Archive for the 'Technology' Category

I’m not reading books anymore - I’m trying to “go shelfless”. With the technology available these days, it seemed to us likely that you could abandon all shelving with the consequential enlargement of your living space. That’s an attractive idea, especially if, like me, your home is already jam-packed with books, CDS and papers that have taken up all the shelving space available already - what do you do as you buy new items?

One friend is very efficient at monetizing her acquisitions - once she’s finished reading her books, she sells them off again on Ebay. She used to rip the music of CDS and then sell the discs on Ebay too. She also gets rid of old clothes and other items the same way.

I’ve been wondering if one could minimise the clutter at an earlier point ie at the acquisition point - by going virtual or electronic.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about taking virtual notes using Evernote, which has so far been a great way to cut back on the bits of paper and physical notebooks that I would normally use. I “write” notes on my mobile phone-PDA using the letter recognizer function so it feels just like scribbling in a physical notebook or on the back of an envelope and zap it across to my online account.

I’ve recently discovered audiobooks via Audible.co.uk, which is a subsidiary of the US-based company Audible.com. So I’m not reading books but I’m listening to them. With Audible, you pay for each book you download just like you might if you bought a physical book from Amazon. But you can also sign up an account and pay a monthly fee of around £8 - each month you can download one title. The latter option is good value as you can download a book that otherwise costs more at that £8 price. Once you’ve downloaded it, the audiobook is yours forever and you can stream it from the online site or download it as many times as you like. The only limitation is that you can only play it on up to 4 computers/ devices that you register with your account - this is to stop you sending an e-version to all your friends and doing Audible out of business.

I’m really enjoying my first two audiobooks. I can listen to them while gardening or sitting on the bus. It’s so much more time efficient being able to listen to a book and do something else at the same time. And activities that used to be boring and painful to do are now quite pleasurable. Also, lying in the garden staring up at the blue sky while someone reads to me in my ears is just delightful - I don’t have to strain my arms lifting the book to read it as I lie down or crick my neck to get the reading angle right. And the books don’t take up any physical space - although you can burn CD versions of them if you want to.

My only complaint about Audible UK is that they have only 18,000 titles compared to the US company which has 40,000 titles. Many of the UK titles are older titles and / or of the WH Smith variety ie non-intellectual easy reading (though there are a few exceptions). I tend to prefer Waterstones or Blackwells which have more academic selections - or Amazon where you can get the most obscure books so long as they are in print. I was very excited when I first discovered Audible.com, the US site, as it had loads of books I wanted. For example, the US company has Naomi Klein’s latest book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature and Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. My excitement fizzled out when I came to the UK site - where none of these books are available. The UK site has lots on Churchill, how to make a million, chick lit and the latest popular non-fiction, which is fine if your tastes are limited to those topics.

So why don’t I just sign up for the US site? The frustrating thing is that if you try that from the UK, it refuses to allow you to do that and shoots you over to the UK site. Their support team explained to me, “The availability of certain book titles is linked the geographic digital download rights set by the publishers. A title can have different publishers in different countries and the rights are set on a country by country basis. Where possible, we try and secure rights on a world wide basis (for our US, UK, French and German sites) but there are times when this is either not possible or discussions are currently ongoing to secure the rights.” So I have to keep checking back to the UK site in the hope that the UK publishers will at some point issue the UK version of the audiobook.

Still, I have found a few books on the UK site that will keep me going for the next few months - hopefully as time passes more of the kinds of books that interest me will find their way onto the UK site and I won’t have to terminate my experiment with virtual books anytime soon.

Illustration: thanks to Drylcon from Flickr.com (CCL)

I’ve been exploring the mobilesphere recently - partly for my own interest (since I got a new mobile phone with internet browsing, email and a camera all-in-one) and partly for a section on mobile phone marketing in my book New Trends in International Public Relations.

