Watching this report from the BBC I didn’t see anything that would drive me out to buy a connected TV.

Now, I have a media centre PC, I’ve had one for years, so you could argue I already have a connected TV, I have access to the internet and online content.  I rarely use it for that though.  Why?  Well, because when I’m watching a program, I’m watching a program.  I don’t want to hide it while I look something up, I’d do that on a separate device (a tablet or laptop).  Which is what Scoble says in the report.  The negative point is it means looking away from a programme.

A good show holds my attention, I’ll only look something up afterwards, or if there’s a particularly contentious discussion with the family, we may pause TV to do it.  Anyone who thinks watching TV is passive and the programmes wash over you is wrong.  Generally, the narrative flow wins.  That’s another reason all these things hooking in to TV don’t really work.  The best services may add to the your TV’s functions (e.g. CCTV for the front door, so you can check who’s at the door with a quick switch), not change the way we currently watch TV.

Social is something the TV manufacturers seem to think will be big, for example, getting recommendations from your friends.  What they fail to remember is the TV-owning generation don’t really do social, not like the younger generations, and they don’t watch TV on a TV, they watch it on a computer.  Besides, most recommendations come via word of mouth, so making programmes available anywhere, anytime is far more important, so when I get that recommendation a month after it was broadcast, I can still find it (without needing to go pirate).

I wonder if we’ll start to see the likes of Sky, who’ve previously used satellite, or other companies who use cable, offering their services to subscribers over the net instead, it would massively open their marketplace, especially if they sell packages on their own (I’d sign up for Sky Sports for football, but I’m not bothered about anything else, so I don’t have a subscription, I think they’d find a lot more like me, so what they’d lose in higher subs, they’d make up in numbers).

Side note, I agree with Cringely, no one is going to subscribe to multiple services, it’s part of what’s stopping me signing up with someone like Lovefilm or Netflix.  Hollywood, if you want to stop piracy, do deals with all these companies for all your content, I want to sign up to one service and get access to anything and everything, otherwise I won’t sign up and they’ll never kick off.  Make your content available anywhere, at a reasonable price, and there’s no reason to pirate, just ask Fred Wilson.

Back to business, some of the other functions (webcams for Skype, YouTube, etc) are better (or at least as well) serviced by allowing people to link their laptop/tablet/phone to the TV instead.  So boxes to allow wireless link-ups are a far better option (and probably why Apple has so far stuck with the Apple TV, rather than an actual TV).  They offer far more flexibility, can be upgraded more often and are much cheaper.

That’s before we consider how often people replace their TVs, the average is seven or eight years, how fast does tech change in that time?  (People have upgraded quicker lately, but I’d equate the move to HD with the move to DVD, Blu-ray adoption has not been nearly so quick and the same with 3D and Web TV.)  If services are built into your TV you’ll find you don’t have a cool new feature or service, or it’ll stop being supported.  Will people really go out and buy a new one just for it?  No, which is why separate boxes are a better idea.

I tend to agree with the comments from the editor of Engaget in the BBC report, Web TV won’t be this year, or next.  With so many TVs only recently upgraded to HD, I think it’ll be more like five years before we see any significant adoption, if ever.

The Pi is a good idea. It won’t revolutionise computer science in schools on its own, or overnight, but at least it will provide a cheap computer for those who want to tinker, and we used to be a nation of tinkerers, we’re just moving from sheds to the bedroom. Interestingly, it seems to be compared to the BBC Micro, which spawned a lot of early computer adoption in the UK. What everyone fails to remember is that the Micro wasn’t cheap.

The [BBC Micro] Model A and the Model B were initially priced at £235 and £335 respectively, but rising almost immediately to £299 and £399 due to increased costs.

Those prices equate to £900 or more in 2012 money, any child with that budget could buy a computer these days. Its success was probably the combination of the TV show, adoption in schools and the fact that it was simple to use yet flexible and powerful.  I supposed you could argue it was cheap by the standards of the day, when most computers ran to many thousands.

What I’m more interested in is how the Pi seems to be anticipated by those of us way too old to be considered their target market and why something like this hasn’t been released before. The closest I’ve seen so far have been the so-called plug PCs (because they’re built into a plug) which are generally less capable than the Pi (no display connector for a start). They also cost closer to £100.

What the Pi offers is something I’ve mooted for a while, the chance of ubiquitous computing power. How a charity has managed to pull together this sort of design at this price (they did get a special deal it seems), when the electronics giants haven’t, makes you wonder. I’m sure many of those same companies are watching eagerly.

