The Week in Geek – July 29, 2008

NOTE: During the summer, the WiG goes on hiatus and publishes less frequently. This year I’m particularly busy writing my first book. I look forward to sharing info, soon!

I’VE MOVED: My office has moved to Fulton 460, the new home of IS at BC (the former CS department office).

Nairobi – the Next Palo Alto?
Another great article for those interested in how tech is impacting the world’s poor. For all of Nairobi’s problems (and they are many and deeply painful – including political unrest, oppressive poverty, crushing health concerns, a lack of world class technical universities, power outages), the New York Times shows how the city also sports a ‘digital brew’ that springs forth surprising innovation. Four times as many people own a phone as a bank account, so Safaricom, Kenya’s main mobile operator, offers M-pesa, a service that lets customers send money via text messages. Nokia offers a $33 mobile phone. One particularly tenacious hacker even developed a Nairobi-focused iPhone app, despite the fact that he didn’t have an iPhone, and Nairibi lacks iPhone coverage. A group of over 600 Kenyan hackers, dubbed “Skunk Works” is running geek confabs on topics like Google’s Android phone. In Silicon Valley tradition, most of the Skunk Works corp is under 25. The Times quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt, saying “Africa is a huge long-term market for us. We have to start by helping people get online, and the creativity of the people will take care of the rest.” Google has hired Nairobi graduates to map the city’s streets and structures for Google Maps, and the firm’s YouTube arm has struck deals to carry Kenyan programming. Google’s two Nairobi-based expats are (like a certain US presidential candidate) the children of an American and a Kenyan. The goal isn’t to take US Google to Africa, but to develop the right local services that empower the local market.

$1 Million Prize for Tech for the Poor
Fortune magazine has announced the Legatum Fortune Technology Prize, a $1 million prize award each year to for-profit efforts targeted at providing empowering technology products and services to the world’s poor. Chairman of the judging committee is Iqbal Quadir, founder of Grameen Telecom, one of Asia’s largest telecom providers that grew to notoriety through unique efforts targeted at grindingly poor micro-loan recipients (think the folks empowered by the efforts of Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus). Quadir’s efforts have been profiled in past WiGs and he is described by Fortune as “perhaps the world’s most renowned success in tech for the poor”. Quadir is now at MIT, heading the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship. Who’s Legatum? A firm backed by contrarian New Zealander investor, Christopher Chandler. Legatum has over $4 billion in investmetns in India alone. The effort was announced at Fortune’s Brainstorm conference.  While the $1 million may not be an enticement for pioneers that can have billion-dollar Grameen-style impact,  the prestige that Fortune’s coverage of the prize can offer may be a key catalist promoting “Bottom of the Pyramid” innovation.  The title link above has some great video along the right sidebar, with further coverage of the conference here.

China – More People Surfing the Web than US
The WiG covered this months ago, but here are some interesting additional stats: only 19.1% of Chinese use the net, leaving room for substantial growth (around 71% of the US population are Net users). BDA suggests China’s Net population will grow by 18 percent a year, reaching 490 million by 2012. China already has over 500 million mobile accounts, and expect mobile use to skyrocket as iPhone-like devices become cheaper and 3G rolls out. According to PwC and the IAB, China’s Internet companies pulled in $5.9 billion in revenues in 2007, up 48.6 % from the prior year. This compares with the $21.2 billion pulled in by just ‘07 U.S. online advertising revenues. Baidu said profits last quarter were $38.6 million. While Baidu is tops in China, compare that to Google’s prior quarter profits of over $1.2 billion. Still, firms ignore China at their peril. Nearly every major US player (Google, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft) has struggled to crack the Chinese market – homegrown firms dominate. Perhaps instead of eyeing Yahoo and Digg, Microsoft and Google should move their wallets east, only this time empowering Chinese management to teach US HQ how to tap the market (hence avoiding eBay’s disastrous gaffe whereby its purchase of EachNet collapsed from a 72% share in 2003 to a 36% share in 2005, while rival Taobao grew from a 7.8% to a 58.6% share).

The Secret Coach – Bill Campbell
Fortune Magazine recently ran an 8 page story on one of my heros – Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell “The Secret Coach” of Silicon Valley. An advisor to Valley legends that include Steve Jobs (he’s on Apple’s board and previously rank marketing), Google’s Eric Schmidt (who says Campbell’s contribution to Google is literally not possible to overstate), and Mark Andreessen (who co-founded multi-billion dollar firms Netscape & Opsware and now sits on the Facebook board), Campbell ran Intuit (maker of Quicken, TurboTax, and QuickBooks) during a period where Microsoft repeatedly tried (and failed) to enter the firm’s markets for personal investment, tax prep, and bookkeeping software. He’s the guy who introduced Jeff Bezos to his funding VC, and is the go-to guy for many of the Valley’s senior venture capitalists when looking to hook up entrepreneurs with a mentor. “Coach” Campbell was also a former Asst. Football Coach for Boston College in the 1970s, and for the past several years (and despite the high demands placed on his time) he has generously taught master class sessions for my students, sharing his experiences with both undergrad and graduate TechTrekkers visiting Intuit’s Mountain View headquarters. In the era of the ‘rock star’ executive, Campbell shuns publicity, but among those who know him, he’s uniformly seen as a leader who can motivate, depoliticize, and dispense of noise to find a market’s radar-accurate strategy signal. Here’s to a true role-model.