Websites are currently optimized for a browsing experience from your desktop or laptop, both of which these days have speedy and powerful processors so that the website loads very quickly on your screen. The consequence is that many websites - as well as blogs and other social media spaces - have been designed with a lot of features, including multi-media, so that a visitor has a top-notch experience on the site. All means that a lot of data (measured in bytes - as in byte, Kilobyte (Kb) and Megabyte (Mb)) is transferred from the website to your computer for every page that you access. Mobile phones at the moment do not have the same processing power so access to many websites can be very slow.

WiFi is often free at cafes, offices and some public spaces - and of course, if you visit someone’s house with WiFi, you can log on to their system there. So, using WiFi, you can access the web for free. But if you are someplace where you can’t access WiFi, you have to pay for data transfer to your mobile phone provider to use the 3G connection - this is charged on a per byte basis. You can usually buy a monthly package data package eg so many Mbs for £X and there are some unlimited packages (though read the small print: in the mobile world “unlimited” doesn’t actually mean that at all!).

Data rich websites and costly data connection means that surfing the web by mobile phone can be a painfully slow and expensive business. And yet, more and more people seem to be accessing the internet from their phones. You can see the appeal - the phone is the communications gadget that many people have with them all the time. And many people have a lot of time where they are hanging around in between home, office and seeing friends eg while on the train or on the bus. A good way to while away that time is to access the web - check or write emails, chat with friends online, faff around on a social network and all those other things that you would do on the computer.

To best capture this audience, there are applications that can minimise the time it takes for webpages to load as well as minimising the amount of data transferred so that the mobile browsing experience is fast and cheap - while at the same time maintaining an attractive user interface. I’ve discovered a couple of these applications so that I’ve enabled my two blogs, Fusion View and ZenGuide, to be accessed as mobile versions.

The first is via www.mippin.com. I signed up for a free account and created Fusion View Mobile at mippin.com/fusionview and ZenGuide Mobile at mippin.com/zenguide. Mippin positions itself as a mobile social network for news and blogs so that you can access such sites entirely from within the Mippin network. I like Mippin because of the attractive first page when you arrive at my blogs - there’s a list of simple headings with photos from the relevant posts. At the bottom of each post, you have the option to email the post, Twitter it or Share it on Facebook, which gives an added interactive, social media experience. The main mobile Mippin site itself offers you mobile-optimised aggregated news and blogs to read when you access it on m.mippin.com.

You can get Fusion View on your phone via Mippin by clicking on the “Make it Mobile” badge on the sidebar on far right of the site.

The second mobilising application is www.mofuse.com, which also offers free accounts. I created Mofuse versions of Fusion View Mobile at fusionview.mofuse.mobi and ZenGuide Mobile at zenguide.mofuse.mobi. This applicaiton has one specific function, which is to optimise your site for mobile browsing. The first page when you arrive on my blogs offers a neat list of the post headings but without images. Clicking through takes you to the whole of relevant post with the photos as well. You can access the comments to the post directly within the Mofuse interface (in Mippin, you have to leave the Mippin interface to do that) but there is no social media element whereby you can email the post etc in the way that you can within Mippin.

You can get the Mofuse version by clicking on the green “Mobile” badge on the sidebar on far right of the site.

Do check out both versions and let me know what you think. Do you prefer one over the other? Are you more inclined to email a post / Twitter it or Share it on Facebook - or are you more interested in interacting via the comments section?

I got a new mobile phone a few months ago and I’ve been slowly exploring all its functions - and in the process, I’m discovering a whole new mobilesphere (I have no idea if there is such a word but it seems an apt way to describe the world of mobile media in the way that blogosphere describes the world of blogs!). My new phone is also a mobile computer, running Windows Mobile and 80% of its front face is given over to the screen - the phone part of it has a virtual keypad for me to touch-type the phone number. It runs a mobile version of Word, Excel, Outlook and Internet Explorer. It has WiFi so so I can surf the internet as well as send and receive emails if there’s a WiFi service available - but I also splashed out and signed up for a monthly data plan so I could be connected wherever I am. With unlimited texting and a huge number of talk minutes on top of all that, the way I relate to my mobile phone has completely changed.