I wonder if, and hope, the Pi creates a great many things, with a device so capable at so low a cost, it could be incorporated into a vast number of devices to make them more than just the limited things we have, from heater controls, to alarm clocks, to home automation. The low power on the devices (it can run from 4 AA batteries and the beta models draw 2-4 watts) means always on computing becomes very affordable.  You only have to look at all the homebrew projects for devices like the NSLU2, Linksys routers and the various NAS devices around to see the potential.

To that end, while I still have some hope, Microsoft’s adoption of the ARM platform could be promising, but they seem to be crippling it (get all apps working on it, Microsoft, otherwise you’re wasting a massive advantage), if they release it as a separate product to install at all.  It’s not essential to the success of the Pi, but I think it might help it bridge into the mainstream.

It’ll be interesting to see if it has an impact on Linux and Python adoption for future projects.

While the Pi is designed to help kids get their hands on computers and have a play, I think the most interesting thing is how it will be used by the rest of the community and just what blossoms from it.  It’s not just a computer, it’s a platform.

I’ve already had several people try and sell me ‘desktop virtualisation’ in a business environment.  I’ve already mentioned how I think it will come to the home environment (and Cringley’s already doing it — side note, I wish he’d write about more stuff like that).

It means Microsoft would become completely platform independent and even if people start to opt for Apples, or Chromebooks or whatever.  It’s even a potential for service providers, who could start offering cheap thin clients to customers with access to Windows for a monthly fee (maybe an extra service for ISPs).  The customer never has to worry about upgrading, or hardware failing, or viruses (they could keep a full image as a back-up, which means near-instant restores).  This isn’t a new idea I grant you.

But with that in mind, I wonder if Microsoft might buy any company who can help deliver remote sessions over DSL and 3G, the likes of Critrix, which I’ve heard decribed as a bolt-on for RDP which improves network efficiency so it can run over slow connections.

We I logged in to Google Reader to check out my feeds yesterday I found over a 1,000 entries to trawl through, looking for anything interesting. Assuming an average of 5 seconds per headline (some I can dismiss immediately, some I need to read a bit of the article to decide) that means it would take me nearly an hour and a half just to decide which articles I want to read more of, nevermind reading the articles themselves!

As it stands it’s taken me the better part of a day each week to read them. And I only subscribe to a relative few (although one is a meta-blog) on a relatively narrow range of topics. What it shows is the huge amount of data we are now bombarded with each day.

Ironically, some of the posts I read last week were about the need for curators and I have to agree. I’ve long argued that publishing houses will move to become beacons in the torrent of content, that while anyone may be able to publish, they will provide a seal of approval.

I could of course try and filter my feeds, to limit the content to only what interests me, but that is very difficult, I’m not yet sure it can be done. If I limit things by keywords, or categories, I risk missing things that fall outside of them which I may also find interesting. I’m not sure such a function currently exists in any service, and may never do, it may only ever be something that can be done by a person. Much as Jason Kottke does.

So maybe that’s the tip for the next wave of successful authors, perhaps that’s where papers or correspondents will go.  Like film critics, we’ll find someone who shares our tastes and follow them, subsidising them to fish the interesting things from the data stream.  Maybe that’s why I’ve started posting to my Tumblr stream again.

Tuesday (Hair Dressers)

Mentioned: The Hair Port; Bob On; Chop Suey; Head Office; Hair to the Throne; Uppercuts

Top Five:

1. Blood, Sweat and Shears
2. Curl Up and Dye
3. Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
4. Hair Force One
5. Barber Black Sheep

She ended up choosing Crops and Robbers apparently.

Wednesday (Kebab Shops)

Mentioned: Rehab Kebab; Absolutely Kebabulous; Grillers in the Mist; Sheesh; Prima Doners; Kebabilon

Top Five:

1. Pitta Sweet Symphony
2. The Good, Kebab and the Ugly
3. Abrakebabra
4. Pitta and Twisted
5. Jason’s Doner Van

Thursday (Tanning Salons)

Mentioned: Right Said Sunbed, Tanfastic; Brown and Out; Strictly Come Tanning; The We Tan Clan; Tan Francisco

Top Five:

1. Brown Dyed Girl
2. Must Tan Sallys
3. Jean Claude Van Tan
4. Tanumission
5. Fakey Bakey Tart

Friday (Fish and Chip Shops)

Mentioned: Chip Chip Hooray; Cod Save the Bream; The Chipsy King; Plaice Station; Addicted to Plaice

Top Five:

1. Fish Bash Bosh
2. Pies and Predufish
3. Battersy Cods Home
4. Salty Towers
5. The Star Chip Enterprise

One of the biggest stories of 2011 was the news of hackers breaking into Sony’s PlayStation Network and stealing millions of user’s credit/debit card details. And they were just one of several companies hit, bit corporations who have the resources to protect their data properly. As I’ve said before though, hackers will get in eventually, no matter how good you are. Now Sony (and others) are adding clauses to their contracts so you can’t sue them if they have a breach.

