principle  requires tremendous guts and vision.   It has never been done, as far as I know, by any large US  corporation (or even by the US Govt for that matter !)  . If ever there was a moment in Google’s decade old history which demonstrated  their resolve and  the true intent of  their  corporate motto “Don’t do evil”  - this has to be  it !    Google deserves the utmost respect and accolades from everybody for this brave stance.   I only wish they had done it sooner in 2006 when they launched Google.cn.  Succumbing to  the unreasonable demands of a communist regime that censors  free  speech, oppresses its citizens, routinely violates human rights and then denies all wrongdoing,  goes  against everything that Google,  and the rest of the free world  believes in.   It is about time someone stood up to them and I am glad Google had the clarity of conviction and the guts to do this.  More power to them and may this be the start of a worldwide movement that puts pressure on  the Chinese Government to revise their policies.

There is  another important aspect to this announcement : If  a $200 billion behemoth like Google,  run by some of  the smartest  engineers and security experts in the world can be breached by hackers in China,  it should be a wake-up call to the rest of the world on  the seriousness of the dire threat that hacking in general and China in particular poses.

Incidentally this attack occurs after several years of under-reported warnings in the press about this threat from China.    The country has secretly been building an army of Chinese hackers on a remote island off the coast of China - with the explicit goal of “electronic world domination” by 2050.  I had blogged about this threat back in April - which you can read here.

So my favorite technology blog TechCrunch announced today that they were giving away a brand new Google Nexus to one lucky person who retweeted their blog post OR posted a comment about why they deserved to win one. This seems to have set off a tsunami of Retweets (6380 as I write this) and a veritajble flood of comments (2809 as of now). The contest ends at Noon PST tomorrow (Jan 6, 2010) - so expect those numbers to swell even more.

Intrigued by the hype and promise of the Nexus I thought it could be the perfect antidote to cure my Iphone envy. So just for  fun I took Arrington’s bait and decided to take the plunge.   And yes folks, this  pretty much … ahem… locks me in for the first spot to win the phone as who can resist a good old, funny limerick, right ?

So (drum roll…) here it is (originally posted on TechCrunch here …)

And in case TechCrunch thinks I am all talk with rhyme but no reason - I will go on record to guarantee that if I do ever win the Nexus I will find a restaurant that serves the Kugel for lunch, order it for the first time and Tweet about it from my Nexus ! How is that for commitment to a cause ?

I read recently that Twitter has finally changed their question at the top of the website to read “What’s happening ?” from the old one which said “What are you doing ?”

Here is the original post by @biz on Twitter’s blog

This change was of course covered by all major blogs including Techcrunch and Mashable among others.

It is interesting that Biz quotes the following reasons :
“People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, “What’s happening?” A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive. ”

I must be prophetic for I urged Twitter to make precisely this change and even suggested the same question as a better alternative tagline almost eight months back in  my Twitter updates and also posted a blog entry here

Maybe  @ev or @Biz were actually listening and decided to implement my suggestion ? Or maybe great minds think alike !

Link to The original Tweet, posted Mar 27, 2009 :
“Isn’t is time Twitter changed their tagline “What are you doing? ” to something that reflects what most tweets are about ?”

Here are my suggestions for alternative tag lines that Twitter could use :

Alternative Twitter Taglines

Note the alternative suggested above  ”What’s happening ?”   !

Well at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that I was ahead of the curve here  :) ?

By now thousands of articles and blog posts have analyzed the reasons  for the appeal of Twitter.  They have sliced and diced it neatly into its various components - simplicity, brevity, openness, immediacy,  transparency etc.  But if you have ever tried to explain  Twitter this way to someone who has never used Twitter,  you most likely got blank stares.  So I tried to come up with an analogy that can explain what Twitter is and how it works to someone who has never used it and this is what I came up with :

“Twitter is like a giant cocktail party where  everyone is talking (tweeeting) or listening.  You can stand in a corner and overhear all the conversations in the room as a steady stream of chatter.  You can also  pick anyone you find interesting  and hear everything they say (follow).    You can talk  to any of them and you can grab anyone else’s attention by  just tapping  them on the shoulder with a gentle t@p (mention) !    And if you  hear something interesting you  can just turn around and repeat it to everyone who is listening to you  (RT or retweet).  And if  someone finds what you say  interesting they can do the same.    And of course, since everybody who is  anybody  is there at this party  -  from Ashton Kutcher to Zakaria -  leaders, politicians, CEOs, movie stars, journalists, atheletes,  colleagues, even  your neighbor (and sometimes even their cat) - you can talk to any and all of them.   Plus it is a fun way to meet new people.  Which is why it is one of those parties no one wants to miss, and once you are there no one wants to leave.”

Got  that ? And now if you will excuse me, let me go get a  drink  :) !

“Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vaccuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1.5 tons” - Popular Mechanics article, March 1949

The above quote amply demonstrates the problems with predicting the future. This is because the future does not always evolve linearly from the past - there are often unforeseen quantum leaps in technology that have unpredictable consequences.