Archive for April 2008
Canon: This is the camera I want
I own two digital cameras today. I own a Canon 5D digital SLR and a very small Powershot SD870 IS.
The SLR takes gorgeous photos with great depth of field control and amazing low light performance. Alas, when I carry my usual set of lenses (16-35 f2.8L, 24-70 f2.8L and 70-200 f2.8L and 85mm f1.8) and a flash in my lowpro backpack, its like bringing along another child on our family excursions. I take care of the camera and my wife takes care of the kids. I would estimate my bag weight at 10lbs.
The Powershot SD870IS is great outdoors, but you can’t really blur the background on a portrait with the camera (focal length too short), it is not that responsive and the low light performance is mediocre to bad. On the plus side, the camera is small enough to ski with and takes great video. It is light at 5.8oz!
The camera I want is a point and shoot camera that combines the best of both worlds. The camera would use the sensor of the Canon 40D (1.6 crop factor relative to standard 35mm, 10 megapixel) and have a built-in 22mm (35mm equivalent), f1.8 prime, coated Canon lens. That would provide a view that looked like a “standard” 35MM lens. The camera would also provide a digital cropped mode that created the equivalent of an 85MM lens (53MM lens in cropped form factor).
Let’s call this camera the Canon T4, named in honor to the Yashica T4 that offered something similar in the world of film. The Canon T4 would be the enthusiasts travel camera of choice. I am going to estimate the weight at 10oz, 3oz less than the Canon G9 disaster (we are losing the optical zoom).
This camera would likely be about the same size as the Canon G9, but a lot flatter. And it would have amazing image quality and awesome low light performance. You could shoot indoors, without flash, at IS0 1600. When used in cropped “portrait” mode at 85MM equivalent, it would produce images that are approximately 4 megapixels. But since these bits would be off a high quality prime lens and 40D sensor, you would be perfectly happy with them. (No optical zoom please. Just lowers image quality and makes for a darker lens). Background blur (bokeh) would come naturally to this camera because of its bright max aperture and longer focal length.
While we are dreaming, let’s imagine this camera has a few creative modes like Aperture priority, Shutter priority and decent shot to shot time. It would omit the optical viewfinder in favor of a bright LCD. The optical viewfinder would be annoying in digital crop mode anyway. Don’t scrimp on the auto-focus system.
Who would buy this camera? prosumers and amateurs who want the quality of a digital SLR but the weight and convenience of a point and shoot. This camera would take images that were indistinguishable from the Canon 40D at 35mm (equivalent). The camera would also sell into the photojournalism market. Might be a lot more convenient to carry around a war zone than a digital SLR (Remember when Rangerfinders and photojournalism where synonymous?)
It seems like this camera is technologically possible today. This is what the PowerShot G9 should have been. Instead the G9 is a heavier version of the Powershot SD line with no real benefit in image quality or high ISO noise and bad depth of field control.
Do you want this camera? Say so in the comments. Maybe Canon will notice.
Improvements to Phanfare Web Client (and more)
We released some new features today.
The most significant portion of this release is a new web client for managing your photos and videos. In addition to a complete re-write of the user interface to adjust to screen resolutions, show a lot more thumbnails and better enable image transforms, new functionality has been added to the client. New features include:
- Re-ordering of images using drag and drop
- Choosing slideshow music from your music library (still canât upload your own music but this will hopefully be coming soon. You can do this from the downloadable client)
- Add, delete and edit sections
- Zoom to see larger image
Other changes
- Added more navigation elements to the header ribbon that include easy access to key site areas like the friends and family list, adding friends and family, viewing messages, edit albums, etc.
- From the add friends and family page you can now preview the invitation to connect email
- From the friends and family page you can switch a connection from friend to family and vice versa by clicking on âedit connectionâ?.
- The inbox has been re-organized to break out messages and invitations into separate tabs.
- New privacy setting to not publish news items when a new album is created. This will keep all new albums from being included in the content notifications of your friends and family.
- New privacy setting to not allow your photos in the montage of your friends and family.
- New display settings to not show items in messages feed when friends and family add connections or when others join groups that you are a member of.
- There is a new setting for groups that allows anyone to join a group without being invited. This will allow large organizations (schools, religious organizations, etc.) to publish the group URL in a newsletter and have all members be able to join the group. Members will still need to register and group admins can still remove people from the group and control who can add content to the group. There is also a group setting to not show the group member list on the group home page.
Much of the web client user interface work was enabled by Yahoo’s YUI toolkit. Thanks Yahoo!
Google App Engine vs. Amazon Web Services
We use Amazon’s S3 storage service here at Phanfare and love it. I especially like that while we are leveraging Amazon’s cost position and development budget, we could probably swap out the service for a competitive service or our own service if we really had to.
