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Life Blues: My reaction to Outlaw Blues by Jonathan Taplin

February 20, 2012

“Outlaw Blues is a story of the American counter-culture — the artists who created an American Avant-garde that pushed the culture forward into what we now call modernity. Though much of the book is centered on a group of musicians and filmmakers that Taplin worked with from 1965-1995, it is also the story of the roots of that era. The book examines rebel artists of America’s past — H.D. Thoreau, Mark Twain, Louis Armstrong, Orson Welles, Billie Holiday, Allen Ginsberg — the “mad ones” who made us who we are as a culture”.  From the book launch at the Annenberg Innovation Lab, Oct. 11, 2011

Just finished reading the Outlaw Blues by Jonathan TapIin. I recently reconnected with Jonathan, an amazing man and the director of the Anneberg Innovation Lab at USC.  We probably had not seen each other for over tweleve years. We found each other on Facebook.  Since I am now living in LA part of the year, I reached out to him and he invited me to meet him at his lab. I also found out that he had written a book called, Outlaw-Blues last year.  The book had a powerful effect on me which I will explain later. It is an experimental e-book that I bought on iTunes and read on my iPad.  Actually, I expected more from the “experimental” part than just short embedded videos even thought they were very effective. Outlaw Blues is the name of a Bob Dylan’s song and also a movie staring Peter Fonda.

This post is not a book review but I will say a few things about the book.  First of all, I strongly recommend it to anyone that is interested in the history of popular music and in particular, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones and/or the history of independent  film makers like  Martin Scorsese  (Taplin produced his first film, Mean Streets).  Or if you are interested in people like Jonathan that have found their own unconventional way  through life and has impacted the development of today’s media industry. The book is a combination Jonathan’s recollections and experience  from the mid 60s to the end of the 90s.  Intersperse are stories of key figures that had profound effects on the evolution of media and culture.

I first meet Jonathan in 1997 or 1998, I think.  In 1996, Intel and Creative Artist Agency created a lab to educate talent about the coming possibilities of broadband residential Internet and personal computers to create a new medium.  I  drove this project from the Intel side after meeting with Michael Ovtiz who was the founder and principle owner of CAA.  I knew that we were creating a new medium that would effect every aspect of our lives from commerce and education to communications and entertainment.  In my position as Vice President of Business Development,  and my additional  role as “Czar” of Intel’s broadband development activities and a leading investor in early stage companies dealing with the consumer market. I wanted to accelerate the development of these “applications”.  I was particularly concerned with how entertainment content would finds its way to this new world.  I was pretty sure that the folks in Silcon Valley would not be able to create compelling and entertaining content with the exception of computer games.  So I thought, lets get the people that make todays entertainment excited about the opportunity.  We set up the lab  within CAA with state of the art computing technology. CAA’s clients and others would come by the lab for demonstrations.  They key person on my side was Sriram Viswanathan.  In addition, we decided to invest in early stage companies dealing with entertainment and to do this together with CAA.  This activity was lead by Matthew Cowan from the Intel side and Hassan Miah from the CCA side.    We had some hits like Launch Media which was founded by Dave Goldberg. Launch was selling enhanced  CD’s.  I required that they move to the Internet as part of our investment.    Launch was eventually sold to Yahoo where Dave ran the Yahoo music business.  Lucky for him, he meet Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook , soon to be one of the richest women in the world….and a lovely person by the  way.  We also invested in Mark Cuban’s  Broadcast.com which went public and then was bought by Yahoo for more than five billion dollars. Of course they were not all successful and we invested in some duds like American Cybercast.

During this period we learned of Intertainer, founded by Jonathan Taplin.  While I was aware that Jonathan had a background as a movie producer, I did not know anything about his extensive history in the music industry.  Intertainer  was one of the first companies to make deals with the movie industry and provide download-able movies.  Remember this was 1997/98. There were not that many consumers that had broadband in their homes. Intertainer did very well until the movie industry, lead by Sony, created an alternative called Movielink.  The result was that  studios cut off access to movies by Intertainer; bringing that company to its knees.  Intertainer sued a number of companies for Anti-Trust Violations in 2002.  In 2006, the suits were settled out of court.