I used my old mobile phone solely for voice calls - and I did not use it a great deal as I don’t like shouting out my part of the conversation in public while I’m on the bus or in the street. I hated texting as I am not very nimble on using the telephone number keys to type out words. My new phone has a Qwerty keyboard (ie like a PC keyboard) as well as letter recognition on a touch-sensitive screen. Now I can email or SMS to my heart’s content in public - an excellent way to pass the time on the bus or wherever I am in transit!

Being a writer with this new writing tool to play with, naturally, I was curious when I came across an article about mobile phone novels. These are apparently huge in Japan. According to Wired magazine: “A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each.” The novelists tend to be young twenty-somethings or even teenagers who type their novels via their own cellphones. According to the writer interviewed by Wired, she can type faster on her phone than on a standard keyboard. There’s even a first mobile phone novel award - sponsored by the premier site that hosts these novels Magic iLand: might you call it the MoBooker?

There has been one author in the West who has written a novel on his mobile phone. According to a news report, “Italian writer Robert Bernocco took advantage of his idle time while commuting to and from work by train, writing his 384-page science fiction novel, Compagni di Viaggo (Fellow Travelers is the English translation), on his Nokia 6630 phone, using the phone’s T9 typing system.” The book has been published in traditional book form by Lulu.com.

I have to say, I admire the abilities of these two writers to master the mobile phone keypad. Even with the mini Qwerty keyboard and letter-recognition function of my new phone, I do not have the patience to write more than a few short text messages or emails on the fiddly thing!

It seems to me, in the West, there has not been any novel specially written for the mobile phone, as far as I know. I don’t think that the reason is necessarily the difficulty of writing on a mobile phone keypad - presumably, one could write it on a PC, blog-style, and then post it to whatever mobile phone novel site there is around. I wonder if Wester writers shouldn’t try this potential new genre. It would be a great way for a new writer starting out to write 500 words at a time. It’s great for readers as most of us have our mobile phones with us at all times - it’s a handy way to read short bite-sized chunks. Writing short, gripping prose is pretty hard, to be sure, and reading a lot of text on a tiny screen can be hard on the eyes. But I think these are excellent challenges for a writer to evolve a writing style exactly suited to this new medium - rather like writing poetry to the constraints of the sonnet form rather than just sticking a few lines together in the modern free-form style.

Would you read a novel on your mobile phone? Do you know of any writers in English who have a written mobile phone novel? Would you, as a writer, be tempted to try writing one? Add a comment or email me and share your views.

Photo: thanks to europe.htc.com

As a writer, one of the most difficult tasks is keeping my notes and research in order. For my fiction novels, I had a lot of research on geology and the structure of buildings (for The Flame Tree, which involved a defective tower that collapses) and on digital technology and brain function (for Mindgame, which turned on a plot to manipulate the minds of Asians). That was just over a decade ago and most of the research was in the form of articles from journals and photocopied pages from books. There was also all my handwritten notes. I stored them all in folders and ring-binders and after awhile it got really difficult to find the particular bit of information I wanted. I also had some recorded audio interviews on cassette tape which I stored in boxes.

Aah, how I longed to go paperless and be able to find what I needed “just like that” (snap of fingers!).

Working on my current non-fiction book on New Trends in International Public Relations, there is even more research than for the two fiction books put together. Fortunately, now that we are in the age of social media there are some great tools to help me sort, file and access my notes easily. First off, I have a del.icio.us bookmarking account. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is an free online service where you can bookmark webpages that are of interest and that you want to return to again. You can “tag” them with keywords eg asia, social-networks, copyright etc so you can retrieve them again by searching that keyword. You can also add a short description and later, search the text of that short description to retrieve the item you want. It’s part of the social media world because you can share your bookmarks - all of them or only those tagged with a certain keyword, as you choose. You can share them with the world or with only the people you choose or no-one at all. People can subscribe to follow what you are publicly bookmarking.