If we start to rely on hosted services, then they’re likely to want to store our details so we can continue to pay for them and remove the barriers to buying new services. These big pools of card details provide a tantalising target for hackers interested in financial gain, so we need to start thinking of other ways to protect our details.

One way to do this might be stop companies storing details and disconnect the payment process so instead of using your card to buy the service, you could buy a coupon code which you would then enter to buy something. You still end up having to dig out a card to buy new services though and risk your service getting cut-off because you forgot to renew.

So how about single-use credit/debit cards? By that I mean simple codes, generated by your bank, which are limited to a specific timeframe, linked to a website or company and can’t be used outside of these parameters? So when you wanted to sign up to the PlayStation Network you would login to your bank, enter some details to limit it by that company name, say, then generate a card number which could not be used anywhere else. Even if someone broke in and stole your details, they’re useless, or at least limited. Once you know your details have been compromised, you simply login to your bank and cancel the virtual card.

You could potentially even assign a certain amount of money to the card so no more could be spent, as you can do in certain countries already (pre-paid cards, electronic money essentially), maybe even set them to require your permission before a transaction could be processed (as it’s not your main card it’ll be feasible to approve each transaction).

Similar services already exist, though through a limited number of providers and with limited options. For example, PayPal did offer the service, in the US only, but have since disabled it. In the UK, none of the banks appear to offer such a service. It’s clear the current system of cards has problems and needs to be updated, we need greater flexibility and more control.

Recently I was met with a question though, I had a piece of packaging with a recycle logo and the letters PPE.  I wasn’t sure if my council took this so decided to look it up.  It turns out PPE stands for Polyphenylene Ether, which didn’t mean much to me either.  Not that it really made any difference, as my council, Test Valley, don’t really go into much detail as to what can be recycled.  Under plastics in their A to Z Recycling Guide, for example, there is no information about the different types of plastic.  The breakdown on the What You Can and Cannot Recycle with Test Valley page is equally high level.  It does state that mixed plastics (stating some examples, like yoghurt pots and meat trays) are not recyclable and on the recycling guide it also says the same thing, apparently because the recycling technologies and markets do not exist in the UK.

Reading a BBC article from 2003 I found this quote though:

“All this food packaging of yours is recoverable but there’s no effective subsidised collection system in the UK to make it worth the effort.

“If there was, we could turn it into car parts, video cassettes, shampoo bottles – we have 1,100 product applications. Anything that can be made from virgin plastic can be made from recycled plastic. The quality is the same.”

Even the RecycleNow website it states that yoghurt pots can be recycled and that you should check with your local authority as there are limited facilities, which should improve “over the next year or so.”  But this article by The Daily Green on plastics symbols, suggests PET/PETE (a triangle with a 1 in it) is also used for ‘ovenable food trays’ which means they’re just as recyclable as plastic bottles.  So are some recyclable?  How do you tell?  The tray my ham comes in states on the back that neither the film plastic (the clear sheet on the front I assume) or the label paper are currently recycled, but says nothing about the tray itself.

So how do you know if something is recyclable?  Well with clear, concise information on the packet, surely.  I mean, I don’t know one type of plastic from another by looking at it and I don’t have a mass spectrometer to analyse them.  Well have a look at the multitude of symbols available.  Is it any wonder we struggle?  The packaging I mentioned at the start has the ‘green dot’ logo, which is European it seems, and “signifies that the producer has made a contribution towards the recycling of packaging.”  What the hell does that mean?  Can we not just have a logo that states if something is recyclable, that’s it, in the recycle bin it goes?  The problem is made worse by different councils working in different ways.

Now, my council don’t accept glass, or Tetra Paks  (cartons with the twist cap) or carrier bags, amongst many other things.  So I walk those down to my local recycling centre when I have a few.  I can’t do that with ‘mixed plastics’ though, even if I wanted to, they don’t offer the facility.  What’s equally galling is that where I live the boundary between my council and their neighbour is ill-defined.  There are streets on the estate where I live that fall into our neighbour’s jurisdiction, in fact a half-dozen houses at the end of one of the streets do, while the rest fall under Test Valley (whoever works out these lines are idiots).  And they have a completely different recycling programme because, in addition to green bins, they also have collections for glass, batteries and food waste all in separate bins.