As I began to read the book, I was shocked to learn that Jonathan and I had a lot of overlap in our early days.  Jonathan, at 65 is two years younger than I am.  He grew up, went to school and lived  on the East Coast during the 60s.  If he had been living in San Francisco, we would have surely known each other.  Jonathan became Bob Dylan’s road manager.  In the early 60s, I was surrounded by the San Francisco music scene but in a very peripheral way. Bob Dylan showed up sometimes at the Blue Unicorn where I hung out.   I met Janis Joplin  while she was rehearsing with the Big Brother and Holding Company (she was not a very nice person I thought but when she sang it would bring tears to my eyes).   I hung out at the home of the Jefferson Airplane and went to a few parties at Gerry Garcia’s home.  But I was not into rock. I had studied classical music, composition and arranging.  I preferred Jazz (and life long addition) and so I spent my time listening to Jazz players when they came to San Francisco.   My engagement with first the “beatniks” and later the “hippies” was more extensive.  I would listen to Allen Gingsburg read poetry in North Beach even though I was just a kid.  I spent lots of time at the  City Lights Book Store.   Later, I became  friendly with Allen and was invited to his apartment a few times.  Outlaw Blues deals a lot with these people. I was also drawn to Jewish Mysticism and was for a while a follower of Shlomo Carelbach and very politically active in the anti war and civil rights movements.

In reading Outlaw Blues, I realized how easily my life could have gone in a different direction.  Maybe, if I liked the music better, I would have become part of the rock music scene. My management and leadership skills might have taken me on a path similar to Jonathan and eventually my creative side might have emerged as it did for him.  I had a similar experience reading Holy Beggars by  Aryae Coopersmith  whom I recently met.  In reading Aryae’s book, I realized that I could have easily continued to explore the spiritual side of myself and may have ended up in Israel as a Rabbi. But I fell in love with technology. By 1966, I was working at the Langley Porter Institute, UCSF Medical School, designing equipment for brainwave bio feedback.  From that point on, I had a continuing connection to technology.  Now I am back to studying music.  Jonathan is a Professor at USC.

At this point in my life, it is interesting to speculate on  the different paths I could have taken.  Life is so strange and random… or is it?

Some relevant links:
Outlaw Blues, the song  
Outlaw Blues, the film 

WSJ  on the book  
Jonathan Taplin 
Allen Ginsberg
Michael Ovitz   
Dave Goldberg

Mark Cuban
Broadcast.com 
Intel/CAA Media Lab
Holly Beggars   

Shlomo Carlebach 

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How I got the iPad right in 1994 but was wrong about the Information Furnace

January 9, 2012

Today is the 5th anniversary of the announcement iPhone by the late Steve Jobs.  It is hard to imagine that it was just such a short time ago. Something seem to happen so quickly in technology while other things  seem to take a very long time.

I recently came across an article written in June of 1994 (almost 18 years ago). You can find the article at the end of this post or you can go to this link.    It talks about the evolution of computing in the home and in particular discusses something called “The information Furnace”  a term, I believe I created, to describe a Home Server. In 1994, most homes did not have even a single computer.  Typically the computers in the home of early adopters were used for productivity applications like Personal Finance such as Quicken or for hobbies.  Probably less than a million homes were connected to on-line services like Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL – which was less than 1% of the nation. They used dial up modems.   Broadband connectivity was just starting to be tested.

Of course the number of homes that had more than one computer was extremely small.  Home networking as we now know it did not really exist.  The floppy disk was the way information would be moved from one computer in the home to another.  This was called sneaker net many years later.  This was also before the development of what we now cal WiFi.  That meant that early networking within the home required running Ethernet cables.

I was  convinced that  computers would dominate home interactivity. Many at the time thought it would be the interactive set top box. Because I was so involved with the creation of residential broadband technologies in my role as Vice President, Business Development at Intel,  I knew we were creating the technical foundation of a new medium.  A medium  that would impact all aspects of our lives from the way we communicated, learned, shopped, were entertained and informed. The article mentioned above was written about a year before Amazon was established.  A few months after it was published, I was quoted in Fortune Magazine as saying “that the killer app for the Internet would be advertising.”  Google was started about four years later and started selling advertising a few years after that.

Now before you think this post is all about how insightful I was, and I was, it is really about how things turned out differently than I thought and wanted.  It really is about a failure to implement a vision and an exploration of the possibility that things could have ended up differently.

In that very same article (again 1994), I coined the term i-pad (see the Article).  Sixteen years later, Apple announced the iPad on Jan. 27th, 2010. Coincidentally, it happened to be my  65th birthday.

So now back to the story.  I envisioned  pervasive computing throughout the house.  At that time most computers were desktop devices and rather expensive. So I thought there would be one central computer in the home that would have the broadband connection.  Then there would be devices around the home that would provide access to this central computer
(remember I am old enough to have lived through the time sharing days).  The central computer would have the main storage for the home.  For instance it could maintain a family calendar, home files,  etc.   I also felt that this would reduce the complexity of managing information since all information (including  media) would be located in just one place (of course it would be automatically backed-up).

