Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
The Sad State of Retail
We mostly shop online, and mostly through Amazon Prime. But every once in a while, we need something in a hurry and venture beyond our keyboard. Tonight I needed a small card table. I looked online and the Target store three miles from my house showed an acceptable table as in-stock. I clicked add to cart for in-store pickup, checked out and the drove to the store in the rain.
Here is what Target showed after my purchase.
When I arrived a the store, they told me that the item was not in fact in stock and that I would have received a confirming email if it was in stock. They refunded my money. I sort of assumed that, since they showed the item as in stock, showing up early would just mean waiting for them to pull the item. My bad.
I then walked back from “guest services” and picked out a different table, walked to the register and waited to check out – about six minutes. As I approached the register I realized the item was slightly damaged, a dent in one leg. So we walked back and got another instance of the table. The cashier processed a couple of small “We’re sorry” coupons along with the order (they keep them on hand, because I think they are sorry a lot.).
Upon arriving home, we realized that this instance of the table also had as small degree of damage on the table-top beneath the plastic shrink-wrap. It’s not an expensive item and the damage is not really that important.
My point is that shopping retail is pretty painful and shopping at Amazon is far more convenient and in my experience, I’m less likely to get a damaged item – I nearly never do. The pick-up-in-store experience at Target is terrible. And Target is my favorite big-box retailer! I just don’t know if retail can recover from the current situation.
To be fair, I really should have just driven to Target without checking their website first. The hybrid online shopping/in-store pickup, is far worse than the retail experience itself. And it was nice that they discounted the item I purchased as an apology for the shop-online/in-store pickup experience.
iPhone 6s Plus – Impressions after Five Weeks
I’ve been using the iPhone 6s Plus now since launch day. I upgraded from the 6. I’ve always thought the “plus” is too big but I wanted to see for myself. When I polled owners, nearly every one was happy with their purchase, although some warned me it can be awkward to use. I use the phone without a case, as I have used every iPhone and Android phone that I have owned.
Size
My take is the phone is too big for comfortable for full one-handed use but there are benefits to having a larger phone. Those benefits are fairly obvious but for me the end result is that I am more likely to use my phone than take out my laptop. But I do commute with a laptop (12 inch Macbook) and am still more productive with it.
I say the phone is too big for “full” one-handed use because I am able to use it one-handed for limited tasks. For example, once I am reading email on the phone, I can use it one handed. However, If i need to write a message, I need a second hand.
I miss having a smaller phone when I have only one hand to use it. That comes up when walking the dog, walking on the streets of NYC, riding the subway, etc. The plus is also heavier and when it’s in my pocket, I find it can be uncomfortable when sitting depending on my clothing. It certainly is not great in the pocket of a suit jacket (although that’s rarely an issue for me).
The best related benefit from the size actually comes from the larger battery. This phone actually lasts a full day, even if I use the phone bluetooth tethered to my laptop for data for an hour in the AM. Battery life is a huge benefit and should not be forgotten. I would say the better battery life is my favorite feature of the 6s Plus.
Screen
Yeah, it’s nice. But many apps are not optimized to take advantage of the large number of pixels. And, my anecdotal experience is that some graphic animations are a tad slower on this phone, possibly because of the need for the phone to render at 3x the resolution and downsample (it’s not the same DPI as the 6).
I find reading on Kindle app with this phone to be more enjoyable, but I own a Kindle dedicated reader so really not a huge deal. I don’t do that much reading on my daily commute and if I am flying or at home, I can use the dedicated Kindle.
Email is more productive with the larger screen, but a laptop is still much more productive.
3D Touch
So far, I find I don’t use 3D touch and often forget it’s available. I don’t see it as adding to my productivity. Perhaps it will become more useful as more apps add support for the feature. So far, it feels like a gimmick.
However, I can see a single place where it could be useful. If Apple is successful at embedding a fingerprint reader into the screen, and if they trigger fingerprint recognition with 3D touch, then they can eliminate the physical home button on the iPhone. This would allow them to make the phone significantly smaller from top to bottom. You can image a future where the entire front of the phone is pretty much the screen. I think that world is the iPhone 7.
If you imagine an iPhone 6s Plus missing it’s top and bottom bezels, it starts being usable with one hand!
Live Photos
I had high hopes for live photos based on the initial description but I have found that I soon turned the feature off. Ultimately, the moments before and after the shot were simply not that interesting. For a landscape, there is literally no benefit most of the time. For portraits, the moment before and after are awkward and the inclusion of sound ruins the moment entirely. You see, portraits are staged moments where everyone acts happy for a single moment. But seeing the frames leading up to and following that moment can be pretty depressing.
