This vid has been out there for a while, but it’s still fun…invoking the famous devil printer scene from Mike Judge’s “Office Space”…Certainly the skills of the graphic designer are not lost in the need to now design for the eBook market. Where the web development community has gone from hand-coding websites to Dreamweaver, Flash, Firework or a CMS system and CSS…so it is w/the traditional printed book. BTW, I just saw a listing at Sotheby’s for a 16th century print of some religious scribes kicking the shit out of Johannes Guttenberg…

Haiti has one hell of a history of getting the short end of the stick from the international community…here’s a good and brief background from Christiane Amanpour:

I’m no foreign policy expert, but if I were Haitian, I’m sure I’d have trouble mustering faith in my country’s ability to pull itself up by its own boot straps. I’d also be busting my hump to provide for my wife and kids…One of the most tangible thoughts running through my head during my week in Port-au-Prince was how amazingly lucky I and my family are…and how distressing it is to realize that w/all we have and our country has that we still have to hear the partisan crap spew out of politician’s mouths day in and day out…blah…

Haiti occupies about 1/3 of the island of Hispaniola:

View Larger Map

Comparing the Haitian population’s per capita income (2008 estimates) to their neighbors, the Dominican Republic (DR), you see the DR doing something right, as a resident of the DR makes about $8,000 USD as the average Haitian who makes about $1300. My family and I spend roughly that amount each year on our Verizon bill…

One person I was speaking with, after I had spouted off about the dire state of the Haitian economy/recovery and how lucky I am/we are and such…(see above) said to me, “Ok, yah…but viscerally, what was the thing that struck you most…” and at the time, I think I pointed to a moment when we were driving through an intersection on the lower end of stretch of Delmas below the airport when the van slowed…and a crowd had formed around a semi w/trailer attached just to our left…turned out it was a food truck…and it was trying hard to pull away…and within about 30 seconds the entire crowd had swarmed the truck…literally climbing up on the back and sides while the driver was trying to move off…it turned out the truck had come to the wrong location to distribute its food.

I certainly remember thinking to myself…”Ok, you’re not in Cape Cod anymore Bouv…” and as the furious crowd pounded our van a bit and we continued on…you realize these people are frustrated by decades of inefficiency, by a huge lack of understanding with regard to their poverty level, by the insanity of western bureaucracy…and without much by way of recourse, on the ground it becomes Darwinian in the most basic sense in a Haitian hurry.

I was reading an article yesterday in this Magazine I’m enthralled with…called Monocle. An aside; I am a periodical/short print format whore…I love magazines/event catalogs/institutional publications…I love the photography, I love the design, I love the paper, I love the writing, I love the formats…IMHO, some of the best work done in print media happens in periodical/short form.

I’ve long since canceled all of my subscriptions, but used to voraciously read Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Details, W, MacWorld and anything else I could get my hands on…now a while back I’ve traded in some miles for subscriptions…which I won’t do again…but I was able to get the long sought after Economist, which was always simply too much cash to justify my infrequent reads…when I do get to read a whole issue, I feel like I’ve had a top flight global policy briefing coupled w/some interesting discussions with a recruiter for aid organizations.

Anyway, this article which is unfortunately available online to subscribers only, was talking about the best teams in the world for disaster recovery…and of course, they all are based in locations where extreme people blow themselves up or where wars are currently raging…the team cited as best in the world is Israeli, permanently based at that country’s main airport…they were on the ground in Haiti inside of 12 hours after the earthquake. Survival rates for those who survive the initial quake are best inside the first 24 hours…so they don’t wait for official sign off, they just find the best aircraft and go…they worry about where the team will sleep later…Made up of elite Israeli forces, there are interdisciplinary members who break out into functions…Medical, logistics, operations, supplies, and they set up in Port-au-Prince what the article referred to as the “Roles Royce of field hospitals.” Apparently they had ER, maternity, radiology, pediatric…they could handle 500 patients at any one time…

You read something like that, and working for a non-profit, you think…”yes, for sure…we could make some improvements…” but in the bigger picture section of the massive pin-up homasote wall that my brain has become, you find that dusty note where all the good human qualities are listed, and photographed and memorialized and say…”Why can’t we get there?”