At that time, I was engaged with a number of engineers in the Intel Architecture Lab (IAL).  I was funding a number of programs within the Lab then licensing the resulting technology for equity in early stage companies.  So I am pretty sure that that I discussed these concepts with members of IAL and probably they had a major impact on my thinking.

The problem was that Intel was a chip company and we had a very strong strategic relationship with Microsoft.   We actually had many software designers but every time we got close to some area that Bill Gates considered  Microsoft’s birthright there would be a major battle and Intel would give in.

Microsoft was actually slow to understand how the home computing would develop.  They believed that intelligent set top’s would be the way along with game machines and various appliances.  After working with Microsoft and General Instruments  (the leader in cable boxes at the time) on the development of an Interactive Set Top Box, I became convinced that this was not the way things would develop. This view was also held by Matt Miller (no relation) who was the CTO of General Instruments.  Together, Matt and I persuaded  GI and Intel decided to develop residential broadband technologies and to do it without Microsoft.  Microsoft spent a lot of effort to develop Set Top Box software and made various deals with cable companies including investing a billion dollars into Comcast in 1997.

However, I was not able to get executive management at Intel or Microsoft to understand the need for a home-server.  Andy Grove never really bought into my vision of how computers would be used in the home and invested a great deal of money into a flawed scheme to use ISDN to do video conferencing in the home.  Microsoft would not announce a home-server until 2007.

So computing evolved in the home with more and more homes having multiple computers and eventually sharing a home network.  This network had at its center a router which allowed the devices in the home to easily share one broadband connection. This was one of the tasks that I thought the Information Furnace would do.  But complexity of sharing information in the home increased.  This provided an opportunity  for Apple, to address this need by creating software to synchronize information between computers and devices (iTunes/ iPod is an example). At the same time Web service companies (like Yahoo) dealt with the complexity of email, calendars and contacts by storing them on the Net. Microsoft even bought HotMail in 1997 and started up MSN.

Now most of the functions that I had envisioned for the Information Furnace will be provided by Apple’s iCloud.  Other companies will create similar capabilities.

In away, it is a better solution that the Information Furnace since these capabilities can be professionally managed and maintained. They can be improved without consumer involvement.  But it has taken a long time in coming, and we’re still not there.

Of course the way it played out had a major impact on the companies involved.

Image

AP Article

PCs Evolving Into Information Furnaces :
Technology: Experts predict computers
are evolving into control centers, linking
the telephone, TV, thermostat and other
household electronic devices.

June 30, 1994 | EVAN RAMSTAD | ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK — In the metaphor-mad world of technology, there’s a new phrase making the rounds, one that experts believe describes the direction that personal computers are taking. After 20 years as an independent box, the PC is evolving into a control center that ties together the
phone, TV, thermostat and other electronic devices in every room in the house. An information furnace, they call it.

“It’s equivalent to central heating,” said Avram Miller, Intel’s vice president of corporate business development. “This analogy with power is very good. If you look at electricity, electricity was designed to do only one thing–lighting. Clearly, there’s a lot more to it than that now.” Like a furnace, the PC of the future could be hidden from view, in the basement, a closet or drawer. The devices it links would take different shapes depending on their use and location. A unit in the den might have a keyboard and screen while one in the living room might be a big screen with stereo speakers and a
player for programs on compact disc. The incorporation of telephone-answering machines into consumer PCs last summer was an early
example of this trend, which will be a key topic at the annual PC Expo this week at New York’s Jacob Javits Convention Center.

Intel CEO Andrew Grove has titled his keynote speech for the show “The Ubiquitous Information Appliance.”
The acceleration of the trend is important for Intel to drive demand for advances in its key product–the microprocessor or “brain” of a PC.
Packard Bell Inc. earlier this month rolled out PCs with built-in TV and radio receivers as well as phone answering and fax capabilities. With them, a technician played a Bach compact disc, the radio and TV and worked on a word-processing program simultaneously.
It’s not just today’s electronic items that could be hooked up but those on the drawing board of technologists and inventors. Last week, Timex Corp. and Microsoft Corp. even demonstrated a watch that can take in messages from a computer. “One of the devices that’s interesting, we call it an I-pad, an information pad,” Miller said. “It would be a device that has a flat-panel screen. You can write on it, touch it. You might be able to speak into it and it might speak back. It would be wireless, cheap and have different forms in the house.”  Some early forms of an “I-pad” are Apple Computer Inc.’s Newton, Motorola Inc.’s Envoy and IBM’s
Simon devices, which have both computing and communication features.
“You will see all kinds of combinations be possible,” said Safi Qureshey, chief executive of AST Research
Inc. in Irvine. “We want to provide the glue so the user can go in between all of these different access mechanisms.”

