Posts Tagged ‘technology’

Monday, October 1st, 2012

Castles in the Cloud

Have you been lost more than usual the past week or so?

Have you turned right when you should have gone left; found yourself on the wrong side of the road or in general wondered where the hell you were?

If so, chances are you have the new Apple iPhone 5 and have used its iO6 launched Maps app originally described as “the most powerful mapping service ever.”

Read the letter that follows from Tim Cook – Apple’s CEO – and you will understand why you found yourself at the local garbage landfill and not at the new restaurant you had waited weeks to get reservations for:

To our customers,

At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.

We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps including features such as turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, Flyover and vector-based maps. In order to do this, we had to create a new version of Maps from the ground up.

There are already more than 100 million iOS devices using the new Apple Maps, with more and more joining us every day. In just over a week, iOS users with the new Maps have already searched for nearly half a billion locations. The more our customers use our Maps the better it will get and we greatly appreciate all of the feedback we have received from you.

While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.

Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.

Tim Cook
Apple’s CEO

And follow this link to see why I said “originally described as ‘the most powerful mapping service ever’”:

Bottom line, you have to give Apple enormous credit for quickly owning up to their massive mistake and even more credit for connecting all the dots – including the product description – while at the same time providing what I think is ballsy customer service (ballsy to some – to me this should be standard – give up the pawn to own the king) by sending you to competitors who actually have great mapping apps.

But here is the thing – Apple gets it – RIGHT? Of course they reacted as they did, or why else would they be the most valuable company on the face of the earth?

To me that is not the question – nor is their exemplary reaction the only lesson to take from this debacle – although many should – business, politics, personal – be quick and honest!!!!

To me the real question is around the world of beta and the unadulterated hype that we live in.

You see, we have become so used to decimal-notated releases that we blindly accept whatever we are told and put up with inferior products and services that we would never accept in our off-line real world.

Imagine buying clothing and having the sleeves fall off or the zippers not work; or going to a new restaurant and getting food poisoning; or getting on a plane and having the engines not work….

And yes – by the way – all of those things do happen – but our reactions are different and our immediate feedback as a means of input into the next version is usually harsher, with way greater consequences.

The graveyards of poorly executed and produced products, bad tasting foods, out-of-control fashion and harmful services are chock full of the things we as consumers/users/buyers have sent to perdition.

Apple is lucky – at the end of the day this was only an app – and it seems that the majority of product reviews are positive – I have one and its form factor alone is a step up – although the charger…come on guys!!!!! Oh well….

But the notion that anything they do – or anything any of the tech community does in the “cloud” – is a step up for humanity is nonsense.

So here is a lesson from two centuries ago – it is almost as if Thoreau had prescient vision into our world…listen:

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” – Henry David Thoreau

So Apple – and all – even today – even in our beta accepting world – we still need the foundations and my bet is we always will….

What do you think?

Posted by David on 10/01 at 03:34 PM
  • Apple had sound business reasons to rush the new phone (and accompanying app) into market, though certainly made a huge mistake in over- rather than under-selling it. They didn't need to hype their map to sell millions of iPhone 5's; they should've positioned the map as the beginning of a (free) new product that would improve quickly over time. This ...
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    Posted by Andrew Jeske on 2012-10-01 16:40:55
Monday, June 18th, 2012

Skout

Skout.

Have you heard about it?

It’s a flirting site – a new twist in social networking that even uses GPS to show others where you are.

Three child rapes have been credited to Skout. That is, three children have been raped by predators who used Skout to scout….

Truth is, Skout began as an adult service but the founders quickly realized that teens were attracted to it as well. And it does have a staff that monitors the active community for bad behavior.  They even have technology—the “creepinator”—that does the same. Yet stuff does get through the technology and the human review didn’t seem able to stop the rapes.

Now, let’s be fair – I am not blaming Skout – in fact, reports indicate that many more cases like these were social-network or otherwise digitally enabled. More so, Skout has – to their credit – accepted a strong degree of accountability and are looking at new technology and procedures to limit the risk to minors (and others, I imagine).

So who do you blame?

Some would say digital channels and apps – and from some religious and conservative and religious-conservative corners, there is a growing chorus wanting to limit Internet access and development and to further regulate its usage.

Not to bash those more right of center – there is no doubt some wisdom in their position, and clearly we do need to make sure that we have adequate controls or maybe, better stated, adequate consequences for those who abuse the system.

Seems to me the issue is not the technology or even its broad access – in a sense that would be like blaming the printing press…all printing presses—for hurtful activities that occurred because someone read something printed.

What we need is education, parental control, peer pressure, clear societal mores with corresponding consequences.

At the end of the day, we all need to take accountability – we might live in the digital age but the outcomes still affect us as the humans we still are.

Bottom line – we make the mistakes, not the apps or the cloud or the devices – it’s us – and us alone.  Yet we still seem to think that we can shift the problem – the blame – the accountability…listen:

“To err is human–and to blame it on a computer is even more so. “
Robert Orben

Time to stand up. Apps don’t rape nor do devices – and while Skout is to be commended for trying to find a solution – I’d recommend that they ask themselves, if it was their children at risk, what would they do?

So while screwing up is human – so is passing the blame – and passing it to technology just doesn’t cut it.