On the wiki site I’ve created for the book, you can see the feed of my public bookmarks of the webpages that are relevant to the theme of New Trends in International Public Relations - scroll to the bottom of the page. Not only am I able to save the webpages, I can also share them so whoever comes to the book wiki can see what I am currently researching.

The only problem about del.icio.us is that it only saves webpages and I’ve had to find some other means of storing my non-webpage research eg notes of discussions, recorded audio interviews, random thoughts I’ve had while on the bus, articles scanned from or torn out of journals. They have so far all gone into the trusty paper folders again.

However, I recently found Evernote, a virtual note-taking and note-storing site that is in beta trialling. It allows you to bookmark webpages as well as add your own notes and attach photos and audio files - which means that I can keep pretty much all my research in one virtual place so that I can chuck out the paper folders. They don’t support pdf files but a workaround is to upload those into my online storage account at Box.net and link to it from Evernote. I’ve installed their mobile application on my PDA so I can take notes on the fly and upload them directly to my Evernote account. That application also optimizes the Evernote site online for viewing my stored notes from my PDA so I don’t have to clog up my PDA’s memory with old notes. I can also forward emails to the account - so if someone sends me email replies to interview questions, I can keep that email together with my other notes on the same subject. And I’ve taken to snapping a photo of any handwritten Post-Its or other notes and sending those to Evernote as well. And it’s all searchable by text or keyword.

There are some limitations in Evernote’s functionality regarding sharing, private/ public options and elements of their filing logic compared to del.icio.us but hopefully, they’ll be able to improve on those with the feedback that their beta users are giving them. The main thing I’d like to see is greater flexibility in being able to share by reference to specific tags. I’m not switching entirely to Evernote for the current book project since I’m committted to del.icio.us for that but I will certainly be using Evernote more fully for my next book project.

For all you writers, students, researchers out there, I’d say that Evernote is certainly worth a try. It’s currently in beta trialling by invitation only - I have 9 invitations left so if you’d like one, add a comment below and I’ll get back to you on a first come first served basis. Remember to leave your email address in the relevant field - I’ll be able to respond to you but it will not be visible by anyone else.

Photo: of files thanks to Stephanie Asher from flickr.com (CCL)

Following my post about the Commercialization of the Web on my social media blog ZenGuide.co.uk, which forms part of the book I am co-authoring with Silvia Cambie on New Trends in International Public Relations, here is the section from the book that outlines the rise of the personal computer. What fascinates me about the history of the Personal Computer (PC) is how it developed from a military machine to something that most of us need to function in the modern world today - and how that evolution has changed society and human culture across the world.

The text is a verbatim section from the book and the links are set out at the bottom of this post as footnotes rather than embedded links. The text is copyrighted and all rights are reserved.

Computers Get Personal

The evolution of technology is a mega-trend today that no business can ignore. A brief tour of the evolution of computers illustrates the importance of keeping your eye on technological developments.

In 1948, IBM´s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, which was to calculate the position of the moon for the 1969 Apollo mission to the moon, took up floor space of 25 feet by 40 feet. In 1951, the computer for the US Census Bureau was one of the early commercial computers and it took up 943 cubic feet, selling at US $1million each plus US $185,000 for a high speed printer. By 1968, the cost of a computer was down to US $8,000 with Data General Corp’s Nova which was the size of small writing bureau.[i]

In 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 could be bought by computer hobbyists from Popular Electronics magazine for US $395 as a kit or US $495 pre-assembled[ii]. The next year, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created Apple 1, which sold at just over US $600[iii]. In 1981, Radio Shack’s TRS-82 Model III retailed for US $699. By now, computers were housed in boxes that could be used on a normal office desk and had the shape and set up that we are familiar with today. There is a screen and keyboard and a joystick for navigation. Software came via cassette tape, which was beginning to be replaced by the floppy drive. The data appeared as text or figures and there were no graphics. While available for consumer purchase, it was still the math and science geeks who were the main market demographic for these personal computers.