The concept of a computer network in the home is rooted in the workplace. Portable computers, for instance, linked to the main one in an office are allowing more people to work at home or on the road. “The same technologies are going to be used in the home environment,” said Alan Soucy, vice president of mobile computers at Zenith Data Systems. “They’re going to be repackaged, more specific, more like an appliance.”
The vision isn’t just Intel’s or the computer industry’s. At a cable TV trade show last month, General Instrument Corp., the leading maker of set-top channel controls, described a plan for “component” TVs built around a computer-like box. The monitor–which in time will be a flat panel screen–and game player, video recorder or telephone would all be separate pieces.
“Exactly how much it all gets centralized in one place, I’m a little hard pressed to predict right now,” said Jeff Roman, vice president of technology and new business development for General Instrument.
The first personal computer sold to the general public, the Altair 8800, appeared in Popular Electronics magazine in December, 1974. It was a box of circuits and lights that cost about $250 but had no software
or screen and required 50 commands, executed by flipping switches, just to get started. Today, the most popular PCs take just a few minutes to set up, have dozens of megabytes of software
already installed, and can link through a phone line to millions of others worldwide.

Very few people anticipated the computers of today in 1974. Even fewer know what to expect in another
two decades. Something as futuristic as an information furnace, while still vague, is probably only a decade away. There is certainty in the industry only about the next year or two.
“It’s not possible to conceive 20 years from now,” said Intel’s Miller. “The computers of 20 years from now will probably be 10,000 times more powerful than they are today”

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Rotterdam 1969-1974: The Thoraxcenter

December 28, 2011

Towards the end of 1968, I accepted a position at the Thoraxcenter in Rotterdam. My task was to create and run the computer dept.  It was actually two depts.  One was part of the medical school at Erasmus University and the other was part of the  Dijkzigt University Medical Center.  Accepting the position was both and easy and difficult decision.  It was easy to accept an offer that would mean relocating to Holland, a country I had visited before and liked.  I was pretty negative about the USA at the time, particularly because of the Vietnam War.  And to make matters worse, Ronald Reagan was governor of California.  I was employed  by UC San Francisco Medical School  and worked at the Langley Porter Institute so I actually work for the state  But it was hard to leave Joe Kamiya who was not only my boss, but also my mentor and friend.  Furthermore, while I was very interested in our work in brainwave bio feedback (I designed some of the first equipment to do brainwave bio feedback)  and the idea of designing systems to diagnose and treat heart patients was not nearly as interesting.

Professor Paul Hugenholtz MD, was the founder and Executive Director  of the Thoraxcenter (Thoraxcentrum) .  He was a Dutch cardiologist who had spent many years working at  Boston Hospital and doing some experimental work with people at MIT.  Paul’s vision for the Thoraxcenter included fully integrating computer technology into the care of patience.  This was  a pretty advanced concept in 1968.   Paul would call me in San Francisco early in the morning  from Holland to try to convince me join his staff. I eventually agreed.  I was to report to Jerry  Russel who was an american bio-technologest.   Jerry also had experience in using computers in cardiology.  He had decided  use computers from Digital Equipment Corp and ordered two PDP-9s for the Thoraxcenter.    I already knew how to program  the PDP-7 and sometime before I left Joe’s lab, we had also gotten a PDP-9.  So this was a familiar  base for me.   I don’t remember what exactly what happened but sometime soon after my arrival, I ended up reporting directly to Paul Hugenholtz.    Paul was/is and amazing man.  Here is a link to a pretty detailed interview with him about his life.  Paul, thought me much and I will always be grateful to him for his support and coaching.  The day I arrived at the Thoraxcenter, I was greeted by his assistant, Arianne van der Klooster, who became my wife of 25 years (we are no longer married but still close)  and the mother of my three children.

This was my first management  position. I had just turned 24 years old.  I also had not graduated from college and was about to fill a position on the academic staff.   I think by the time I left some five years later to immigrate with my family to Israel, there were over 30 people working my group and and held a position that was something between an assistant and associate professor.  We accomplished much both in terms of the development of  computer technology and in terms of cardiovascular medicine. It is almost funny to think about the technology we had to use and how we improvised so much which is really the main point of this blog post.