Lack of Conclusion
After a little more than a month, I’m still on the fence as to whether or not I prefer the Plus to the regular iPhone 6. My answer changes moment to moment. If I was forced to have only one device, no laptops, not iPads, no Kindles, then the Plus is the right size. The extra real estate is worth the hassle of carrying and using a larger phone with one hand. But if you carry multiple devices and are fortunate enough to be able to buy them, then I think it’s a harder sell. My guess is that I will go back to the smaller form factor during the next generation iPhone cycle. Hopefully battery technology will have caught up by then. Then again, if the 7 is the size of the iPhone 6S Plus without the bezels…
Apple Chips Away at Selling Cars to Pickup Truck Drivers
In 2010 Steve Jobs likened PCs to pickup trucks. Farmers may need them but most people drive cars. And by that he meant that most people would use appliance-like tablets running mobile operating systems versus traditional PCs running Windows and MacOS.
Five years later, the transition is occurring slowly, with PC sales estimated by IDC to be dropping about 11% per year. The 2014 data shows that PCs and tablets are about neck and neck. Many folks who need computers (like me) are still buying PCs. For me, a tablet is an optional media consumption device, a luxury item.
But Apple has not given up on their founder’s vision. They are diligently chipping away at the objections of using a tablet over a PC:
- screen is too small
- limited multitasking
- poor OS integration with mechanical wireless keyboards
- no adequate mechanical keyboard solution on the go
- not enough memory and not enough disk for serious computing
- no support for a stylus, which some creative professionals depend on, especially the ones who buy Adobe Creative Suite.
With the latest round of Apple announcements you can see them slowly and meticulously knocking down these objections one by one. The iPad pro, the stylus, the new keyboard, the better support for bluetooth keyboards, the multitasking in iOS; all these changes attempt to realize the Jobs vision.
What’s left?
First and foremost, Apple needs to change the way the App Store works so that independent software vendors (ISVs) can make money. For document-based software that needs only to save its files in the cloud, there is no business model possible through the App Store today. A subscription is not warranted because there really is no ongoing service being offered by the ISV.
Making your app free and ad-supported does not work when you are a niche product. Charging a fee a single time is not the answer because it leaves the ISV with no ongoing economic relationship with the customer. Although PC software is often sold with perpetual licenses, the need for periodic upgrades requires the user to pay money periodically to update.
What’s needed is a way for an ISV to charge for major upgrades while still offering minor point releases for free. And, as John Gruber points out, the ISVs need 30-day free trials. Because that’s the way a lot of software gets sold.
Taking care of these items won’t convert all the users. Engineers still need boxes that they can develop code on and extend. We won’t see engineers switching to tablets with closed operating systems until development environments are completely cloud-based and connectivity is so ubiquitous that requiring a network connection to develop code is not a deterrent.
It’s also interesting that when Apple finally offers a tablet that can replace a PC for a non-technical knowledge worker, it really is no cheaper than a PC. In fact, it is priced higher than most PCs. What it comes down to is a preference for a computer with a touch interface that does not expose the internals of the operating system to the user.
Finally, I am not sure we won’t eventually see a laptop running iOS from Apple. For lots of folks, the laptop form factor works better. The connected rigid keyboard makes it easier to use on a couch, in bed, in an airplane seat, or on a couch. At that point, the main difference between the MS surface computers and Apple IOS laptops will be that iOS laptops won’t allow you to access the legacy OS view. When you look at the 12inch Apple Macbook, imagining it running iOS versus MacOS is not much of a stretch.
Apple Live Photos is a True Innovation
Apple announced Live Photos (aka Harry Potter photos) as part of their Hey Siri media event on 9/9. By itself, the idea of pre-capturing some shots before and after the shutter is pressed is not a significant innovation. Panasonic offered this previously and others probably have too.
What makes the Apple announcement interesting is that they have this feature turned on by default and they are going to not only support it across their multi-device iCloud Photos service but also actively try to get other services to support the format.
They claimed that facebook has already agreed to support Live Photos and that they are going to make the APIs to manipulate Live Photos available to all. This is crucial because unless the entire world starts supporting the format, then your photos are going to be stripped down to ordinary JPEGs when you share them outside Apple (and let’s face it, social is not Apple’s forte).
There has been very little innovation in what a photo is in the last twenty years. We added some geo meta data, which is certainly useful, but other than that, not much has changed. This has the potential to dramatically change what we consider a photo.