In 1984, the first Apple Macintosh appeared, with a graphical interface – ie the data could be accessed by activating icons on the screen and navigation was by way of a device called a “mouse”[iv]. At around the same time, Microsoft released the first version of Windows, its own graphical interface sitting on top of MS-DOS, the text-based version of Microsoft software used by most computer manufacturing companies at that time, including IBM and Compaq[v].

By the mid-1990s, you were also getting more bang for your buck when it came to computer processing chips with Intel unveiling its Pentium chip at under US $1,000[vi]. While business and industry had been using computers for decades, plummeting costs, greater processing power and increased ease of use meant that for the first time, it made sense for the public to buy a computer for personal use. People were becoming used to computers from their work environment. It was a natural transition to getting a computer for home use. PCs, as personal computers soon came to be called, were also fun – computer games loaded by CD-ROM became a serious contender to TV-based consoles in 1994[vii]. With PCs arriving in many homes bundled with Internet Explorer for access to the internet, Outlook Express for email and a host of other useful (eg Calendar, Paint and CD-ROMs packed with dictionaries and encyclopedias) and not-so-useful applications (eg Minesweeper and Solitaire games), our personal relationship with our home computers as a source of productivity, fun, information and communication truly began.

In 1995, there were 50 million personal computers sold globally.[viii] By 2000, computer sales in China alone were growing faster than any market in the world, with 4.1 million PCs bought in that one country during the second quarter[ix]. Now in the first decade of the 21^st century, there are over 257 million personal computers sold worldwide[x] and sales are likely to increase over the next few years, in particular of laptops and other mobile computing equipment as affordability, performance and wireless access improve. Gartner, the IT consultants, calculate that emerging markets made up 70% of the growth in overall computer sales and projected that laptop sales during 2008 would grow by 11%. They are confident that a looming global recession would not slow sales[xi]. Experts elsewhere in the industry also seem to agree that mobile computing will bring the next wave of growth for the sector. Loren Loverde, the Director of data firm IDC’s PC Tracker, says, “It will be increasingly important for PC vendors to have a strong portable offering to stay competitive as the market continues its rapid shift to mobile computing.”[xii]

It took 30 years for computers to evolve from military and government use via business and industry to become affordable for a limited geek market, with prices dropping from US $1,000,000 to stabilise around US $700. But from the 1970s onwards, major developments in processing power, size and ease of use surged ahead in leaps and bounds. And with each technological leap and bound, we adapted the way we communicate, relate and work. Even as some businesses are only now thinking about getting their first website (and there are quite a few of those still around), the market is already surging ahead towards online social media and mobile communications. For anyone engaged in business nowadays, it is critical to keep one eye on the latest technological and communications advances if you don’t want to be left behind.

For many of us over a certain age, the digital revolution has really changed our lives in a dramatic way - especially if you compare how things are now with what we were doing 30 years ago. I’ve written about such stark contrasts in my post about the difficulties and costs of phoning home to Malaysia from the UK in the 1970s and touched on how our working lives have changed because of the computer. So my interest was immediately sparked when I came across a post on music players on Say Lee’s blog A Pleasant Surprise(s), a personal blog from a Malaysian emigre to Florida, USA, talking about his daily life, family and musings on Chinese and Buddhist philosophy.

He wrote about his experiences of listening to music over the decades, starting with vinyl records played on a gramaphone and progressing via the Sony Walkman to today’s MP3 players. It reminded me of fiddling around with a cassette recorder and leads trying to tape vinyl records off my parents hi-fi so we could listen to taped music in the car. And of songs getting stuck on the turn-table if there was a scratch on the record. And the pain of having your favourite tape chewed by the tape machine and trying to unravel the mess of brown tangle from the mechanism - especially if you’d actually bought the cassette and had no other back up of it.