Surely we should have a national standard, where all councils work in exactly the same way and collect exactly the same thing?  Then you get the benefit of scale, of standardised processes, of being able to learn lessons from one another.  Currently it’s a complete mix.

So why is it important?  Well, aside from the environmental benefits and the fact that we’re running out of landfill space, the government have targets to meet, set by the EU.  We’re supposed to recycle 50% of our household waste by 2020.  According to Defra, we currently recycle around 40%.  Off course, those figures come from councils, who take them from the recycling companies and no one checks.  As a recent Panorama programme explains, many of them are just shipping the stuff overseas and dumping it in third-world countries.

Recycling is a complete mess.  It needs, pardon the pun, cleaning up.  Make all councils work the same way, get some standard labels and recycle more of the things we use (or force manufacturers and suppliers to use only materials that can be recycled).  Legislate what packaging can be used by companies to reduce it wherever possible as well, to stop it even entering the chain.  It sounds simple, it isn’t, but neither is it rocket science.

I think we’re all well aware the nation is in a hole because we’ve been spending more than we’ve been earning for some time.  As such we’re all equally aware of the austerity measures and cuts we’re having to impose and I’m behind them.  We do need to reign in spending and get our house in order.  Cuts are obviously one way to do this and something that must be done, but one question the programme raised was about how the government spends our money, and do they do it well?

I’ve long held the belief that there is massive scope for efficiency improvements in government spending and that we don’t get anywhere near good value as taxpayers.  We’ve all seen the headlines about projects that were late or overran, or were not fit for purpose.  There was one on the programme I had never heard of.

FiReControl was designed to save money, but it’s ended up doing anything but that.  The idea was simple, condense the existing 46 emergency (999) control centres into nine regional centres, providing cost savings by sharing resources as well as improved service using new technology.  The centres have been built, but will never go live, due to cost overruns and delays the project was scrapped in December 2010.  So far it’s cost the taxpayer £469 million and it won’t stop there.  It was originally due to take four years and £72 million to complete (in 2004).  They’re now going to spend another £84 million to see if they can salvage any of it for use with the existing 46 control centres.

In the programme it also mentions that the First Control Centre for the north east of England sits empty, at a cost of £97,000 per month, on a contract which runs for another 24 years (not alone, apparently the control centre in Taunton “stands empty at a cost of £5,000 per day,” it was built in 2007).  According to an article in Metro:

Eight of the purpose-built centres remain empty – at a cost to the taxpayer of £4m a month in maintenance – and it is likely that only five of them will be used again by the fire service.

And the worst of this is no one lost their job, no one was sacked or demoted due to incompetence, the contractors were not added some a watch list and still work on other government projects.  When I worked for the government we had a ‘no blame’ culture, it looks like it still exists.

There is no easy solution to things like this.  Vast projects like this are difficult for anyone to manage and are largely a step into the unknown as no one has ever done them.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try though and I’ve said before that we need to start with procurement.  I’ve also mentioned how government cutting can actually cost us money.

I know we need to make cuts, but there are huge cost savings to be made in how we buy goods, manage projects and deliver services that should be looked at and the current climate gives us the excuse (should one be needed) to demand more efficiency.

There’s an area that is probably of much bigger concern though, one that they could fix, as of today, if they wished: they don’t make good products.  I say this as someone who doesn’t buy Sony products, I made a decision years back after a lot of bad experiences (not that I’m saying I never will again) and I will actively avoid buying something with Sony on it if I can.

Sony used to be the gold standard for many products, but that was years ago.  They used to be visionary market leaders as well, but it’s been a long time since they’ve come up with a great product and nothing I can think of comes close to the Walkman.  Their history with formats has been hit and miss, though I bet most people don’t know how many they’ve helped create, having launched 3.5″ floppy disks and co-launched CDs, but for each success there has been a Betamax, a MiniDisc (not bad) or a Memory Stick.

That’s part of their problem, they don’t understand how people use technology (ironically, with my last post being about how Steve Jobs did), or they think locking them into their format will make them more money, which is wrong.  Their digital media players, the latest iteration of their legendary Walkman brand, for example, didn’t support MP3, instead preferring Sony’s own proprietary ATRAC format, so you had to convert all your music into their format, using their clunky software, which nothing else played.  The iPods have supported MP3 from day one.  It may not be the best format, but it has always been the most popular.  It was this blind faith in their format that killed their music store.

