Why all the fuss? I’m hoping this will be my last posting on the subject I’ve been blogging about. [UPDATE: 4 linked postings here]

NO, I am NOT going to argue that this is the revolutionary educational box we’ve been waiting for. I’ve ranted against “the next big thing fallacy in education” elsewhere.

YES, I am composing this entry entirely on the gizmo itself.. booted from a cold start a few moments ago.

Here are the reasons I think this is a big deal:

1. Alignment Of The Planets: many factors are now in place, at last, to bring about the computer I first saw when Alan Kay showed a cardboard mockup at Xerox PARC in 1972. That’s 35 years… but now the hardware, software, developer and end-user ecosystems are at last aligned to have “good enough/ cheap enough” ubiquitous computing technology at our disposal

2. GNU/Linux: it’s essentially free, and eminently hackable – and the next generation of kids will noodle their away around this stuff with no problem

3. Web Apps: Web apps have matured into stuff we can really use a LOT of the time for a lot of our computing needs

4. gOS: The ‘almost Google OS’ we see on the Everex PC, essentially combinations of 2 and 3 above with Firefox and other goodies such as Skype, makes a robust, powerful, and usable environment

5. Cheap: Hey, you can buy 3 of ‘em. Or, another way to look at this is to think of it as Your Third Computer. Forget about Desktop replacement, laptop replacement, or PDA replacement… keep those, all good in their niches – this is a perfect Third Computer.

6. Solid state: it’s quiet… no moving parts – hooray!!! Psion’ 7 and Windows HPC and others have tried and failed before… that’s partly because they didn ‘t have all the ingredients above… partly because no one wanted to fork out so much money when they could have a full-spec Toshiba laptop for the same price.

7. Does ‘enough’: it does 95% of what I do on a regular basis

8. Grandma: it has a friendly enough interface to satisfy the constraints of my fantasized “Grandma-friendly computer”

9. Kitchen: well, use it ‘wherever’ … in precisely the places where other computers would be inappropriate or too worrying.

10. No-thinkee: you don’t have to think “shall I take this with me”

That’s it… 20 minutes from cold bootup to posting this entry. I’ll need 2 more to upload the photo I just took. Only 1 beef is that the right shift key is in the wrong place… I’m a demon touch-typist, and the keyboard is tiny, of course, but fine.

UPDATE 19:35, same day: I’m adding this update paragraph from a conventional big-keyboard machine… everything you see in this posting above, as well as the Technorati Tags below, was done on the Asus Eee itself. I wrote down my start time when I opend the stone-cold machine: 15:38. The blog posting was live by 15:54, so that’s 16 minutes from a cold start, with no prep, no notes, and only 2 minutes playing with the machine a few days earlier. It then took me about 5-6 minutes of fiddling to upload the photo from my camera: the SD card worked perfectly, and the image opened up immediately… but it took me a little while to make sense of the menu choice in the image handling package I selected. No big deal. Also, I forgot to say that I opened a handful of tabs in Firefox to do quick copy/pasting of the embedded links to my old blog entries and to copy the Technorati tags I use (the ones below are the originals, copy/pasted live on the Asus Eee at the time I wrote the above notes). During all my frantic window juggling, Firefox crashed!!! I was halfway through the blog posting, but delighted to find that when I re-started it, the option ‘restore session’ brought up WordPress with all of my as-yet-unsaved draft completely intact (whew). So I reckon that the 20-minute-total time from cold start to live blog entry with photo is approximately correct – 22 minutes max, including crashed Firefox recovery. When I had finished, Mark Gaved then tried the Asus with a 1280×1024 external monitor at full resolution: it looked great! All in all, ‘full marks’. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that (a) this was a pretty exceptional, intensive and fast-paced 10-finger typing exercise, and (b) it’s now almost 4 hours later as I’m adding these notes, and my right hand aches. That’s almost certainly why this needs to be a ‘Third Computer’ for me – but in that niche, I love it. ;-) Finally, check out these cool additional resource links from Ninelocks’ blog.