What do you think?

Posted by David on 06/18 at 05:08 PM
Monday, June 11th, 2012

Digital Natives

Digital Natives.

No doubt you have heard the term.

I kind of imagine pixelated caricatures dressed in feathers and palm fronds – who were downloaded rather than born and who were recharged rather than nursed.

Or worse, the Natives, as seen in Gangs of New York, and we know what they did to the immigrants….

Seems, though, that many Digital Natives take themselves very seriously—very, very seriously indeed. In their minds nothing existed before digital – meaning themselves. In fact, I had one such denizen recently tell me that music in any other form really isn’t music…so it goes.  Tell it to Beethoven or the Beatles or any YouTube band trying to be a phenomena group, not to mention the savvy Digital Natives who crave vinyl records – not for the Luddite factor – but rather because the music sounds more authentic, real, warm.

Here is what I find astounding and ridiculous in the whole notion of Digital Natives – worse, here is what I fear and loath – not to mention what I believe is antithetical to the entire age we live in:

To begin with, there is more than a hint of Lord of the Flies here – and the ignorance that often attaches itself to those who believe themselves “natives” – of anything – frankly frightens me.

Far from this being a world of Digital Natives, we live in a world where age compression on one end and longevity on the other have created – for the first time that I know – a continuum of purpose and value between the oldest and the youngest. Both my two-year-old grandson and my 85-year-old father-in-law have iPads, both are proficient in its use and frankly, both use it the same way – if not for the same things.

We live in a time defined not by Digital Natives and Immigrants but by Generation World. A universe where age, borders and demographics mean less than shared values. An epoch where traditional segmentation means little as communities and interest groups form and coalesce in a multi-hued tapestry never before seen – generation gaps are being eliminated in social movements and culture – unlike the 1960s when being over 30 was considered traitorous and there was little if no age or other heterogeneity in anything.

We share, we shop, we read, we watch, we listen – sometimes digitally but almost always with some digital enhancement that links our flesh-and-blood world to the digital enablement we now have – Digital Exponential – our ability to bridge all our worlds: to shop in an Apple Store in person or buy online 24/7, to go to a movie theater or download or stream our favorite shows or movies. Buy the book, cover and all, or just buy its content; go to the concert live or watch it online (well, that really predates the Natives…see The Last Waltz for one).

And we still go to new restaurants – proliferating by the way – and use Pinterest to share our favorite dishes, we crowd the aisles of UNIQLO, and help sell out concert after concert around the world.

I have written much about the Waldorf Schools, but one thought stuck in my mind when one of the Digital Elite said that his kid would learn to use a computer in minutes. (“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste. At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older,” says Alan Eagle, an executive at Google.)

We have made it that simple (catch this experiment as detailed in Wired‘s print edition: Researchers from Tufts University and the MIT Media Lab this Spring dropped off a few solar-powered tablets to kids in a small Ethiopian village, where there is no electricity and essentially zero literacy. With no instruction, the twenty children ages 4 to 12 began using the devices within 18 minutes. After the first week, the kids were using 47 apps.) – but that he needed to learn to think and reason.  Being a Digital Native doesn’t make that a slam dunk…not even close.

So rather than basking in the pride of being born into a digital age that was, by the way, created by immigrants (sound familiar?), Digital Natives should be leading the way in taking the best of what we know and turning it into the best of what the next generation will need to develop the next big thing.

And then, my dear Digital Natives, you will be mere immigrants as well…unless….

Windows emulates MAC, Amazon emulates the old Sears Catalog, Facebook emulates our DNA- driven behavior, You Tube and whatever else emulates TV, Pandora and Spotify emulate radio, all try to emulate (old-fashioned LOL) advertising in order to exist and we should all try to emulate Steve Jobs…listen:

“A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. “
Steve Jobs

Don’t get me wrong – before all the emails come pouring in – I love Digital Natives – my children, my grandchildren, and in truth all the people I learn from….

But I want to learn from people who are not unidimensional – who define themselves by today’s technology – I want to learn from people who can teach me about today’s technology but who can also share and teach me about values…and who themselves want broad and diverse experiences so that they can – in fact – create the next big thing.

What do you think?

 

Also appeared on The Huffington Post

Posted by David on 06/11 at 05:05 PM
  • From Wikipedia (extract): "A digital native is a person who was born during or after the general introduction of digital technologia and through interacting with digital technology from an early age, has a greater understanding of its concepts. Alternatively, this term can describe people born during or after the latter 1960s, as the Digital Age began at that time; but ...
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    Posted by Jessica Wawoe on 2012-06-13 20:15:34
  • We’re gonna getcha. We are going to get you where you may not even know when, where and how we gotcha. We get you when you’re driving (radio ads and billboards). We get you when you’re watching tv. We get you when you’re on your laptop, tablet or smartphone. And if you try to avoid us by switching us off ...
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    Posted by Shah on 2012-06-13 18:17:11
  • This isn't about age, it's about acceptance (indeed, embracing) things that are new AND USEFUL. I'm in my seventh decade, and I think of myself as a digital native. I was building intranets and web sites when you had to learn to code in HTML and Java to do so, because there weren't any tools. I download movies and TV ...
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    Posted by Richard Tooker on 2012-06-13 17:33:24