If they are successful with this, they might also push folks to take more natural photos and fewer posed shots. I can’t imagine a posed shot being very interesting in Live Photo mode. Either you see that the subject was not smiling right before, or you see that they were smiling rigidly the whole time. Either way, that’s boring. So perhaps folks will tend to take a more photo journalism approach to capturing life, taking more candids.
Kudos to Apple for noticing that people really like animated GIFs, even though they are a bit goofy. I truly hope that Apple is successful with Live Photos. It could change the way we view photography for a long time.
What happens when you expose the file system to consumers
I got a message from Dropbox today announcing a new feature. (I’m a happy customer). They now have the ability to detect when another user is simultaneously editing the same shared file. That way you can coordinate your edits and avoid conflicts. Here is snippet from the email:
Huh? I thought with Dropbox I could easily share files already? Well, you can, as long as you don’t allow multiple people to edit those files. Because when you edit a file within a local application on the computer, merging those edits is very difficult programmatically. Engineers deal with this type of fine-grained conflict resolution all the time when merging code changes using version control systems, but they do it on files that are text-only. And even then, it’s often a manual process involving looking at two files line by line, side by side, and deciding which pieces of each one to keep.
Having to coordinate your edits is one of the primary problems when you expose the file system to an end user, and dealing with it is beyond the interest of consumers. I wrote about this in 2009 and it’s still true today. I’m a dropbox user, but I use it mainly for self-collaboration, where the possibility of conflicts is low or for sharing something read-only with someone else.
This is where Google Apps shines. When I work on spreadsheets or documents in Google apps, we can easily have multiple people in the document at the same time. We can see each other type, and unless we are literally editing the same cell or the same word, Google can resolve any conflicts. They have turned documents, spreadsheets, and presentations into a service. The only downside is that connectivity is required for use for the most part.
For Dropbox, this is a big problem, because to move beyond being a tool for knowledge workers, they need to provide experiences that don’t expose the file system at all. And the problem is going to get worse because as time goes on, consumers are going to be less and less aware that files even exist on their computer. They are going to be an implementation detail. This is Dropbox’s primary impediment to growth. In the long run, only engineers will deal with files. Even most knowledge workers will interact only with cloud-based apps that seamlessly communicate data in the background.
Revisiting Freemium
In July of 2009, I wrote that Freemium did not work for Phanfare. I just re-read the pos and I want to revisit the topic of whether Freemium could have worked for Phanfare. Ultimately, that post concluded that for a premium product with few network effects, it was difficult for the economics to work. I stand by that conclusion, but I believe there were other options at the time and other considerations that I did not include.
First, since Freemium means giving something away to entice user sampling in the hopes of having them buy the product, by definition, Freemium is always possible if you give little enough away. That is, if we had given away downsampled photo sharing limited to 100 photos for example, the cost of the free service would have been low enough that it would not have represented much of a burden on the paying customers. Yes, it may have undercut our premium positioning.
Whether a very limited freemium offer is enough to create any user interest is a separate topic. But these types of freemium offers do succeed in the brick and mortar world. At a retail store, you can come in and browse for free. This is a form of freemium. You are consuming their HVAC and taking up physical space.
We did not explore severely limited forms of freemium Phanfare service and so can’t generally conclude that no freemium offer would have worked.
Second, I undervalued the ecosystem benefits of having a large user base, even if that base is not paying. Ultimately, your ability to strike deals with other companies depends on you having a lot of users. Want to be featured in a camera or promoted at retail? Your large user base is something you can trade on.
In addition, all the ancillary parts of the ecosystem only show up for systems that have large user bases. Apple TV, Roku and Nikon, Canon, Adobe; they only care about systems with large number of users. Hence, you don’t get to provide a full solution unless you have a larger number of users. A paid-only offering pretty much guarantees these ecosystem partners won’t to do business with you if you are in a space where only 5% of users will pay.
So looking back, I believe that we should likely have pursued freemium more vigorously by figuring out a way to offer something that could work economically. For Phanfare, that also might have meant ditching fullsize originals in general. And it might have made sense. It might have meant ditching the premium positioning entirely.
That said, if you are happy with a niche, small service, then avoiding freemium probably does make sense. And niches can make a lot of money. Apple takes home most of the profits in the smart phone industry while serving a small minority of the customers. Of course, that’s a huge market. But Apple has pretty much no freemium offer except maybe being able to listen to the first 90 seconds of ITunes songs for free on an ongoing basis.
