A year has passed and I don't miss TV at all. I never think about it. I think about the book I am reading. I think about the book I just read. I think about the book I'm looking forward to reading next.

If you've contemplated cutting the cable, I encourage you to do it. You will not regret it.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Jack on July 30, 2003, over the phone, as part of my research for my book on the history of the PLATO system. I uncovered a story Jack had intended to keep secret, that George Pake was not the actual first choice to be director of Xerox PARC, but rather, it was someone else. I have a chapter on PARC in my upcoming book, in which the decades-old secret will be revealed.

During the interview, I casually asked Goldman, who, remember, created Xerox PARC which would inspire Steve Jobs to pursue the GUI interface for Macintosh, what he used personally: PC, or Macintosh. Here was his reply, in 2003:

I use only Macintosh. If you came into my home, I have -- I still have, I never throw them out, I have a Macintosh, a Macintosh 500, a Macintosh Plus, a Power Macintosh, a PowerBook, and now I just got a new iMac, because I wanted a 17 inch screen, and the easiest way to get one was to get an iMac.

Siri represents a compelling case for a front-end natural language interface to vast amounts of data. Put simply, you ask it questions and it gives you answers. In time, you will be able to ask it more complex questions and it will be able to provide more complex answers.

What follows is a possible scenario, a possible way things might go, should Siri take off the way I think it might.

1. Siri Changes the User Experience

Siri changes the way you interact with your phone. You currently interact with your phone through applications that generally require interaction via the touch screen. If Siri takes off, you will touch the screen less. A lot less. When driving, in all sorts of situations. You'll talk to your device instead.

2. Are you talking to Apple's app or talking to a third party app?

If you're not interacting with your phone by touch, but rather talking to it, you are probably going through Apple's own natural language funnel, meaning, Siri. Question is, will Apple extend Siri's functionality to other apps, third party apps? Or will it keep it for its own?

One possible scenario: development of standalone apps declines. What rises instead is data. Tons of data. Logic. Logic and data mixed. Basically, domain knowledge. Expertise. Facts. The Yelp portion of the Siri demo in the video is what did it for me. That makes me think the future of the iPhone is kind of like HAL in the movie 2001. All those modules that make up Hal's knowledge and expert system. The more modules, or plugins, you pay for, the more your Siri knows about the world. Third parties become knowledge plugin developers. Apple opens the "Know Store". "Knows" like Yellow Pages, TV listings, sports info, stocks, medical knowledge, car info, travel info, tourist info, all sorts of things. All the things that Apple doesn't have the time or resources to build: let the third parties reign.

3. It's Not Just What You Know, but Who

But would these third parties be developing "apps"? I don't think so. I think they'd be developing server APIs. APIs that the iPhone can plug right into. (And heck, when Android has its Siri clone, that Android can plug into as well.) So there might not be as much need of a front-end UI designer, graphics design, etc, but rather it's all about information design, query design, knowledge design, knowledge rules, knowledge sets. And that's what the value-add would shift to.

Eventually a Yelp app would not need to have much of a UI if any. It'd be handled by Siri and a Yelp Know plugin. Siri would come pre-bundled with lots of Knows, but you could add more. Companies could compete to build the best Knows, and that becomes the next vibrant marketplace.

Companies with social networks, social graphs, and such, would theoretically be at an advantage in such a world, because they could enable Siri to ask more complex questions like "What are my friends doing tonight?" and "What shouldn't I get for Sally's birthday?"

I could envision walking into a hotel, and the hotel's wifi offering a free Know plugin that your phone can immediately use. So you could ask questions like, "What's on the room service menu" and "Have my friends checked in yet" and "Where is the conference registration desk in this hotel" and "What time does the pool open in the morning". Or walk into a grocery store and be able to slurp up the local Know for that store.

There will be all kinds of such opportunities for startups in the future. Which begins right now.

In Werner Herzog's latest documentary there's a line that struck me: live your dash. "Dash" meaning the hyphen on a tombstone between the two years. Steve Jobs lived his dash well.

I met Steve twice, years ago. First time was in 1991, at NeXT's gleaming white offices in Redwood Shores, while I attended NeXT Developer Camp. The tradition at DevCamp was that Steve would join the developers for a dinner one evening, but his schedule didn't permit it so we were all invited into one of NeXT's conference rooms near the famous supportless concrete stairway that was the architectural centerpiece of the company's office building (though, I was equally impressed with floor-to-ceiling whiteboard wall surfaces, which I'd seen at only one other place years earlier: Xerox PARC). Inside, Steve was demoing NeXTStep to Phil White, then CEO of Informix. We all watched as he walked through the NeXTStep OS and series of apps.

