Some Random Bits

Droid X
My Android based Droid X phone continues to be the swiss army knife of electronic gadgets.  I recently found that it makes a pretty serviceable book light.  Given the battery drain this particular use is best saved for situations where the phone can be plugged in.  My wife gets car sick and prefers to drive, so I often find myself in the passenger seat with little to do, particularly now that navigations systems are pretty much ubiquitous.  It is getting dark early these days so having an always available book light is a good thing.  Which leads me to my next topic.

Kindle
I'll be getting my very own third generation 3G enabled Kindle soon.  It'll be accompanied by the nice leather case that Amazon sells with the integrated book light, so my Droid X likely won't be spending very much time in the future doing this duty.  The Kindle isn't cheap, but for E books it is a much better value than an IPad.  The IPad is of course a more flexible device.  I do have an urge to do a TCO (Total Cost Of Ownership) on both devices though and post it in the future.

I'll no doubt be talking more about the Kindle in the fut

China & High Performance Computing
This has been discussed a fair amount in the HPC community.  China now has the worlds fastest super computer.  This is a distinction that had been held by the US since 2003.  If China had simply used commodity parts this story wouldn't be that interesting. What is notable however is that they are using a "home brewed" interconnect.  The interconnect is really the heart of an HPC system.  Bandwidth is important, but for most applications latency is even more of an issue as no work is getting done while the parts of a massively parallel application are communicating.  This interconnect is twice as fast as quad data rate Infiniband which is the current state of the art in HPC applications.  I haven't been able to find a reference that quantifies that any more precisely.  Twice the bandwidth is nice, but if the latency is similar the speedup isn't going to be anywhere near as significant for many applications.

Image via Wikipedia

Disneyland/Disney Vacation Club

My wife and I had the good fortune to spend a few days at Disneyland recently.  Dis ney is an interesting case.  They are both a large corporate entity and a world wide institution.  The company fell on hard times for a number of years which eventually led to long time CEO Eisner stepping down.  The main impetus for this change in power came from an effort spear headed by Walt Disney's nephew Roy E. Disney.  In early 2004  Roy E Disney was able to get enough proxy votes to essentially deliver a no confidence vote in the next round of board elections.  It's hard to believe that this success didn't play a part in Eisner announcing his retirement.  Eventually a compromise was reached and things have been going well for Disney ever since.

One thing I recall from late in Eisner's stewardship of the Disney corporation was the obviously deferred maintenance at Dinsyland.  That didn't sit well with me and I don't think I was alone.  Some of my best childhood memories are tied to Disnyland and seeing it in anything less than tip top condition was jarring.  I was annoyed. I wasn't alone.  The number of people and insitutions that Roy E. Disney was able to sign up for his proxy fight showed that a lot of people were unhappy with the way the company was being run.  Branding provides great benefits but it also incurs responsibilities.  Neglecting those responsibilities can be very risky both to the people in charge and the long term health of the business.

As a brand Disney has an amazing range of appeal.  At the parks you'll see people from a wide range of demographic groups.  A visit isn't cheap, but it is possible for most people to make the trip and ejoy the parks.

There are things though that a compnay like this probably shouldn't do.  Imagine Disney building tall condos near the park that included free admission to the parks and other perks and selling them for top dollar.  It would potentially mean a big influx of cash in the short term but how would most people coming to the parks feel about seeing those buildings?   What kind of message would this send?  They would have more flexibility in Florida as it is a much larger area.  Disney actually does something along these lines with their vacation club.  The Disney Vacation Club (DVC) is a points based time share.  The original DVC resort and several subsequent ones were opened at Walt Disney World but today DVC has many different themed resorts that span an ever increasing geographical area.  They added Disneyland a year or two back and will have a resort opening in Hawaii soon.

I'm always fascinated by brands that somehow manage to appeal across a broad spectrum of consumers.  To me they prove that branding is not science with hard and fast rules, but rather a series of approaches that when exectued properly can nudge public perception in a particular direction.   Disneyland was Walt Disney's vision.  Having read a fair bit about his life, it seems clear that he wasn't much of a business man.  That was the provence of his older brother Roy, who was Roy E. Disney's father.  In addition to being the visionary, Walt Disney was essentially the Disney brand manager, though I doubt he'd have used those words to describe his role.  He was very good at instilling in people the idea that the Disney company was there to provide quality family entertainment and Disneyland was meant to be the physical embodiement of that concept.  This essentially made Disneyland a part of a lot of people's families.  Given that, it isn't surprising that Eisner ran into serious opposition when people felt that the company was being poorly run.