Timing Matters
Mark Heinrich and I started Phanfare sometime in 2003. We incorporated in 2004 and eventually sold the company in 2011. Along the way, I learned a few things, but one of the most memorable to me is that timing matters. Not only can you be too late, but you can also be too early.
When we started Phanfare, storage was too expensive to consider storing fullsize originals for free, ad-supported. Collections averaged more than 30GB and our fully burdened cost of storage was at least $1/GB/year. Even Google today has only about $20 of revenue per user per year ($60B/3B people), and they have one of the most lucrative advertising businesses in the world.
Ask most married people what they would take with them if their house was on fire and they would say their wedding album. Ask them the last time they looked at that wedding album, and they often can’t remember.
Excepting the immediate gratification one gets by sharing a photo or video, the amount of time that folks spend looking at the older media in their own collection, on average, is very small, probably under one hour per month.
Netflix costs maybe $9/month and many families use it over 100 hours. It’s rational that a consumer simply won’t pay more than a few cents, at most a dollar/month, to have convenient and permanent access to their photo and video collection. Obviously, some will, but that makes for a niche market.
So consumers won’t pay much, if anything for a permanent online archive. If you want to make the service mainstream, you will need to make it free. But since total page views and audience attention is low, advertising is not going to cover the bills easily. And if you are storing fullsize originals, then we are not, even today, at the point where delivering a phanfare-like service is economical based on advertising.
Today, the two leading mainstream services for taking your whole collection for free are Apple Photos and Google Photos. Google down-samples by default, unless you are willing to pay. Apple offers only a paltry 5GB for free (if you consider buying a $700 phone free).
So if you want to store fullsize originals for consumers and encourage them to store their entire collection, you need to charge them. And since we established that they will only rationally pay maybe a few dollars per year at most, back in 2008, you were not delivering the service. Phanfare was $99/year. At that price, the service had contribution margin at scale, but getting enough subscribers proved difficult.
So what should we have done? Well, to start, we should not have worried about fullsize originals. We clung to that because we were not sure we had not enough differentiation in the down-sampled photo world. But the reality is, if you show a friend a 25 megapixel image of your children versus a 2 megapixel compressed JPEG of the same kids, the friend leaves with the same impression. The emotional impact is the same.
This lesson on the importance of timing, and secondarily on the importance of doing some price-based-costing (deliver a product at the price point the customer will pay) is one that I won’t soon forget. Technology marches on, becoming cheaper and more capable. When Apple decided in 2001 that your computer would be your digital hub and you would sync by-wire your songs from your desktop to your devices, it was not the best solution imaginable, it was the best solution possible at the time.
The Road to Phanfare
Carbonite acquired Phanfare in 2011 and at the time, I could not talk too much about the acquisition. But some time has passed now and the details are not nearly as sensitive. In this post, I don’t want to focus so much on what has happened since the acquisition (not much) but instead, what led me to start the company with my friend Mark Heinrich.
My love for photography started at Stuyvesant High School in the early 1980s. Back then, a friend who had a Canon AE1 taught me the basics of SLR photography. I bought a Pentax K1000 and eventually a Nikon FG. I still remember trading my K1000 for the FG, taking the modest credit that Willoughby’s offered me. I wish I had kept that first camera.
I became photo editor of the Stuyvesant Spectator newspaper during my senior year, 1985. By that point I had a darkroom in our laundry room at my childhood home on Staten Island. I developed all the Tri-X pan for the staff photographers, creating proof sheets. I had modest equipment and a lot of patience.
I never considered photography to be art. Maybe some photos are art, but most simply document life, communicate a moment. For me, photography satisfied my desire to leave something behind, to be more than dust in the wind. I also loved the technical aspects of photography and the gear. The Japanese cameras are beautifully made, finely engineered instruments. They are almost like jewelry.
I took a lot of photos – as many as I could afford to develop. I always had basic equipment. In college at Dartmouth I had only a 50mm lens and one terrible Vivitar zoom that was so poor I could never get myself to mount it. I joined a company at college, Picture This, that took photos at sorority and fraternity formals. I learned how to shoot portraits and groups, use a flash properly and avoid red eye. I learned that at sorority formals, photos without men sell better than those with the men. The men were transitory.
When digital photography started to first take off in grad school at Stanford, I played with a Apple QuickTake 100 we had in our research group. In the late 90s I watched the founding of Ofoto and Shutterfly with great interest. These were ultimately transitional digital photo services – they focused on creating physical prints and objects from digital images, something with little long term appeal.