Then in 1993 my wife and I got to meet Steve as he was walking the Moscone Center exhibition hall before his NeXTWORLD EXPO event opened to the public. Coconut Computing, our company, had a booth at the conference; we were exhibiting the NeXTSTEP version of our COCONET software. Steve was absolutely beaming. He'd just had a baby, NeXTSTEP for Intel processors was being introduced, thousands of attendees showed up for his conference, and things were still looking bright for NeXT

Millions of people to this day are unaware how important NeXT was and is to Apple. MacOS X is essentially NeXTSTEP; every Objective C developer is familiar with the NS prefixes to all of Apple's MacOS and iOS software development APIs.

Thanks for the inspiration and changing the world, Steve.

Things We Never Told Bookstores

• We love books, yes, it's true. But we hate bookstores as much as we wanted to love them. For every delight and surprise there were two disappointments. But we kept coming back.
• Amazon is better. It's cheaper and they have a better selection. Get over it.
• Well, come to think of it, you are over it. You've gone out of business.
• Let's take a look at what kind of business you were in, shall we? One word. Consignment.
• You had decades, literally decades, to innovate, to try something different. But no. You just stayed as a consignment shop for pulp from publishers.
• When after fifteen years of Amazon you still didn't catch on that it was time to try something new.
• You're like that scene in Deep Impact where the father and the newsanchor daughter stand on the beach and look at the rapidly-approaching 1000-ft tidal wave and do nothing. If you knew the meteor was gonna hit the ocean, do you ever think that being at sea-level at the shore was maybe the very worst place to be in the world at that moment?
• When we walked up to the counter and you asked us "Did you find everything okay?" of course we didn't! Don't insult our intelligence. Your store never had much inventory, mostly crap. Usually we didn't find anything we were looking for but because we're suckers for books, we found some we weren't looking for and had. to. buy. them. anyway. It's what kept you in business.
• But actually it's worse than that. Bookstores suffered from the same problem as Blockbuster video stores. Really hard to find stuff, storing them in shelves that go all the way to the floor. How frequently do you think the thing you are looking for is at the bottom shelf, and you walked right by it and didn't notice it? Really frequently. #fail.
• List price? You really think you have a viable business when you charge list price for a book?
• The "bargain" tables are an insult. $1 remaindered coffee table photo books on sports figures, cats, dogs, celebrities, and the national parks are a waste of space and we still we spend tons of time rifling through every damn book on display and we hate you for it.
• Other customers get in the way. There's always somebody curled up on the floor right in the aisle where your book is.
• When you tell us "You could have saved X dollars and Y cents" if we'd only purchased using your store's loyalty card, we want to tell you, "You could have charged X dollars and Y cents less and maybe I would have bought more books, you idiots" but we're polite so we didn't.
• We always had as much contempt for you as you had for us the customers. We come, we shop, and we witness the slow inevitable decay of a wonderful, age-old institution that had every chance in the world to keep up with the times but thought the answer was to embed mini Starbucks in every store and sell stationery, Godiva chocolates, and other crap instead of books, books, and more books.
• Most of the authors you had for in-person appearances and book signings and readings were as boring and uninteresting as us.
• Oh, and there was nothing worse than walking into your store and seeing an author sitting behind a little draped table with their book perched on a stand besides them, and no customers or fans are anywhere to be seen. Did you not see This is Spinal Tap?
• When you were at your best, you were curators of a world of knowledge. We came for this, to be enlightened, to be taken on a journey of discovery to new ideas, new perspectives, new stories. But you were not always at your best. Putting Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck and all the other ignorant hustlers' books on prominent display just because the publisher paid you to put them there doesn't mean you should have done that. That's not curation, that's the road to idiocracy. And you helped pave it just as much as CNN and Fox.
• Yes, we did notice your dwindling inventory over the years. At the same time we noticed Amazon's growing inventory. The gap got so big and you did nothing about it. You had every chance in the world. But you ran your store like you were selling groceries, letting the publishers pay for placement and winding up being dependent on that model instead of figuring out how to stay vibrant, stay interesting, stay ahead of Amazon, offer things that Amazon could never offer. Now we're stuck with Amazon, and now they're killing books outright. Now we have to lease DRM-laden data files that reside in a "cloud". Great.

]]> tag:brianstorms.com,2011://15.183 2011-09-17T18:38:28Z 2011-09-17T18:41:05Z

The internet can't help itself. Even a demonstration against Wall Street gets plastered with ads. (Screen grab from the live video feed at the Wall Street demonstrations going on today)...

brian The internet can't help itself. Even a demonstration against Wall Street gets plastered with ads.