Technorati Tags: rm, asus, eee, minibook, laptop, linux, olpc

My eye caught a New York Times article about the Everex gPC TC2502, a vanilla box that comes loaded with Ubuntu Linux and instant access to (quoting from a more informative CNet review):

popular and useful Web 2.0 services from Google and other vendors… Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube, for example, as well as Meebo, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Sprinkled into the lineup are some non-Web-based apps, like Skype and Gimp…

They’ve dubbed their Ubuntu + GUI the ‘gOS’ (Google Operating System)… the name is unofficial, in the sense that there is no ‘Google Operating System’ as such, but what the heck: it describes the de facto situation! It also comes with an energy-saving CPU, decent peripherals, etc – what’s not to like? OK, so it’s being sold by Wal-Mart… but whereas the CNet article enthuses and links to other low cost Linux boxes for the masses, in the UK the reports were somewhat different. On a tech.co.uk posting today I see firstly, a sub-headline

Ubuntu Linux installed, but could run Vista (badly)

Ha! Trust me, the possibility of running Vista was not what attracted me to these cheap machines! Just look at this enlargement of the summary gOS screen shot above (courtesy DeskTopLinux.com – thanks!). Cute, no?

Secondly, I see this outrageous commentary on the likelihood of such an environment appearing in the UK:

So are cheap Linux PCs likely to hit UK shops anytime soon? We checked in with PC World, which said that it had no immediate plans to introduce Linux systems into its shops.

“Our customers are very used to, and comfortable with, the range of Microsoft and Apple computers that we offer”, a spokesman for PC World told us. “We have no plans to sell Linux PCs at this stage but technology is a fast-moving business so you should never say never…”

That’s pathetic. I hope entrepreneurs around the UK spot this hot niche and move into it quickly. £100 webtop box – why not? It does everything most casual users need most of the time. (And I’m no Linux fanboy – in fact, I’m thoroguhly bored with operating systems and upgrades of all flavours… I couldn’t care less at this point.) Fortunately, RM in the UK is already agressive in this niche, and is sourcing the ASUS EEE PC, essentially a £169 Linux laptop for school children, but also usable as a cheap ‘access box to go’. I’ve got one on order, and will give you the lowdown as soon as it arrives.

Technorati Tags: linux, ubuntu, olpc, asus, everex, gpc, gos

The New York Times had a Tech article on 14th October entitled “Video Chat Service Aims to Follow YouTube’s Path” in which they wrote

A Web start-up company with some of the same backers who helped catapult YouTube to glory wants to do for live video chats what YouTube did for video watching. The company, TokBox, allows people with Webcams and broadband Internet connections to conduct face-to-face chats inside a Web browser. Users can visit its site, www.tokbox.com, or add a TokBox module to their pages on social Web sites like MySpace.

Sure enough, TokBox’s 1-to-1 Flash video chat is easily embeddable anywhere… here’s mine below (if I’m there, you can click to chat to me). I had it in my sidebar originally, but moved it to just this posting so it’ll disappear with time):

It’s great that they’re getting all this publicity, and that they’ve raised $4 Million from Sequoia Capital, even though, as it says in the article (”…then it will be up to the company to figure out a way to make money”)

I have mixed feelings about this (or maybe it’s just envy?). Ease of use and embeddability are crucial, so they’re doing the right thing. But $4M while figuring out how to make money: wow, I’d better go meet some of these guys, then. KMi’s FlashVlog is embeddable in the same way… my little ‘greeting’ in the upper right is exactly this, and our FlashMeeting does multiparty video chat much better. But quick 1-to-1, easily embedded anywhere, is a strong idea, and undoubtedly this is what Sequoia and others are banking on: they have a great window of opportunity for viral growth that other players in this space may have missed. They use Gigya to simplify embedding anywhere, and I would assume that the lion’s share of that investment capital must be going on scale, scale, scale, which is of vital importance. On the other hand, entry barriers are pretty low IMHO. If you can bankroll the scalability, then Flash already solves most of your problems for you. The Tokbox ‘user experience’ is pretty good, I must say. You need a headset to avoid audio feedback, but this is pretty normal these days– the alternative for a tool provider is to opt for push-to-talk audio like FlashMeeting has.