Walt Disney has been gone for nearly forty four years now, but clearly his legacy lives on.

Image via Wikipedia

Google By The Borders

In my last post I speculated a bit about what Google might be doing with all that data they are gathering from Android phones.  Earlier this evening Rea and I were heading to Borders books to purchase the book that the movie Secretariat is based on.  Borders sends us coupons regularly in email and as we were getting close to the store I decided to search for the coupon in my GMail app so I'd have it handy.  Before I'd typed a single character the helpful search feature had put up three options.  I don't recall the other two, but one of them was Borders.  I touched that option and within seconds I had located the latest coupon in my saved mail.

On the one hand I loved the convenience and speed of the experience.  On the other, it was a little spooky.  Was it just a coincidence or did Google make a quick guess where we were going based on where we were and our previous destinations in that area?

Artificial Intelligence has been around as a field since at least the 1960's.  I have a set of books I bought used in a box somewhere.  They are from the early 70's and outline the state of the art and history of the field up until that time. It's interesting to contemplate the hubris of those early pioneers.  They thought that translating between human languages would be trivial.  Even today relatively simple translations between English & Spanish are imperfect and as the two languages being translated diverge errors tend to become more common and occasionally very amusing.  What Google has now isn't really AI but there are times when it sure seems that way.  Essentially Google's tools are very good at tracking and understanding context and making associations.  This isn't intelligence per say but it can sure look that way at times.

My mother was born before the first electronic computer was built.  I've sometimes wondered what it is like to have lived through that much change.  If I live another couple of decades I strongly suspect I'll get to see more change than she has over the course of her life.  I find that thought both a little scary and very exciting.

Image via Wikipedia

Google/NVidia/Word of Mouth

(Google)

One of the things I really like about my Droid X phone is the navigation app. It's essentially eliminated the need for me to worry about having a navigation system in any car I buy or rent. I'm highly prone to making wrong turns, so having an electronic genie available at all times that can instruct me in minute detail on what to do is excellent. On thing that occurred to me earlier this week as I was driving home from a meeting about thirty miles from my home is that Google is getting all sorts of interesting information by providing that App. They can get a pretty good real time perspective on how slowly traffic is moving on a particular freeway. Over time they can get an idea of traffic flow on surface streets and where stop signs and traffic lights are. As Android based phones become more common they are going to have more and more data points to look at. I wonder what all those clever people at Google are planning on doing with this information? One thing they could do is reroute in real time based on traffic flows. That information is already available for most freeways and some major roads, at least hear in the SF Bay area, but coverage seems to be a lot less common for surface streets. You wouldn't even need to be in the navigation application. All it would take is the GPS being enabled. Even without the GPS they can make a pretty good guess based on cell tower triangulation and the maps of wireless hot spots that they've built.

Google started out with a fairly simple idea, to help organize the worlds information. Even a fairly simple idea can lead in an amazing number of directions.

(NVidia)
The big news on the the NVidia front recently has been their decision to directly sell finished boards.  Historically NVidia has sold GPU's to partners who have then created boards that were in turn sold to customers.  It's nearly always the case that being closer to the final sale means higher margins, but undermining your partners in this way can be  a very bad thing as they tend to take such changes in the way the world works very negatively.  Several years ago NVidia acquired the assets of a competitor called 3Dfx for song after 3Dfx essentially did the same thing, thus alienating their partners and accelerating their demise.

So, is this an act of desperation or a change in business strategy with potential risks and rewards?  I've seen both theories advocated by various technology pundits.  I'm honestly not sure which side is right.  Having signed up Best Buy to sell their cards certainly wasn't a bad move.


(Word of Mouth)
Recently my wife and I have been shopping for an alarm company.   Some friends of ours have a more immediate need and have thus been a bit more aggressive in pursuing a solution.  We've been sharing information during the search and one thing that struck me is how common this is and how positive or negative information about a particular company is magnified.  Our friend got a big time hard sell and bad attitude from one of the major national players in this space.  Instantly I removed that company from our list of prospects.  Another company that I heard about while having lunch with some coworkers faired much better when our friend contacted them by being professional and customer focused.  Rather than trying to sell our friend as much equipment as they could they made suggestions on how to get the best possible coverage without spending too much up front.  It's probably not a surprise that this second company is currently the odds on favorite to get both our friends business and ours.