Amazon & TiVo Team Up
A new “product purchase” feature in TiVo will allow owners of the set top box to purchase videos, books, and other material that are, say, promoted by guests on the Daily Show or Oprah, or that have been promoted via ads or live program product placements and sponsorships. Boston-area WiG readers, who were among the first in the world to expericence TiVo over Comcast may wonder if the feature will be available to them. TiVo’s deal with Comcast does include a provision to offer interactive ad technology, but says TiVo CEO Rogers “this is not our focus today”. TiVo has long suffered because the technology was replicable, and although rivals offered copycats that lacked the patented and exquisitely elegant interface of TiVo, the pioneer also lacked distribution channels to get its boxes to the market. Perhaps the move signals a strategic shift in which TiVo moves from a hardware provider to a software firm positioned as consumer/content intermediary.

New Tool from Facebook Extends Web Presence
At this year’s F8 developer conference, Facebook demonstrated “Facebook Connect”, a method for integrating aspects of Facebook into other websites. For example, a demo from Loopt (which has a neat locating-based friend finder for iPhone), showed how a Loopt user can pull friends from Facebook instead of having to re-enter contact information on people you’d like to track. In addition to the recent site re-design, Facebook also launched a “Great Apps” program, to highlight noteworthy applications, and a verification program where apps rated as secure & trustworthy would carry a badge indicating that Facebook deems them safe.

Japan Cautious on iPhone
Over the past few years it’s been my good fortune to have spent time at Asia’s cutting-edge mobile firms, including Japan’s KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, and Korea’s LG and SK. In many ways, the iPhone is a quantum leap ahead of the competition – super-slick, elegant software and a killer app store already loaded will utility-exploding innovation. Indeed, at BC’s alumni event in Tokyo, many of our local friends crowded for turns test-driving the iPhone’s slick features (although I was limited to WiFi in May’s pre-3G event – it was essentially an iPod Touch with a camera). But there are cultural issues that some suggest may thwart iPhone adoption in Japan. Many Japanese phones are able to beam e-mail, phone, and contact info via infrared connections, a feature the iPhone lacks. Suggests the AP “Being without those instantaneous exchanges would be the death knell on the Japanese dating circuit.” Also missing are digital TV, voice dialing, video camera features, and electronic wallets (many Japanese vending machines now accept Sony’s Edy mobile phone payment system). Missing, but iPhone’s app store already features streaming video and voice dialing apps, showing that software may plug some of these holes. And it’s only a matter of time before a future iPhone iteration sports an internal hard drive, becoming a camcorder and so much more.

Commentary: Thanks again to those who nominated me for the Teaching with New Media award this year. It was indeed an honor, although I’ve got to confess that I’m enjoying the prize, as well. I was able to trade in the iPod Touch that came with the award for a 3G iPhone. The new device is great – the app store showcased amazing innovation during its first week of offering. The MLB app serves up an unlimited selection of play-by-play video for less than the cost of a vente latte, and the shockingly slick games have made it a challenge to pry my iPhone from my 8 year old’s hands (my son is an MLB stats nut and loves the games Cro Mag Ralley and Enigmo). While browsing is faster, I’ve noticed that the Safari browser running under the 2.0 update crashes more often when loading the news sites I regularly read during my trolley commute, but the speed kick makes the experience far less frustrating (Greater Boston has several spots without 3G, but at trolley speeds these are quickly passed over). Another favorite, the previously unusable FlyTunes is now a great way to get streaming radio of my local NPR station. GPS is also wonderful for a directionally challenged pedestrian like myself. Some location-based apps still have work to do (for some reason UrbanSpoon thinks Newton is Malden), and remember, GPS is a line-of-site technology (e.g. not much use indoors), but Apple’s fall-back location services leverage mobile tower triangulation and WiFi mapping to offer reliably good guesses when there’s a roof over your head. With social-apps like iPhone Facebook (with over 1 million installs) gaining raves, my guess is a third of my students will have one by this time next year. Apple sold a million iPhones the first weekend, with 10 million application downloads. The 10 million iPhones Jobs promised to sell by year-end ’08 now looks solidly within reach.

Esquire to offer High Tech Cover
Some 100,000 copies of the Sept. issue of Esquire offer a flashing digital ink cover. The firm developed a special version of the product, along with a battery. The costly gimmick is sponsored by Ford, which will have a message on the inside of the issue. Personal note: I’d love a copy of this as a class prop (great for the Moore’s Law lecture, and as a demo of Kindle-enabling digital ink). If you hear where I can get a copy, please let me know. Thanks!

My Son the Blogger
Dr. Arnold Kim started MacRumors.com in 2000, when he was a C.S. student at Columbia. Turns out, blogging MacRumors was more lucrative than diagnosing patients’ kidney aliments, so Kim’s hanging up his stethoscope to blog full-time.

Randy Pausch, CMU’s “Last Lecture Prof.”, Passes
Carnegie Mellon’s Randy Pausch delivered a moving lecture last fall, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The “Last Lecture” grew into a viral sensation, inspiring millions and launching a best selling book. Pausch outlived his doctor’s initial diagnosis, but finally succumbed to the disease on July 26. As Rausch put it, “We don’t beat the reaper by living longer, we beat the reaper by living well”.