NOTE: if you run other tools that use Flash video, e.g. if you have a permanent presence is some other environment, like our own Hexagon, then you’re out of luck unless you spawn a fresh tabbed browser in advance: if you launch in a separate window, Flash does not like to handle two video environoments at once.

SUGGESTION FOR TOKBOX: The embeddable variant ought to be ‘less wide’, e.g. a single square that does ‘window-in-window’ video like Skype, or perhaps ‘expands or pops out when a call starts’: this will make it much more appealing for blog sidebar embedding and other similar locations where users are fussy about their screen real estate.

Technorati Tags: tokbox, flash, flashmeeting, flashvlog, video, chat

It’s been all over the tech press and blogosphere for the past 2 days (catch up with everything via this great Techmeme listing for example), but nobody I’ve read so far is saying the following:

1. BAD: this may put the brakes on some great visionary European entrepreneurial activity (see for example Saul Klein’s great posting “Y Europe can seed growth of its new stars”.

2. GOOD: OK, so consider it a sanity check, and a healthy way to avoid crazy valuation bubbles for now.

3. CURIOUS: Ever since I was a kid, I have thought “Gee, I wish I could lose billions of dollars in some deal, and walk away with a phat handshake (or should I say drive away in my Rolls-Royce)”. Pretty interesting: ok, some shareholders are down a few bucks each (oh wait, they’re actually UP as of yesterday… add another notch to the ‘curiosity’ levels), and the key people in the chain are laughing all the way to the bank. “Re-structuring”, “earn-outs”, “taking a charge for this quarter”. Bah. Hey, I’m not knocking capitalism – but this ain’t capitalism, it’s voodoo. To me, anyway: obviously if I understood it better, I’d be laughing too.

Technorati Tags: skype, ebay

OK, Mashable.com doesn’t call it that (no need) – the headline above is just to catch your eye. They have so many great pointers and comments every day that you ought to be sure to subscribe to their feeds directly, but I thought I would flag a few interesting one that just caught my eye.

The links below and any quotes are all related to the original Mashable postings, since that what caught my eye – you can then follow those onwards to the ‘native’ sites:

TalkBean Launches Language Tutor Site without a Community

TalkBean is a new site that lets tutors teach language online. All lessons are performed live, using webcams. As a tutor, you can set your schedule to show times when you are available. Students can set up an appointment with you, or they will see when you are online if you choose to go live, making yourself immediately available to teach. … There are a few drawbacks to the site…

Grockit Lands $2.3M of its Series A Round

Launched by Fabrood Nivi, an award-winning exam preparatory instructor, Grockit offers a more cost efficient alternative for test takers, and is taught via WebEx. You can get 16 90-minute sessions with GMAT review text books for about $400.

LessonBites Launches iTunes Model for Educational Video

LessonBites is a new video site that aims to provide an online marketplace for instructors and consumers. As an instructor, you can upload a video to LessonBites. This will cost you about $10 per video, not including the membership fee required upon registration, which allows you to upload one instructional and three sample videos. When users purchase your instructional video to download, you earn money.

Tutorom is a Free E-learning Community

Tutorom is an e-learning community that has created a marketplace for students and teachers. Anyone can submit lessons on Tutorom, and the site is free for those seeking lessons in a variety of subjects, from AJAX to cooking. Lessons can be submitted as text, or even video files. As a user, you can choose to register in order to gain access to premium lessons and turn ads off. As a teacher, you can charge for your lessons, or earn 10% of ad revenue by becoming a registered member as well. Lessons can be rated on a 5-star scale, and bookmarked for later use, though other users cannot be bookmarked. Tutorom tracks every lesson you look at and gives you a report on how many times it’s been viewed.

xLingo Offers Foreign Exchange Language Community

xLingo is a new site that’s created an online community for the exchange of foreign language. No matter what language you speak, you can register for xLingo to offer yourself as an instructor of the languages you speak, as well as finding others that can teach you the language you wish to learn. When you register, and when you search for other users, you can select what kind of access you’d like to have on the site, whether it be via email, chat or phone. Other search parameters include country, age and gender, among other things. You can indicate on your profile your Skype status as well.