On the other hand, it was fun to sit around with friends passing the record sleeve around, reading the lyrics from the insert and gazing at the big photos of your favourite singer or band. And making mixer tapes of songs for your friends, writing out the titles by hand and decorating the tape box with stickers. Sure, MP3 players and iPods are much more efficient and easy and portable but doing things the old-fashioned way had a fun of its own, too.

Say Lee also writes about Chinese traditions like the Moon Cake Festival and finds opportunities to muse on Buddhist philosophy from everyday moments. I also like the warmth with which he writes about his family and it’s just delightful how he proudly displays his wife’s Chinese watercolours on his blog.

Last Sunday morning, I had a conference call with my sister (in London) and my parents (in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) using Skype. My sister and I were using Skype on our computers on the voice call, occassionally exchanging short chat messages when the sound quality warped. My parents were on speakerphone in KL and I had conferenced them in using SkypeOut (they don’t have a computer). The sound quality was patchy at times and the whole conversation took a longer because we had to repeat ourselves from time to time.

But it was brilliant to be able to have all of us on the call at the same time. And it cost be about 30-40p altogether for the SkypeOut part of the call.

It made me think about how difficult it used to be to speak to my family from England when I first came over. Mobile phones had not been invented yet and all we had at school was a call box in the cold, dark cubby hole under the stairs. The school discouraged us from calling home more than once a week - in case the contact with home made us more homesick and unhappy with our lot at school. So once a week, the girls would queue up on the stairs to call home.

I don’t think I called home once a week because of the cost of the call. It was a coin-operated phone which we had to feed with a ton of coins. The only way to do it was to call reverse-charge and back in those days, reverse charge calls were even more expensive. I’d queue up and call my uncle in London instead. It was nice to chat to him as a family contact but it wasn’t the same as speaking to my mummy. (I was 12.)

Later on, after I went to university, I think overseas calls got a bit cheaper and I’d call once a month or something like that - reverse charge - from my digs in Oxford. We had one payphone that we all shared. I don’t remember using the phone much with my friends - we used the “pigeon post” system where we could send written notes on bits of paper to students in other colleges via the University’s internal mail system, or we would just turn up at someone’s room or at their digs and hope they’d be in. (The mobile phone still hadn’t been invented then).

When I started work and had my own place, I remember being careful about making non-essential calls after lunch or in the evenings as calls in the morning were more expensive. I was the first among my friends, being a techhy type even then, to get an answering machine. It was at least a year or more before some of my friends could even get over the strangeness of it and leave a message. And when I got a fax machine, I’d say, “Fax me the directions of how to get to your place” and they’d just laugh at me. (And yes, we were still waiting for the mobile phone to be invented).

I went off on a cycling holiday in Spain in the late 1980s with a three other friends - back in those days without mobile phones - and at one stage, we had to split into two pairs because of illness and bicycle problems. One friend and I would cycle the rest of the way and the other two would take the train. We pulled out our maps and poring over the route, we agreed that we’d meet again at our end destination, Santiago de Compostela. I made a list of the three hotels in our guidebook and we would aim to meet at the one at the top of the list first. If the other pair was not there, we’d work our way down to the other two. And if we came to the end of the list and we couldn’t find each other? That option never crossed our minds. I can’t imagine doing that trip now without at least texting or Twittering each other every hour!

These days, we text and Twitter and Skype and chat online and call without a second thought. I’ve got my mum signed up to receive my tweets on her mobile phone and she’s getting the hang of texting. On some call plans, it’s actually now cheaper to call her in Malaysia than to call a UK landline. I’m now looking into signing us all up on Jajah.com to get free landline conference calling this coming Sunday - hey, why spend 30-40p if we can do it for nothing…

Photo: thanks to porticus.org

Here is a fun video showing the Mona Lisa being painted using Microsoft Paint. There’s some funky music to go with it if you enable the sound on your PC.

I think Leonardo would’ve been amused, given that he was an innovator and was always experimenting with different ideas. I imagine that he would have been a geek had he been born today!

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