I’ve had a lot of questions about “scary moments” on the ground in Haiti, and for sure, there were a couple…as I mentioned above…what may be scarier still is the idea that a cherubic caucasian guy like me gets a chance to work in a place like post-disaster Haiti, only to come home, fall back into business as usual consumption and partisan Sarah Palin bashing armchair fluffernutters…oops! I forgot, I have to go to Wal-Mart this afternoon…

1. The Week has a nice time line from 2002 – 2010 covering a good selection of hearsay and third-party conjecture

2. Down in Oz, Garry Barker has some astute thoughts…comes close to discussing analog of music to publishing

and finally:

3. MacWorld’s Jason Snell offering a solid parsing of potential Apple thinking re: digital content delivery on a tablet

Let me offer this to the collective speculation; I believe the splashy color on the Apple event invite is a sort of shot over the Amazon Kindle bow…meant to at the very least poke fun at the device’s limited display. That said, I fear the iTablet may simply be a content consumption device…with a price-point just below Kindle…and a fairly limited hardware/software feature set a la the iPod Touch…could be?

Nah…w/the amount of time and consideration that Apple has put into the device, the content it may serve and the existing market dynamics…I’m going to predict a much more powerful and empowering 10″ monolith. And I wouldn’t be surprised to hear “Thus Spoke Zoroaster” from Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” as SJ has the drape lifted off, both arms tracking horizontally…wait for it…I give you, The “Jesus Tablet”…What? Too much?

Frankly, I haven’t given a lot of thought to the actual hardware and software feature set…I’ve been thinking more about the content…and as I mentioned above, several folks have noted the analog between the music and publishing industries…how engines like Napster and the MP3 removed the optical key, namely the Compact Disc, from “The Man’s” distribution equation…and how the slow the music business has been to realize Pandora has left the box…

And around the same time, 1997 or so, I recall thinking to myself…”Wow, I can read the New York Times for free online? OH and better yet, I can filter the content I want from their stream and have it emailed to myself every day at no additional charge?” Well, why would I bust my chops scouring my collegiate burg to find a copy so I can buy and then read the damn thing? I never liked reading the physical paper anyway…always needing a windless room w/a 6′ round to lay the paper on, never properly folding the rag…and getting filthy with newsprint…I was much happier searching and forwarding articles and links…with an input device like a keyboard…yes, Bouv is a geek…you just noticed?

The now painfully obvious answer to the newspaper industry is that I wouldn’t hunt a copy of the newspaper down to pay for it…and never would again, in fact, I might not even read the free version of the paper handed to me by the concierge…and while yes…there is advertising revenue to be made in the free content model, The Times Companies couldn’t and I guess can’t figure out a way on its own to earn the $300,000,000 + to keep the global news room profitable…so onto the basic lines of the analog for Apple between music and newspapers…which Christopher Breen over at MacWorld has also briefly noted…

The Compact Disc is to the MP3 file as the newspaper is to the free online news website*…yah?

A valuable but ailing commodity (music) is broken into reasonably priced bits (songs or albums)…given a free and reasonably easy to use organizational desktop model and pricing structure (iTunes)…Despite a wide range of competing free piracy solutions available to this day, Apple makes the end user experience more consistent, guilt and persecution free, oh and dare I say fun to integrate with the Apple created ultimate music toy e.g. KEY…We give you the iPod! Cue the music…

Fast forward 8 years…So where does Apple fit in to the newspaper solution? In news, we have a similar revenue from content problem:

A valuable but ailing commodity (books, magazines, news items) can be broken into reasonably priced bits (stories, sections, e-books, e-magazines or a whole paper)…provided it’s given a free and reasonably easy to use organizational desktop model and pricing structure (iTunes – now w/Bookstore)…where Amazon’s Kindle, NYT Online, or any other priced/free solution fall short at providing the complete ecosystem…Apple comes to the rescue by making the end user experience more consistent, easy to organize, and fun to integrate with the Apple created ultimate reading toy e.g. KEY…We give you the iTablet…cue the music…purchased of course from the ITMS…

A stretch? Perhaps…maybe Apple will simply offer us an e-Ink “in color” tablet that only displays books/newspapers and then tries to charge us $999…Barely a mini-woot…More a “ho-hum”. Yah, ah…I don’t think so…SJ isn’t going to come out, waste his (now very valuable) time and throw a color Kindle at us…

The most interesting thing about the potential iTablet to me isn’t the tablet…it’s how content will be culled, created and distributed via the device…to make it a true tool…giving publishers a way to get that content into the stream as fast as any other will be key…

Will it have global wi-fi? Will there be a content development template or SDK for an App store-like bookstore model? What ramifications are there for the iPhone/iPod touch community? Does this device now make all 100,000,000 + owners sigh a collective…”Shit…” when this thing is announced?