Google’s new App Engine offering, which gives you a vertically integrated development environment to create a web application in Python, has pros and cons relative to the Amazon Web Services approach of giving you more industry standard pieces like Linux instances (EC2), key-value stores (SimpleDB) and web-service-based filesystems (S3). (If you are not familiar with the offerings, Gartner has a nice summary)
Amazon’s offering is a lower level offering, closer to the hardware. It will take you longer to get started with Amazon Web Services and require more work to build systems but the resulting systems will be more extensible (and my guess, higher performing). For example, if I need to convert video using an obscure codec, I can probably install the appropriate code on an EC2 linux instance, but there may not be a suitable Python module for Google’s App Engine.
You can build Google’s App Engine on top of Amazon’s EC2 and S3 offerings, but you would have a tough time building Amazon’s web services using Google App Engine. To make the point, the folks at AppDrop are running the open source App Engine SDK on an Amazon EC2 instance.
There is a place for both the Amazon and Google approaches. If you want to create a new web app that requires very little third party open source software, Google App Engine will get you running faster, especially if you are proficient in Python and have no pre-existing code. The Google App solution might just wind up being your early prototype, but will let you get to market faster. If you are extending an existing service, have a lot of code, or want to split between in-house and cloud-based infrastructure, as we do at Phanfare (we use only S3), then Amazon is the natural choice.
Personally, Amazon’s approach is more attractive as we look to build Phanfare. Amazon is creating virtual instances of industry-standard services that everyone is building. I know that if we create services that run on an Amazon standard Linux EC2 instance that we can move it off of Amazon fairly easily. I also like that Amazon has broken down the problem of building scalable systems into different services pieces that do one thing very well. Large monolithic systems can get overly complex and unreliable.
Google has developed an environment that nobody is using today. If Google decides that Google App Engine is not strategic for them and discontinues it, it could be catastrophic for me. Sure I can take the SDK and run it myself like they did at Appdrop, but that won’t guarantee any level of reliability. By contrast, I am pretty sure that Linux is not going away. If we had to find another host for our Linux-based system, it would be easy.
Selling Music in the World of Free
Although Apple is having good success selling music online, there has long been serious concern within the industry that with DRM disappearing the business of selling music is going the way of the dodo bird as online sales are not keeping up with the declining physical sales. Fred Wilson eagerly awaits the day when all music is free via advertiser-supported streams.
DRM is going away. That is clear enough. So where does that leave the music industry? I believe there is an opportunity to provide a service that people will pay for to buy songs. Rather than buying a song and simply getting a single copy, buying a song should make it available to you for perpetuity from any network-connected device you want at higher and higher resolution as time goes on.
Apple is in the best position to provide a service like this. Here is how it would work. You would buy a song on iTunes from Apple while logged in using your Apple ID. Apple would sync that song without DRM into iTunes. You can do what you want with it. But Apple would also make it so that you can login from any iPod and get to your full purchased library.
Essentially, the songs you “own” would be part of a hosted library that you could access from any device. When you enter a car, you could login to the car audio system and get access to your full library (it would be cached on the hard drive in your car stereo). When at a friend’s house, you could login at their computer (or stereo) to iTunes with your credentials and get access to your songs. Through smart synching and caching, it would appear that your music is available everywhere you want it.
This is a type of service I want to buy a song from. It sells the convenience of a hosted environment. Whether the songs are DRMed or not does not matter (they likely won’t be). Because even if I export a song and give it to a friend, he has only 10% of the experience unless he is also an “owner” of record with Apple.
What is required to fulfill this vision:
- The provider has to be strong enough to get the licensing deals that would allow this type of sale of music to consumers.
- The provider has to be able to get the service and synching incorporated in the iPod, the default music player for most people.
- The provider needs to able to get the service incorporated in other consumer electronic devices like car stereos and home audio systems, to allow true universal access.
- Consumers need to believe that the provider behind the sale is not going away.
Few companies satisfy all these criteria. Apple is one of them. Amazon gets pretty close.
By layering service on top of the music, piracy becomes a non-issue. You might be able to copy the music from a friend, but you can’t steal the service. Of course, there might be some sharing of login credentials, but this is much more easily addressed by monitoring simultaneous usage.
This type of music service would finally make owned music a hosted experience like most other consumer apps, while still providing commercial free music, which many people want. It simultaneously solves the music backup problem as well. I don’t need to backup my music because any iPod I own will automatically have my music, synched wirelessly over the network (we can all dream). And I won’t need a computer to enjoy an iPod, which is welcome because computers are a disaster (we need a good consumer appliance).
Because this service would guarantee that music would be provided at higher quality as time goes on, I might even buy the songs that I already own free and clear from old CDs.
How about the pricing? Could you provide a song for $0.99 and offer to restore it for the person indefinitely into the future? I think you probably could. After all, the music is not streamed, just synched, and you do have the attention of the consumer and can probably sell some advertising at appropriate points in the process (for example, when waiting for your device to synchronize or in the music store).