Many of us in grad school had simple web sites that we maintained on our workstations with our personal digital photos. These websites were the equivalent of the personal photo album of our childhood, the album that was in the living room cabinet. Most of the images that we published to these sites we got from CDs that Kodak gave us when they developed our film. digital cameras were poor quality in the mid 90s and expensive, way outside the budget of a graduate student. Our websites were often static HTML pages generated by Perl scripts. They were protected from prying eyes via an .htaccess file that popped up a password prompt.
After Stanford, in 1999, I founded my first company with my friend Mark Heinrich: Flashbase. I will talk about Flashbase another time, but it had little to do with photography. DoubleClick acquired Flashbase in 2000 and Mark and I finally had some financial security for the first time in our lives. We started buying a lot more digital cameras. I owned one of the first Nikon CoolPix cameras and the Canon D30, D60, and so on. Our digital images were piling up and we were not sure what to do with them.
Keep in mind, this was before facebook, before YouTube. By 2004, Mark and I were interested in doing something in digital photography. We both loved it, and we both had no idea where we should be keeping the long tail of our digital photos. We were certain that keeping them on our local hard drive was the wrong answer, that your hard drive was where photos go to die. Unseen by anybody, the disk would eventually fail. We hypothesized that folks would pay for a high quality archive of their digital photos. And we thought that the internet should be your master copy of your digital photos, not your computer.
The idea of the cloud being the master copy of your digital photos was not popular yet in 2004. Networks were not fast enough and disk was way too expensive. Steve Jobs was pushing the idea of your Mac being your digital hub, centered around iTunes. To make the whole thing workable, we designed a fat network client that would run on your PC and sync your photos to internet, moving small versions fast and fullsize versions in the background. The idea was that you could work with your photos on the local app while the app moved the photos to and from the net in the background.
We were fixated, perhaps wrongly, on preserving fullsize originals. And at that time, there was simply no way to store fullsize originals and have the service be ad-supported and free. Plus, we did not want ads on our personal photo albums. And so we decided that Phanfare needed to be a subscription service.
I will tell the Phanfare story in another post, but in retrospect, we were not wrong about where photography was going but we were way too early. It would take another ten years before Apple would release their Photos app that synchronizes your iPhone roll with the cloud and shows it across your devices. Google Photos is the same idea (but better). These ideas are right in my opinion. You should be able to shoot and the photos should magically get mirrored to all your devices and stored reliably in the cloud. There should be no upload step.
What we were wrong about is that websites of photos at unique URLs would be the way people share photos. People share photos through social media when they want to share with more than a few people and by direct message (email, SMS, google hangouts, etc) when they want to share with a single person.
I learned a lot from the Phanfare experience and I will share some of those things in coming posts.
Competing Without a Timing Chip
I competed in the NJ State Olympic Triathlon this past weekend. I am an amateur, of course. Nevertheless, as anyone who competes in these weekend warrior events can tell you, results matter. You want to know not only how you did overall relative to your age group but also how you did in event (run,bike,swim) and how fast your transitioned between events (known as T1 an T2). And you want to see those results published.
Your results in triathlons are typically recorded by an RFID chip that you wear around your ankle. That’s the way it worked at the NJ State Tri. First you swim (1500m), then you transition to your bike (T1), then you bike (approx 30k at this one), then you transition to your running gear (T2) and then you run (10k).
It’s not unusual for me to get kicked a lot during my swim because I can’t swim in a straight line. This event was no exception. After finishing the swim (poorly), as I was passing over the timing mats at the end of the T1 transition, getting ready to mount my bike, I noticed my ankle chip was gone – knocked off in the water no doubt.
I told the kid manning the timing machine that my chip was lost and he asked my number, but it is was also clear that he had no way of manually entering my time at the machine in the field. Perhaps he just wanted to know my number so he could radio that I had not drowned.
So now I am biking my heart out, and then running in 95 degree heat with absolutely no certainty that any of it will actually “count.” And then I thought, this is really a lot like life. You work hard, you go to school, you try to make your endeavors a success, but while you are doing it, you just never know whether you will meet with success, or whether history will record your efforts.
And so this blog is like competing without a chip.
As it turns out, the nice timing people at Timberline Timing Systems were happy to accept my Garmin watch times as my unofficial results, along with my observation that I finished right before a particular chipped runner. They said I would not be eligible for awards, which did not change the outcome for me. Bib 1851. My own analysis here.
Hello, World, again
This blog contains a copy of all the material I wrote as CEO of Phanfare. But now, I am restarting the blog, three years after Phanfare. I will probably still write about photography, although much less than before. And I might write some about what has become of Phanfare, but probably not too much. We will see what this becomes, together.
An Engineer 