Chegg Launches Textbookflix–Book Rental for College Students

Textbookflix, despite its name, has nothing to do with movies, but everything to do with text books. With this service, you can rent text books for the semester. Launched by Chegg, which has established itself as a classifieds system for students to buy and sell textbooks, among other things, Textbookflix has created a similar system for students to rent text books in the same way that you rent movies from Netflix. Right now, about a handful of schools are participating in the textbookflix program, letting you search by university, department and course. From there, you can rent the book you need for a price far lower than the book’s purchase price. Send it back at the end of the semester. This is great in theory, and hopefully textbookflix can pull it off.

Personally, I like the sound of Tutorom, so am going to dig a little more deeply – it relates a lot to what we have been discussing in our OpenLearn groups when thinking about next generation activities. This is a great collection of ‘heads up’ articles. I’ve only quoted the opening line and main intro paragraph and deliberately not put in direct links to each site, so you can read the Mashable articles for yourself – they are filled with screen grabs and critical commentary as appropriate, and make a great resource for educators everywhere… check ‘em out!

P.S. WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL (I hear you ask), especially since I’ve been so critical of elearning?
The big deal is that most of the sites described in the Mashable listings above are ‘bottom up’ in conception – i.e. they originate from grassroots-creatable content, and provide social/matchmaking capabilities to link teachers and learners. Will they work? I have no idea – certainly not until the content rises above some critical quality threshold. The trick is to push both the envelope and the quality threshold, getting good content a la OpenLearn, and good grassroots involvement, and good ‘mentor-finding’ services.

Grrrrr. My instincts told me not to mess with the new BBC iPlayer. But what the heck. I love the BBC, and I wanted this to work. Kind of like how I used to want Bob Dylan to sing on key, and could more or less ‘will it’ to happen. Kind of like how I used to want RealNetworks to succeed. Now the only thing I want (as far as new media technology is concerned) is a simple and robust end-user experience. So the sad ‘joke’ in the headline is that I fear that the BBC has suffered from its long-term association with Real, which for a long time bugged me with its over-complex download/install/signup ‘procedure’. This is ironic, given that iPlayer is dependent on Windows Media Player (rather than Real Player) underneath – all the more painful then, as it now appears to be the worst of multiple worlds.

So what went wrong? How do I know? I merely struggled for a while, and have temporarily given up. Here’s the lowdown:

I can forgive the Windows XP dependency (just).

I can forgive the Internet Explorer dependency (just – this one actually caught me out briefly).

I can forgive the Windows Media Player dependency (just – but aaargh, during installation it forced me to branch off to a separate Media Player update, although that side of things is normally pretty up-to-date on my machines).

I can forgive the special and unmemorable login/password combo needed to unlock the iPlayer.

I can forgive the special proxy settings required to get past my corporate firewall.

[Man, I am one forgiving son-of-a-gun. You think I was kidding about wanting Bob Dylan to sing on key?]

I can understand (just) why I need a separate BBC.co.uk membership ID, but when it comes to mandatory double-login to ‘do the business’ (iPlayer and BBC), my forgiving mood starts running out.

When the most salient feature of any mouse-rolloever graphic on the site is the number of days left before the rights to any media clip expire, then I start thinking I’m living in a time warp. It’s 2007 for goodness sake. And the second most salient feature is some tag that is not strongly relevant, like ‘Northern Scotland’ (for a Mountain programme) or the date of the programme, used as a tag.

When the ‘automatic proxy fixer’ says it is modifying my REGISTRY, my forgiving mood has long since expired.