Would everyone buy songs this way? I think ad-supported music might be bigger, but there is a market out there for a premium version. Like buying a CD versus listening to the radio, this service would provide a better experience for the music you really care about.
Good Consumer Apps Don't Expose the Filesystem
Consumer apps are moving to the cloud. No news there, we all know it. One unifying characteristic of well designed cloud-based applications is that they don’t expose the file system to the user. Do you think about the file system on Gmail? What about when you are using Google Docs?
The computer filesystem is an engineering concept, designed by the geeks who created computers. It has nearly no useful purpose in mainstream computing.
Apps that expose the filesystem are uniformly focused on the wrong level of the problem if they are being pitched at consumers. The best example would be the consumer backup services out there like box.net and Mozy. These are fine services for small businesses. But as a consumer, forget about it. Use a hosted service in the cloud that solves the underlying problem.
Don’t backup your email, use Gmail. Don’t Backup your photos and videos. Use Phanfare to manage them. What if you want to create a spreadsheet? Use google docs. What about backing up your tax forms form TurboTax? Just use the web version! Any service that promises to sync your hard drive to the cloud is a waste of time. But wait you say. How do I backup all my personal files that I create with MS office? You have lots of files you create with MS Office? You are not mainstream. You probably look more like a small business, in which case, soak in the file system.
Consumer devices can be divided along similar lines. The Blackberry and iPhone are both great consumer devices and neither one shows you the file system. The Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation both have available web browsers, but no user-visible file system to corrupt. On the other hand, the standard Windows PC shows you the file system and PCs are notoriously difficult for consumers to keep running and manage. Macs are really only slightly better.
We will eventually see a great consumer appliance that allows you to access the internet, run a web browser and do everything you want to do while providing no access to the underlying file system. This embedded device will probably run some form of Unix under the covers but that will be transparent to the consumer. A good bet is that the first such device will be a multi-touch tablet computer from Apple.
The Golden Age of Hosted Services
When Mark Heinrich and I started our last company in 1999 we rented space and a network drop at Exodus data center in Jersey City. We bought servers, racked them, and installed a bunch of equipment at the office, including a phone switch and an email server.
At the time, most small businesses without engineers on staff would just go without infrastructure or hire someone to install a bit locally, probably not properly backed up.
In the last 10 years, a relatively short time, everything has changed. There are now excellent hosted services up and down the food chain of information processing. At Phanfare, we use Datapipe managed hosting to provide us with servers and bandwidth. I have physically been in the data center twice. We use Amazon’s S3 data service to reliably store data (I have never been to their datacenter). We have our email scrubbed of spam by Postini and we just subscribed to a hosted support offering from Parature. Our payment processing is outsourced with Ebay’s Payflow Pro product.
Even our accounting is hosted. We scan our invoices, shred everything, and email PDfs to our bookkeeper, whom I have physically met once. She in turn provides us access to our books via Windows terminal services.
Our faxes go to an outsourced fax service. Our phone service is voice over IP, provided by M5. They ran a T1 to our office with DSL backup and provide us with phone service that is so reliable that you can cut our T1 line and the phone call stays up. We bought the Cisco IP phones. We have a support organization in Saint Louis that is on the same phone system, completely transparently.
What is remarkable about all these services is that they are all excellent. We have had minor issues with Datapipe, and sometimes S3 does go down, but by and large, we are happy customers. The age of hosted services has arrived. If you are starting a business today, you can find a good hosted service for just about any software you might consider installing in house: email, blogging, intranet wiki, word processing, file storage, backup, to name just a few.
Some of the services we are using, like Datapipe, seem somewhat primitive compared to today’s hosted offerings. Rather than rent machines by the month that are physically dedicated to us, you can now buy a la carte infrastructure from Amazon or a fully hosted development stack from Google.
What this means is that the barrier to entry to build a business, especially a web-based business, is very low. That means competition is going to be fierce, and it also means that entrepreneurs don’t need VC money to start a web business. With a few thousand dollars and a smart dedicated engineer, you can build a prototype and see if it gains traction. Even monetization is available in hosted form from Google and a variety of other ad networks that will run ads on your site and send you money.
The age of hosted services will also empower and enable groups that have traditionally not had access to high quality IT services. For example, the average public school lives in the dark ages of information processing. But now, there are great opportunities to build a world class hosted solution that a school can create an “instance” on and run the whole school. It also means that we can export one of our greatest resources, information processing and software design, all over the world.
Consumers are the beneficiary as well. Gmail, Google docs, and Phanfare are all hosted services that can provide a consumer with a portable computing experience that is not tied to a particular computer or place. That is a great benefit to consumers because the personal computer, whether Mac or PC, is really not a consumer device. The PC is a hard-to-manage, hard-to-maintain engineering tool that will eventually let you down in some way or another. But with hosted services, you don’t care because you just move to the next computer and sign-in.
An Engineer 