I doubt it…more likely, many of the reading tools will hopefully be available for those devices as well…Certainly a nice pitch to content owners/producers eh? “We have a rapidly growing install base of folks with these tools and 100,000,000 live credit card accounts…I think we can help move some of your product…” not to mention potential ad revenues from the Quattro Wireless deal…again, a point made my the good chaps at MacWorld…it’s an interesting time to be a consumer for sure…anyway…looking forward to seeing SJ out there…If the start of 2010 is any indication, my gut tells me he still has at least one more trick up his mock-nerk sleeve… – Bouv.

*Don’t forget the fact that the NYT and the lot, save Murdoch’s WSJ and a few others have been giving the content away for 12+ years…and previous attempts to put Pandora back in her box have failed…anyone remember NY Times Select?

Bouv's 2009 Holiday Mix.

It’s been a long year, filled with turbulence and challenge…and, as always, music. I’m very happy to present to all, the 2009 Holiday Mix…

You can download the mix here:
www.jcbouvier.com/Holiday_2009.zip

This is ~ 130MB .ZIP file download.

Many thanks to all those who offered some influences this year…you may or may not know who you are…Hannah, Maxine, Oskar, Roo and I wish you all the best for the coming year…it’s already off to a fast and focused start!

Warmest regards,

Bouv.

Bouv’s Holiday 2009 track listing:

*iTunes users, once you have downloaded and unzipped the folder, you should be able to simply drag it onto your playlist column and iTunes should import the files and create the playlist.

Congratulations, that’s 1000 stolen strategic plans! Their customers may become confused when they accidentally wander into an Apple store looking for support for Microsoft products…oh well…Apple will probably still help them out…

“Watching this clip gave me the kind of feeling I get when I watch a good episode of The West Wing or MadMen…these guys are connecting the dots on why technology isn’t simply the race to enslave something to do our chores for us…or to help make us money…but rather to advance the abilities of the human race to advance itself in the spirit of how Bill Hicks used to describe evolution…”

• Who in their right mind breaks into their own home without taking a look around and thinking first…moreover…
• Who in their right mind, as a tenured professor at Harvard, can’t hide a spare key for themselves or find a key buddy?
• Who in their right mind and of any color or creed screams at a white cop in their own home when they know their rights?
• Who in their right mind…arrests an aggravated Harvard professor when he’s clearly in his own home?
• Who in their right mind…calculatingly takes the last question about Skip at a press conference on health care?
• Who in their right mind…gives a dodged Clinton-esque response on the President’s comments the night before?

Of course racial profiling exists, because there’s a disparity in the wealth of the white vs. all other races…and so the other races are more apt to commit crime, thus creating the profiling of people by race…vicious I know…

Clearly the Skip Gates incident doesn’t merit any of this coverage…moreover I think it’s a moronic wastes of everyone’s time…most importantly the President’s…friend or no friend…the calculation of taking the only question off the health care topic was tacky both on taking the question and in the use of the word “stupidly”. Skip should get a plastic rock or maybe a yard gnome with a spare key…and the state of California should heavily tax both gay and heterosexual marriage + the sale of weed and put the money back in early childhood education…and the rest of the country can follow suit…causing people to seriously think twice before they make foolish decisions that affect other people’s lives…I mean really…

So I’m using this new service, that MC Caples turned me onto called LaLa…which to my mind, upon initial inspection…is deeply flawed…meaning…while elegant, I don’t see the business model as usurping the iTunes Music Store (ITMS) anytime soon. Here’s why.

I can stream any of their 7 million songs once. Then I can choose to pay .10¢to “add” this song to my permanent online collection…but I can’t download it…so it’s a “cloud” collection of songs…” and then there’s the MP3 download option…compatible w/the iPod or Zunes of the world…for more or less the same pricing as the ITMS. So apart from my ability to listen wherever I am should I have forgotten my iPhone or MacBook Pro (not likely)…I’m still going to need to download the tracks and manually add them to my ITMS library. Strike one.