(Screen grab from the live video feed at the Wall Street demonstrations going on today)

]]> tag:brianstorms.com,2011://15.182 2011-07-17T00:57:06Z 2011-07-17T01:20:05Z

It's amusing to read about folks declaring they're quitting email. One writer shared how he went on a strict Google+ diet: "I even stopped using e-mail." No you didn't. Google+ is email. It is an evolutionary step, not a revolutionary...

brian It's amusing to read about folks declaring they're quitting email. One writer shared how he went on a strict Google+ diet: "I even stopped using e-mail."

No you didn't. Google+ is email. It is an evolutionary step, not a revolutionary step. I kind of wonder if Google+ is not Gmail with a different UI

Let's compare, shall we?

Google+	Email
You send and receive messages to and from people	You send and receive messages to and from people
The spin term is share	There isn't a spin term, it just is what it is
You can't send a message unless you specify at least one recipient	You can't send a message unless you specify at least one recipient
Distribution lists are called Circles	Distribution lists are called distribution lists
When you specify your recipient(s), you pick individual names from your Circles, you pick one or more Circles, or some mixture	When you specify your recipeint(s), you enter individual addresses (or pick them from your address book), or a mixture of addresses and distribution list addresses
Recipients all get the same message and all the attachments	Recipients all get the same message and all the attachments
Recipients reply to the message by adding a "Comment" which is seen by all the recipients and the original sender	Recipients can reply to just the sender, to all recipients, or to a subset
Recipients can forward incoming messages to other individuals or Circles or some mix	Recipients can forward incoming messages to other individuals or distribution lists or some mix
Users view incoming messages in a "Stream", which can be organized into sub-streams based on posts from senders belonging to one of your Circles	Users view incoming messages in an "Inbox", which can be organized by moving the messages manually, or automatically based on rules, into sub-folders

Sure, Google+ has other features like Hangouts and stuff, but the core is the conversation, and the conversation is basically email. Like it always has been.

]]> tag:brianstorms.com,2011://15.181 2011-07-15T18:39:14Z 2011-07-15T19:02:56Z

I always find it unsettling that so many VCs don't show up at the San Diego Venture Summit. Photo of registration table with VC name tags, taken at 10:14am on the way out near the end of an event that...

brian I always find it unsettling that so many VCs don't show up at the San Diego Venture Summit.

Photo of registration table with VC name tags, taken at 10:14am on the way out near the end of an event that started at 7:30am.

Click on the image to see the names. You'll recognize a few I bet.

A VC told me recently, the thing is, they all show up . . . the night before, where they go to a ball game at the stadium next to the hotel. That is what gets the VCs to come to San Diego. But rather than actually show up at the Venture Summit event, they bail. Hence the table full of unclaimed name-tags.

The San Diego business community ought to think about how together we can make it worth their while to stick around the day after the ball game so we can reverse this trend.

]]> tag:brianstorms.com,2011://15.180 2011-07-12T15:05:25Z 2011-07-12T15:08:18Z

Welcome to the 21st century, which amuses itself by remixing the 20th century for endless LOLs....

brian Welcome to the 21st century, which amuses itself by remixing the 20th century for endless LOLs.

]]> tag:brianstorms.com,2011://15.179 2011-05-28T16:53:05Z 2011-05-28T16:55:22Z

Remarkable and wonderful....

brian

Remarkable and wonderful.

]]> tag:brianstorms.com,2011://15.178 2011-05-18T02:25:07Z 2011-05-18T02:28:22Z

After learning about the latest nutty craze, planking, it reminded me of how the newsfolks usually react to "what will they think of next" type stories... here's one future craze scenario I don't doubt will actually happen some day: News...

brian After learning about the latest nutty craze, planking, it reminded me of how the newsfolks usually react to "what will they think of next" type stories... here's one future craze scenario I don't doubt will actually happen some day:

News Anchor A: And now a report on a new craze happening on campuses across the country.

News Anchor B: It's called "treeding", and it has authorities increasingly alarmed.

News Anchor A: "Treeding" when you give up your digital devices and start reading only from documents printed on actual paper, made from trees, like in years past

News Anchor B: But, but wait, that's against the law!

News Anchor A: It gets worse, Jim. Instead of using current technology like the Apple iVision dataglasses and digital implants from Samsung, some rebel students are "going analog" with only tree-based products. Says one police chief...

Police Chief: As we all know, trees are sacred and it's not been legal to make paper from trees for a generation. We need more funding and officers to tackle the problem. Support your police force and send us your bitcoins toda---

News Anchor A: ---"Treeders", as they call themselves, are secretly cutting down trees, generating pulp, and manufacturing their own paper in underground "mills", then printing the text from ebooks and other documents onto the paper and creating old fashioned books!

News Anchor B: *gasp*

News Anchor A: Some are even selling them.

News Anchor B: Oh my! Please stop!

News Andhor A: Yes, Jim, it's true...