When the proxy settings appear to ‘test’ OK but no downloads ever succeed, I start getting cross.

[UPDATE: aha, now my first two downloads have suddenly succeeded after a long stretch of "0%". That's the good news. The bad news is that going 'full screen' crashed the player.]

Forget about ‘why would I ever watch any of these clips on my PC anyway’ – I just might, and I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But the download/install/signup procedure is too arcane by a factor of three; the overemphasis on glitzy graphics at the expense of easy indexing/search is too annoying (the alphabetic list is chunked like that of a PlayStation or mobile phone, which is fine for certain devices, but seriously annoying on a more flexible PC: I suppose this is ultimately designed for a ’sit back living room’ experience, so I’ll suspend judgement on this element for now); the proxy settings are simultaneously ‘too smart’ and ‘too ineffective’ (I can handle one or the other… e.g. Skype is smart AND effective, QuickTime is dumb, but you can make it effective with manual modification); the heavy date-expiry-dependency is both intimidating and confusing.

Yes, I can understand why they have to do all this. But no, I cannot forgive the arrival of such a poor user experience by such a powerhouse organization at such a late date on the Internet-media-timeline.

Grrrrr.

Technorati Tags: bbc, iplayer, drm, media, video

Saul Klein has been blogging in his “Y Europe” posts about the hot entrepreneurial possibilities now available in and around London – arguing in his original posting and followup analysis that the combination of mood, confidence, density of talent, and Euro-initiated global success stories like Skype and Last.FM have now made Europe, and London in particular, second only to Silicon Valley in terms of possibilities for getting things cooking among investors, new startups, young hackers, and the rest of the mix needed to create a self-perpetuating series of big successes.

To put his money where his mouth is (which, in fact, is precisely one of the things he does for a living) he has set up the Regent St. London Open Coffee Club Meetup, and written about it here , with latest attendee updates here.

Saul writes:

This is an attempt to establish recognized, open and regular meeting places where entrepreneurs can meet with investors (and anyone else who fancies coming along) in a totally informal setting. The key is a regular place and a regular time – it’s not important who comes along, some days it might be no one – just that people know if they want to meet, this is the time and this is the place. We want to create some density for people — a few places where people know they can meet or bump into others.

Sounds good – I emailed Saul, in response to his blog entry, to say that I feel there’s a need in the Y Europe approach for academic R&D labs and their host institutions to be fully on board with this kind of thinking. Some already are, but there’s still a mindset shift necessary in many places. Hmmm… looks like I’ve got to put my money where my mouth is too, so I’ve just signed up, and will be heading down there to check it out!

Technorati Tags: meetup, entrepenuer, London, open.coffee.club

Kazaa/Skype Dynamic Duo Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström are, as Spencer Reiss’s Jan 17th Wired article nicely states:

the most feared digital tag team since Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page marched across the Net

In a nutshell, they’ve got the tech skills, the charisma, the attitude, and the cash, to do what ‘Internet TV’, ipTV, Video On Demand, and numerous other experiments, have failed to deliver: a great seamless experience of full-lenght big-screen video with an infinite number of channels, cool user interface, and social software sophistication. OK, OK, I’m signing up already… Joost

Technorati Tags: joost, skype, venice, project, , iptv, p2p, tv.

No sooner had I posted my previous entry on Skypcasts, than I received an email from Brian Schuliger, Senior Vice President of TalkShoe, suggesting that I might be interested in their network. And how!

TalkShoe allows you to integrate IP telephony, including Skype, group chat, conventional telephony, live audiocasting, and output the whole thing as an RSS-aggregatable MP3 (i.e. a podcast). Since it has host/moderator/audio bridge features built in, it looks to me like it was produced by Radio Professionals – but with amateur use in mind – just what the doctor ordered!

Digging a bit deeper, I found a site that makes use of TalkShoe and Skypecast to do some wonderful work: TechPodcasts.