No iPhone app as best as I can tell…now if they had one…I’d be a lot more inclined to use this regularly…but still, am I going to eat up battery life to stream a collection I would prefer to own? Maybe to check out new music…oh but wait…I’m already using Pandora…which to date, is a far superior intelligent agent when it comes to suggesting music. And yes, you guessed it…they have an iPhone app for streaming. Strike two.

Ok, the silver bullet I’m sure for some people (Hellweg I’m talking to you…) is the price. Here’s the thing here…If I’m willing to pay .10¢ to “add” this song to my permanent online collection, I’m probably willing to ante up the remaining .69¢…and I’m sure that’s the idea…however by confusing the pricing structure w/this option…they loose momentum…I know Arrington and co over at TechCrunch are excited by the technology…and again as elegant at as the LaLa player is…beating the iTunes store purchase integration, preview functionality, music management, encoding and playback will be LaLa’s biggest difficulty…and one I think many others have tried w/similar models only to find themselves wandering in the digital music forest. Strike three.

Anyway, the coolest thing about the tool, and don’t get me wrong…it is cool…may be the ability to embed a preview of an album into your blog or Facebook profile. Will certainly help drive interest in new music…and I’m sure membership for LaLa, whether it results in increased revenue for LaLa remains to be seen…hopefull it will benefit artists…

UPDATE: Ok, I stand corrected…LaLa does have an iPhone App…but it’s not out yet…once it ships…I’ll try it and get back to you.

Palm sent the folks who signed up to win a Pre an email letting them know they could buy it.

UPDATE: Here is a link to a NY Times story talking about demand…

Ok, I’ve been reading every damn note, article, tweet, and blog post re: PALMs new Pre smartphone. And have come to the conclusion that the Pre will not be an iPhone killer out of the gate. Here are my reasons:

1. The poor battery life will be the deal breaker.
2. People are_not_going to leave Verizon or AT&T for this device.
3. Apple will address the majority of the Pre’s competitive advantages in the iPhone 3.0 release, likely to hit on 6/8/09.
4. The gambit by Palm to sync the Pre with iTunes will only serve to highlight the Pre’s shortcomings.
5. By the time Verizion might offer the phone, sometime in 2010, another manufacturer will deliver a more intersting product…likely APPL.

Sprint’s decision to allow buyers to avoid paying full retail and take advantage of the instant rebate only at Best Buy stores speaks to another major issue for Sprint/Palm; namely the size and ability of their channel to sell this item through.

I’ll bet the sales of this device will peak in the next 72 hours never to see the same spike in demand over time…they’re simply not enough people who will seek the phone out…or trust the slickster hawkers at mall kiosks to drop their existing plans to sign up w/Sprint for a smartphone they need to come some $300+ out of pocket for…and then only to find 20 apps and less than a days useful life in the battery…it’s going to take interest over the long tail for this device to catch on…if it catches on at all.

Anyway, as a former Palm loyalist and gadget hound, I’m interested to see this device…if I find myself at the mall and Palm has done its job supplying the aformentioned channel, then maybe I will see it. I’ll be sure to post an update w/my thoughts on the device itself if I do.

Now, I was very skeptical when they first started this app up…and beware, the demo is roughly and hour and twenty (1:20) minutes…however, for the hard core geeks out there, it’s worth the wait…I’ve cliped the most powerful moment of the demo up here, runs about three minutes.

Ok, so long story short, Wave is a new model for electronic text based conversation. These guys start the demo reminding everyone that email was invented 40 years ago…and using simple diagrams of how the information flows, set up the idea of Wave around the notion that the conversation is the object to focus on, rather than the person who started the conversation.

In this paradigm, the medium now becomes part of the message flow. Most impressively, the team shows off a real time text translator which has the ability to convert 40 languages on the fly. And the crowd of some 4,000 developers…enthusiastically responds. A nice geeky moment even on web video.

Wave could be the next killer app with an open source philosophy meant to drive innovation. The cloud based service will clearly allow people who grew up with email, instant messaging, and digital cameras to at the very least drop a couple of applications from their machines…certainly not Grandma’s email client…unless she’s been working at MIT…

Watching this clip gave me the kind of feeling I get when I watch a good episode of The West Wing or MadMen…these guys are connecting the dots on why technology isn’t simply the race to enslave something to do our chores for us…or to help make us money…but rather to advance the abilities of the human race to advance itself in the spirit of how Bill Hicks used to describe evolution…