Word of mouth is hard to measure, but it is likely a significant factor, particularly in situations where a company is trying to acquire new customers.  It's kind of amazing to me how many businesses drop the ball in this area.  Bad interactions multiply.  Customer facing employees are extremely important to the long term health of any enterprise.  This concept is often ignored by companies that are looking for a short term improvement in their bottom line by outsourcing.  I suspect that most of us have had sub par experiences as a result of such efforts.

Really though, outsourcing isn't the problem here.  The problem is the fact that some companies don't seem to value the contribution that customer facing portions of their business provide to their bottom line.  Bad customer experiences can come just as easily from employees who are some combination of badly trained, badly treated or badly paid.

In general it seems to me that companies don't always have a very good idea of where value is created.

Image via Wikipedia

Droid X + Android 2.2 + Kindle

The Droid X update to Android 2.2 (Froyo) finally came out just before the last minute of summer had expired on the west coast of the US so technically Verizon met their promise of a late summer release, albeit barely. I waited a week or so to do the install so I don't have a lot of mileage on this release. So far however it certainly seems like an improvement overall. My phone is more responsive and the built in on-screen keyboard is a big improvement over the previous one as I don't commit anywhere near as many typos.  It just looks nicer as well.  The built-in market place app is also improved with the ability to do batched updates of installed applications.  One nice feature related to this is the fact that it won't batch update applications that have had changes in their access permissions since the previous install/update.  This means you have to go in and look at the changes and be sure you're happy with them.  The number of things some applications want access to has caused me to abort installs before so this is a nice and useful thing.

Overall I'm still very happy with this phone, though I have had one hard lock since the update which is something that I don't recall having happen with the 2.1 release.

One of my favorite activities on the X is using the Kindle app.  There has been a saying going around for a couple of years now in relation to photography that goes "The best camera is the one you have with you" and that is certainly true of books as well.  The screen of the Droid X is big enough that I don't have to page constantly and the text is very readable.  Much like a real book, after awhile I don't even notice that I'm "turning the pages".

My wife bought one of the current generation Kindle 3G's right when it came out and I really like it.  For $189 with free 3G wireless it is hard to complain about the value.  The screen is great, and being able to do casual web surfing via the built in web browser is a nice bonus.  There are also some games available which makes it an even better value.   The battery life is good, but not as good as the ads imply.  I'm not saying they lie, but as is generally the case the maximum numbers are probably based on a very unrealistic usage scenario.

I love the IPad, but given the fact that you have to subscribe to a monthly service if you want to use the 3G model I'm just not seeing the value, at least for me.  The 3G model is three times plus the price of the Kindle up front.  It's a much more capable product, but I'm not willing to pay that kind of money.   The IPod Touch on the other hand is on my radar.  The 8G version of the latest touch is $229.  I don't plan on having any music on it, so 8G is more than enough for any applications I'm likely to install.  It isn't quite the same, but I think of it as a "IPad Mini", and that will be just fine for me.

If Apple comes out with an IPad 3G with 16G of storage and no monthly 3G I'll be very interested.  Particularly if it's the next generation of the product.  With all the Android based pads coming out it will be interesting to see what Apple does.  I think they'll come down a bit in terms of pricing, but they don't generally have a lot of interest in competing on price.  They are a premium brand and they can and do charge based on that.  Even so, I really feel that the IPad prices as of today are not sustainable in the longer term.  They've been doing great with the early adopters but I don't see that lasting.

Image via Wikipedia

NVidia (Again)

So, not surprisingly it turns out that NVidia does understand that they have some problems in regards to the probable extinction of the discreet GPU in the X86 space. To recap, both of their main competitors, Intel & AMD are general purpose processor manufacturers first and GPU vendors second. The trend in CPU's has always been to integrate formally external components such as floating point processors onto the CPU. For cost and performance reasons this just makes sense; and if that happens, odds are good that NVidia will have a very hard time continuing to provide competitive product since there will be much less motivation for either AMD or Intel to do the kind of engineering needed to support discreet GPU's.