The great thing about TechPodcasts is they pull in a variety of technologies to ‘do the business’, including text chat GoToMeeting (of which I’m a long-time user and enthusiast), to share screen control across disjoint presenters, and Camtasia Studio to record the entire experience for distribution to people who want to watch the replay. Here’s a great example of a recent TechPodcast.

Finally, one of the key technologies featured on the above TechPodcast happens to have been MotionBox – think YouTube but with the addition of highly intuitive and powerful editing tools, internal tagging (tag specific segments), and much much more – very nice! At first glance, it looks like it does for videos what Phanfare, that I also love and use regularly, has done for photos, but raises the bar a few notches along the way.

Technorati Tags: skype, skypecast, podcast, talkshoe, talk.radio, motionbox, flickr, phanfare, video.editing

Skype 3 Beta is available, including large multli-party Skypecast which has been around in test form for a few months (Click to enlarge image).

Last week I gave it a pretty heavy test drive…

Good news: Same easy install; simple interface; public IRC-style chats can be easily set up and people invited in via URL; browser plugin auto-parses/highlights phone numbers anywhere on page to make them all 1-click-to-call (very nice IMHO); multi-user talk-radio-style Skypcasts easy to set up.

The bad news (not so bad for a beta release, but caused me some grief, so I hope the team can resolve these soon): major firewall problems prevent me from using it at work – so I ran my tests at home – whereas Skype 2.x is fine in this respect; Skypecasts are riddled with too much ‘can you hear me?’, ‘am I on now’, ‘who is speaking?’, and audio noise, largely an artifact of full-duplex mode (see details immediately below).

What do I mean about the artifact of full-duplex mode? Here I’ll repeat what I wrote in a Skype forum posting:

The old VoxChat from about 10 years ago was a short-term runaway success and had both a key strength and a key weakness worth noting here (because I think it’s really important for Skypecasts to succeed):

the key strength is that they relied on ‘push-to-talk’: some people moan about push-to-talk buttons but it can be made very simple with a ’sticky key’ (that the moderator can override), and has the great advantage of making the ‘talking indicator’ trivial to implement; for very large discussion rooms, it is also a great way to observe the ebb-and-flow of the discussion, since you always know who is talking

the key weakness that ultimately killed them was sound-card dependency and lots of audio debugging nightmares… which nowadays are mostly resolved on modern machines.. moreover Skype has made it a lot simpler for people to test and setup! The reason I mention this weakness is that you just need be careful that every Skypecast isn’t ’sunk’ by poor audio, intrusive lurkers, lots of background noise because of too many people speaking at once,etc.: *MOST* of these problems can be eliminated by switching to a push-to-talk style…. which is why I mention it…

at the very least, push-to-talk ought to be a moderator option when the Skypecast is created!

Push-to-talk, or half-duplex mode, demonstrably works for large groups, whereas full duplex, for more than 2 people on the internet, is demonstrably awful (unless you implement some fancy voice-tracking to show who is speaking, but even then noise and latency spoil the party). Heck, FlashMeeting has been using half-duplex / push-to-talk for years, and scales up beautifully for this very reason. Indeed, FlashMeeting 3 has recently been launched, with tons of new features (read the KMi Planet News Story about it).

Here’s a handy thumbnail of a screen snapshot taken during a recent FlashMeeting I participated in. (Click to enlarge). What’s the big deal? The big deal is that we have 15 participants from all over Europe engaged in a mission-critical videoconference from their desktops, all in a Flash app for which they only needed a URL to join. If someone ‘has the floor’ (large image on the left), all you can do is ‘raise your hand’ to join the queue – there are 3 already in the queue in this snapshot. If you can’t wait, you can hit the interrupt button. Guess what? It really works. People rarely interrupt unless there’s a need, and the flow of the meeting/discussion is consequently very smooth. Cameras are optional, in fact, so running this like ‘internet talk radio’ is really trivial – and the quality is always excellent, because only one stream at a time is competing for your attention.

Technorati Tags: skype, skypecast, voip, flash, flashmeeting, synchronous, audio