I Want A Phone With Average Intelligence

I'm heading back from a case competition at Boston University where several business schools competed around the topic of an all IP converged world. It led to some very interesting discussions surrounding how the future will unfold. And one thought that sticks with me from our discussions is the idea of an "average intelligence" phone.

We're all used to the idea of a smartphone and what it offers over a typical device. And yes, the lines between phone and smartphone are quickly blurring as the technology in our devices gets better and better. Email, texting, cameras, internet, bluetooth and all of the things that we need in our busy lives are becoming commonplace for all of us.

But we all know the problem. Five hours of use, and we need to scramble to find an outlet for more juice. Our phones are more and more powerful but require more and more power. What if we could offload the power intensive applications to the cloud. The idea of cloud computing is quickly becoming more popular, regardless of the multiple definitions people associate it with. Google docs, MobileMe and other services are allowing us to work more efficiently with our data and software running elsewhere.

I think our phones should do the same. With better connectivity and higher speed access, we can have devices that keep basic functionality in the phone, but send higher end processes out to be handled elsewhere. We definitely don't need to send basic tasks like a calculator or solitaire, but things like gaming, video processing and other media rich applications are perfectly suited for this. The resulting phones would send out the really "smart" functions and keep the "dumb" stuff local. Hence, the "average intelligence" device.

For a good example, the online gaming service OnLive does exactly this. They offer a gaming service that can run on almost any device. The processing is done on a server where there is capacity, while the frames are the only thing sent to your device. You are essentially watching a video of your game as it is being played on a cluster. I think this is a model that will hit PC's first, but I think mobile devices are the best place for this kind of technology.

I remember SGI working on a similar technology previously. Computationally intensive visualizations were handled by a supercomputer, while the resulting output was streamed to any kind of device.

The benefits? Better battery life, cheaper devices, backed up data in the cloud, software updated remotely, and the ability to move your applications seamlessly from one device to another.

The problem? It requires an operator to take the leap and instantiate this kind of service. And the infrastructure required is expensive. It's the chicken and egg kind of problem. However, in this case, most of our devices can likely already handle the output. The iPhone and Palm Pre are the beginnings of this kind of service. Hopefully it quickly becomes viable to the people who are in the position to offer it.

twitter vs facebook

People have been talking all over the interwebs/tubespace about the competition between twitter and facebook. Perhaps its because of facebook's redesign that makes it closely mimic a twitter feed. Or perhaps it's the fact that people associate fb status and tweets the same way. One of the articles I reference in the beginning talks about facebook being passive, and twitter being active. I would go one step further.

I see them this way:

facebook is my ultimate phonebook/rolodex/event planning tool
If I run into someone who I haven't seen in a while, or meet someone who I want to keep in touch with, I can just tell them to find me on facebook. It's that simple. No longer do I have to remember phone numbers, or even bother to enter their number into my phone. As long as I know your name, I'm set.

And you want to throw a party, or get people together for dinner? Send invites via a facebook event. All my friends are on there, so everyone will see it.

twitter is my status tool and primary way to quickly communicate
Am I out and about somewhere cool? Do I want to share a link, picture or video? twitter is how I'm going to do that. Whereas I have to go to facebook to see status updates, twitter is being pushed to me all the time. I can search who's tweeting nearby, get updates about where people are eating, etc.

I find that keeping these tools separated by function will make my life a whole lot easier to manage. Initially upon signing up with twitter I was getting overwhelmed with information, trying to keep my status updates on fb in sync with twitter. That's not the way to do it. By utilizing facebook as my phonebook/rolodex and twitter as my status tool, I can quickly decide what is appropriate for each platform.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts as well. Am I missing something fundamental? @kones

Twitter Sheep or Shepperd?

I've been quite obsessed with twitter lately. More accurately, I've been obsessed with the incredible potential that twitter offers. This is definitely skewed towards a marketing perspective because, well, I'm studying marketing at business school with a focus towards the high tech industry. So, I'm a geek that wants to sell you things. That being said, I am excited about what Twitter for more than just marketing purposes. I'll briefly touch on two things that have been on my mind in the past few days about the twitterverse.

1. How many people should I follow? (The pull)
As I am fairly new to twitter, only about a month or two in, I have been trying to navigate my way through noise in order to figure out the best way to use it both for pushing and pulling content. I prefer to use it to follow thought leaders of industry, people like Tim O'Reilly & Kevin Rose, or up and coming companies like hulu & boxee. It's been a great way to stay on top of issues that are near and dear to my heart. However there are also a few hundred of my "nearest and dearest" b-school buddies who are also getting into twitter. Many of them tend to use it as a glorified IM platform, which understandably, is a perfectly valid use of twitter. I just can't stand opening up my feed and seeing a 100 @replies of a conversation. I have taken a hard stance on how many people I'll follow for this reason. Perhaps I piss off some who I don't follow back, but I don't feel it's a required practice. I had an interesting discussion with @mattweg about the ratio of following/followers and how it is an interesting metric that may or may not be related to how many followers one receives via services like Mr. Tweet for example. I'd love to here thoughts from anyone in the know. Tweet me: @kones

2.How often should I post? (The push)
The other issue is how often should one post. I had this discussion with @jfalk, who's been using twitter considerably longer than I have. He tries to keep his tweets to one or two a week, only posting niche specific content. While I am still figuring out how I want to use twitter, I tend to tweet as I feel like it, when I find interesting web content, or (less often) when I have something poignant to say in 140 characters or less. I log on using thwirl on my laptop or twitterfon on my iphone and immediately respond to any @replies I've received, but then want to post a link or comment and feel like it can be overkill. I've often refrained from tweeting something interesting because I don't want to overdo it. There's one person who I no longer follow who had great updates, but they happened 6 times an hour. It was just clogging up my stream.

These are just some random thoughts, twitter has reinvigorated the need for me to start blogging again, and 140 characters can be somewhat restrictive. I don't want people to bookmark this page, b/c I'll link to any post through twitter, and prefer to just have the followers there instead. This page may move, it's acting as just overflow for the time being. I hope you enjoy my ranting and raving.