[ Only a matter of time... ]

]]> tag:brianstorms.com,2011://15.177 2011-05-05T00:42:56Z 2011-05-05T14:46:36Z

AKA, Why Conferences Are Mass Failures at Communication. (For fullest enjoyment, pretend you are Lewis Black reading this rant.) We've all seen it. You're at a conference, looking for that one business person you need to meet, and you...

brian

AKA, Why Conferences Are Mass Failures at Communication. (For fullest enjoyment, pretend you are Lewis Black reading this rant.)

We've all seen it. You're at a conference, looking for that one business person you need to meet, and you notice that the name badges for half the attendees are on backwards, hiding their names and company affiliations. Fail.

Maybe you check once in a while and notice your own name badge is backwards and nobody knows your name or company. Double fail.

It is always the little things at conferences, the little details and the lack of attention to such, that when combined and repeated and combined and repeated over and over again dozens, hundreds, thousands of times per day over the course of a conference are usually the cause of epic failures to communicate -- epic failures we're often not even aware of. Lost connections, lost opportunities, lost business deals. Unfortunately, few conference organizers care about these details. Some do, most don't. The result? Attendees fail to connect with all of the people they should be connecting with. Presenters fail to make the key points their companies need them to make.

Here is my 2011 list for conference failures and what could be done to fix the problem and how such a fix would help:

PROBLEM: Name tag printed on one side. Almost always printed on one side, and if you ever needed an example of Murphy's Law in action, it's the name tag printed on one side. The person you are looking for, but don't know, have never met, wouldn't recognize, is only ten feet from you. But you will never know because their name tag is backwards!

SOLUTION: Print the same information on both sides.

HOW THIS'LL HELP: Because then your attendees can see who other attendees are. You charged attendees how many hundreds? how many thousands of dollars to attend this conference? Print it on both sides and help your attendees network.

PROBLEM: Name too small on name badge..

SOLUTION: Print the name bigger. Much bigger. In fact, the name badge should be bigger too.

HOW THIS'LL HELP: Attendees should be able to read names on name badges from across the room. Not from ten millimeters away. I would recommend taking a sheet of regular laser printer paper, running it through a color laser printer, printing two copies of the name tag on the full sheet, make them 5 1/2" wide and 8 1/2" high (then fold in half so you have a two-sided name badge), print the attendee name in a HUGE font, and if you really want to be nice, let the attendees upload their company logo to you to include in their badge. So what, if it costs you $3 extra per name tag to print! Add $3 to the conference admission fee. Nobody will care. Everyone will love the badges and how much easier it was to meet people and network, and everyone will love YOU the conference organizer. Flava Flav was on to something, man.

PROBLEM: Moderators don't repeat audience questions.

SOLUTION: Moderators: always repeat audience questions, so everyone in the audience hears what question was asked.

HOW THIS'LL HELP: The audience, you know, the paying attendees, will hear what was asked. I know, seems obvious . . . you'd be amazed.

PROBLEM: Not knowing who's going

SOLUTION: Letting attendees know beforehand who's going to a conference.

HOW THIS'LL HELP So, you can, you know, PLAN who you want to meet! The conference should be facilitating the networking and the communication. Nail that, and we'll forgive the rubber chicken lunch and dinner.

PROBLEM: Concurrent sessions prevent attendees from getting the full value out of the conference.

SOLUTION: Find a way to let attendees get the rest of the sessions, by private webcast, something. Anything. Incentivize attendees to volunteer to record the sessions so you don't have to pay A/V people huge hourly rates. Give those volunteers discounts on attendance, or a free lunch or gift certificate.

HOW THIS'LL HELP: Conference attendees will feel like they really got their money's worth. There are ways to make this work, make it cheap. Gone are the days where the conference organizer would say, oh, it costs too much to record the sessions and make them available on cassette or videotape. It doesn't cost squat these days. If someone pays $1000 to attend a conference, let them get the full conference, even if for a very limited period, but let 'em get it.

PROBLEM: Speakers lose out on making connections with audience because the line formed after a panel is over is too long, and many attendees don't bother waiting around.

SOLUTION: Lots of technology solutions here. It would start with before the conference even begins. Let attendees build a "wish list" of all the speakers they want to speak with. And all the OTHER attendees they want to speak with. Then everyone, speaker and attendee alike, can sign in to see who wants to talk with them. If for some reason an attendee doesn't want others to know they're attending, fine, charge those attendees double.

HOW THIS'LL HELP: Think of how much more business could get done, for starters. Again, a conference organizer should be a networking facilitator and a communications channel opener. Open, accessible, efficient, easy, natural. This is the way communications should be at a conference. Not closed, intermittent, full of hassles, hard, and awkward.

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