From my own personal experience, I had a MiniDisc car stereo.  I liked MiniDisc, you could play through the whole disc or skip through or to certain tracks as you can on any CD or digital player today.  All the tracks except the last track that is, because, unlike every other device ever sold, when you hit skip on the last track, instead of returning to the start of the disc, it did nothing.  Talk about a usability design flaw.

I also had a DVD player of theirs.  The first problem was the remote control had buttons, ones for major operations, that were pin-head small and which you could barely see, never mind push with normal-sized fingers.  And when playing music CDs on the device, if you decided to switch on repeat, it did go round again, but if you put the player on standby and then switched it back on again, it would forget about the repeat, so you’d have to switch the option on each time you wanted to listen to a CD more than once.  Again, simple, but a glaring problem.

Last was my video camera.  It was awesome.  I had a Handycam IP7E, it was tiny, it’s still small even by today’s standards.  The problem was it used MicroMV, a format invented by Sony that no-one else used (I’ve written about my woes before).  So the only software you could edit on was that on the CD supplied by Sony, which wasn’t very good.  It relied on QuickTime 5 and wouldn’t run with any newer version, so it was soon out of date.  A couple of third-party applications did support MicroMV, for one release, and the format soon died.  The problem wasn’t the physical size, which needed to be small to reduce the camera size, the problem was Sony recorded in an non-standard format, instead of just using the popular DV format everyone else used.

There’s a reason Apple sells so many of its products: they know how to make things consumers want and can use.  Sony used to be able to do that, but they’ve lost their way.  First up, they need to open up and make their devices follow industry standards, they need to support the prevailing wind and work with as many other systems as possible.  Stop locking people into proprietary formats and systems, it doesn’t work and it’s counter productive.

Next, design your products for people, not engineers.  Only include the functions people need and remove everything else.  Less is more.  I don’t want to have to try and find some option several layers into a navigation system with choices that don’t say what they are.  Make it do as much of the setup for me, spend some time on the software both on the device and especially on anything I have to use with it.  Work with other companies to include their services so they add value to your consumer instead of fighting them.  This could be said of any company.  Being insular is no longer an option, take a look at social networking to see how people want to be able to connect.

Sony are far from dead, but unless they get their act together they’re going to find a lot of other companies will be passing them by.

How he chose those designs seems to be simple (from what I’ve read): user experience.  He wanted to make products people wanted to use.  If there was something clunky, or if something had a rough edge, he’d hammer away at his staff until it was smooth, like the corners on an iPod.

Look at the typical MP3 player, certainly before the iPod, and it had loads of small, fiddly buttons with complex, multi-layered menus that you’d get hideously lost in.  The first iPod still had buttons, but laid out logically for control similar to how the, now famous, click-wheel would work on later models.  The menus were easy to read, the controls simple to operate.  Once they found the method they didn’t change much, another benefit over most manufacturers, who seem to change the way their hardware works completely with every release.

To load music onto the iPod you still had to go the old route of finding your CD, ripping it onto the computer and then copying it over to the device.  The sync functionality in the associated software was designed to get around some of the mess in that process (finding the tracks you’ve ripped and copying them over).  iTunes was the solution to the rest, instead of having to go out, buy the CD and rip it into the correct format, you just went onto iTunes, did a quick search, downloaded it and voila, it synced to your device.  Loading media was a rough edge and the iTunes store was a solution to it, not just another way to make money from the hardware.

The same is true of many of Apple’s other devices.  They took the button heavy, confusing, clunky designs that everyone else’s engineers came up with and they threw them out.  They designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind, everything from the packaging to the store experience is a search for simplicity.  And jobs wouldn’t stop until they found it.

Isaacson says Jobs decided on the iPad after a friend who worked at Microsoft said they were building a tablet but that it used a stylus.  The ill-fated Newton, started while Jobs was away from Apple and cancelled not long after his return, may have had an impact on his dislike of them, but is there anyone who liked using them, they were though to be a necessary evil.  Instead of just accepting it, Jobs got his engineers to solve the problem, he wanted to use his finger, they delivered the solution.  You can see Jobs’ derision of the stylus when he announced the iPhone.

I always like the often-quoted story of Jobs redesigning the DVD burning app for OS X:

“Then Steve comes in,” [Mike] Evangelist recalls. “He doesn’t look at any of our work. He picks up a marker and goes over to the whiteboard. He draws a rectangle. ‘Here’s the new application,’ he says. ‘It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says burn. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.’ “

There’s no doubt Jobs was a visionary, he saw things others didn’t, but what he was best at was delivering great products, great because they were products people could use, that people wanted to use, instead of clunky crap.  He didn’t limit himself to what was possible today, he drove his company to find the right solution, not just a solution.  One that was right for people using