So, what are NVidia's options here? The most obvious one is to create or acquire their own 64 bit X85 compatible processor. The first of those two options is fraught with danger. Intel is a company that takes intellectual property rights very seriously. You don't want to mess with their lawyers unless you have deep pockets and an airtight case. Such litigation can take years to settle. The second option is much safer, but there aren't really a lot of options. Probably the best is acquiring Via. With a market cap of just over $28 billion as I write this they certainly are affordable. One aspect of the FTC/Intel settlement is a modification of intellectual-property agreements with AMD, Nvidia Corp. and Via Technologies Inc. so that those chipmakers can more easily do mergers and joint ventures with other companies without the threat of a lawsuit from Intel. In my opinion the prospects of both Via & NVidia would be improved by a merger. Consumers would benefit as well by having three credible competitors in this space. NVidia however appears to have other ideas.

Jen-Hsun Huang, NVidia's CEO was recently quoted as saying "Our CPU strategy is ARM," This statement doesn't preclude NVidia acquiring Via but it is worth examining in more detail. Unlike the Intel X86 architecture ARM is readily licensed and costs to do so are modest. ARM processor variants are used in most high end "smart" phones as well as devices such as Apples IPad. The first question that comes to mind when evaluating this strategy is how important is the X86 instruction set likely to be in the future? If you run Windows or recent variants of MacOS, the answer to that question is pretty obvious. Increasingly though the computing devices we interact with do not in fact run either and thus do not require an X86 compatible processor. Given this NVidia's strategy makes some sense. My Droid X is my camera, video recorder, email reader, navigation system, games machine and casual web browsing tool of choice. If it had a keyboard I'd use it even more.

The problem with that strategy is that there tends to be a lot of downward pressure on cost. This isn't a segment where you're going to find high margins for any sustained period of time. We're getting into an area here where I don't actually have a lot of experience or knowledge, but what the heck. NVidia has essentially exited the chipset business. First the acquisition of their main competitor ATI by NVidia essentially closed off that space. Then Intel refused to license newer technologies to NVidia which essentially killed that part of the business. Chipsets likely aren't high margin for the most part because their is a lot of pressure on cost for pretty much every component in a computer. So it seems reasonable to think of NVidia's desire to do more in the ARM space is at least in part intended to be a replacement for their chipset business.

But what about the high margin discreet GPU part of their business? How are they planning on replacing or salvaging that situation? My guess is that they are putting all their eggs in CUDA & high performance computing. In this model the GPU essentially becomes a really fast highly parallel vector processor. If they put enough memory on their GPU cards they can minimize the downsides of not having a low latency/high bandwidth connect to the main memory and CPU. Heck, they could even create their own super computers using ARM processors to do the basic computing tasks, the PCIe bus and a bunch of slots populated with GPU's. The amount of processing power they could get into a single rack with this kind of model would be REALLY impressive. And since most of the processing takes place on the GPU's the processor really doesn't matter much. Linux already runs on ARM so the effort there wouldn't be that daunting.

One of the cool things about the technology field is that change happens really quickly. If you're a business geek this means you don't have to wait around a decade to see how a particular strategy plays out. Generally three years is plenty. I suspect we'll have a good idea as to the long term viability of NVidia in twelve to eighteen months.

Image at top is from Wikipedia.

Droid X One Month Report

Family obligations and work have kept me very busy the past couple of weeks. Throw in some unseasonably cool and damp weather that has allowed me to spend time out in the garage working on my hobby guitar building projects and you get a two plus week gap in posts.

I've had my Droid X for a bit more than a month now.  The Honeymoon is over.  I still love the phone but it isn't without some faults.  These include

• The voice recognition is spotty at best.  When I use it for navigation I often comedic results.  An example, Amil Villas is one of my favorite breakfast places.  The android voice recognition software translates this as "Able Phyllis Restaurant"
• The Nav system is buggy and prone to crashing.  Even when I do get it to accept my voice input it will sometimes go off into never never land and never return when searching for directions.  I've also had it crash on a couple of occasions and exit.  This isn't a good thing when you are driving some place you've never been before.  Particularly when you are depending on the speech prompts for directions
• It crashes and reboots, seemingly at random every few days.  On the plus side this has never happened while I was actually doing something.
• It occasionally becomes sluggish and unresponsive.

I'm hoping the 2.2 Android update that is due in a few weeks fixes these issues.  In the meantime I'm still much happier with this phone than I was with my Blackberry Tour.