Let me start by describing the basic set up.  We had two nearly identical PDP-9s.  The PDP-9 had an 18 bit word length (today computers have either 8, 16, 32 or 64 bit word lengths).  The maximum memory was 32,000 words. To put into bytes (8 bits) which we now commonly use to describe computer memory, it had 72,000  bytes (72kb).      Most of the photos I take on my iPhone are about three times as large as the total memory of the computer.  We had no disk memory.  We had a small tape unit which had a capacity about equal to the main memory.  We did not swap programs.  All the software had to be in main memory.  We got really good at writing very tight programs in assembly code as you can imagine.  One of the computers was used for our real time Intensive Care Unit (ICU) Monitoring System.  The other was used for program development.  Only one programer could work on that computer at a time.  The programing computer was also used as backup to the mission critical ICU system.  To facility that ability to switch, we had a small bus switch which would move all the peripherals  we used for the clinical system to the backup/programing computer.

I think the computer system monitored heart rate, blood pressure, temperature  and breath  I don’t remember if we were able to monitor arrhythmia.  I doubt it.  We actually got the raw signal in for the EKG, blood pressure and breath.  We used a Digital to Analog Converter which was multiplex to sample four signals for six patient and from that we computed the key values we monitored Not only could we provide the nursing staff with continuous instantaneous values but the could set alarm thresholds. We were also able to provided graphs so that trend lines could be seen.   There  were six patients on line, I believe.   The displays at the nurses desk were TV monitors turned on their sides.  We used a head per track video disk to create the images and text. This desk  was actually developed for the television industry.  But the craziest things was the keyboard.  At first, we used rotary  phone to send commands from the nurses to the computer.  In other words, the nurse would dial a command.  The computer would monitor the signal from the phone and count the pulses.  Later, we built a specialized keyboard using keys that were designed for elevators.  The company that developed the specialized equipment for us was Mennen Medical. ( I would later work for that company in Israel where I was able to commercialize some of the work I had done at the Thoraxcenter. I also joined the staff at the dept. of cardiology, Tel Aviv Medical School as Adjunct Associate Professor.)   Later, we  wanted to increased  to look at other aspects of the EKG such a t-waves but we did not have enough computing power.  It was then that I ordered a PDP-15 which was the successor of the PDP-9.  But I treated it in a way like a microprocessor.  I just got a small version without any peripherals and we created a high speed connection to the ICU computer system. It was the beginning of my love of networking computers.  I had a special love for the PDP-15.  When I was still working at Langley Porter, I found that there was a design problem with the PDP-9 which made it difficult to use for real time programing (it had to do with the interrupt structure).  I modified the micro code of PDP-9 to fix the problem and Digital took that change and applied it to the PDP-15.

We then got one of the very first PDP-11s. I think it might have had 32kb of memory.  We used it to develop a system for the catheterization lab.  That system was later licensed to Mennen Greatbatch.  We also developed software for some of the first work in echo-cardiogram as well as creating a computer simulation model of the heart.  It would take the computer a whole day just to have one heart beat I think.

I have been working with computer for 45 years.  The capabilities have grown by something great than 50,000 times.  I remember making circuits with just one transistor, a few resistors and a couple of capacitors.  If you look at the evolution of biological intelligence and compare it with computer intelligence, there is just one conclusion that I can make:  That in my life time we will go from a single cell to a human capability. And then what?  More about that some other time when I explain why the universe is the way it is.

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These are the good old days for Apple and not just because Jobs has passed

November 27, 2011

Companies like products, have life cycles.  Apple is very unusual because it was able to reinvent itself.    In particular, Apple went from being a niche  PC player with a relatively small market share to the leader in revolutionizing music (iPod), the cell phone (iPhone) and creating and leading the tablet market (iPad).    But each of these product categories has its life cycle.  We can see that now with the decline of iPod sales.  The iPhone is on its 4th generation (the iPhone 4S is  just a mid life kicker for the iPhone 4).  We expect  to see an iPhone 5 sometime next year.  How will this product be different?  It can’t really change much in size so it can’t change much in terms of the display now that we have a so called retina display (where individual pixels can not be seen).  The camera can get better but how much better?  Siri can get better but it does its processing in the cloud so it has not much to do with the phone.  Of course, we can get 4G but is that really so important on a phone?  Anyway, I suspect  that the iPhone 5 will be a great success?  But then what?  Eventually there is not that much to add that is meaningful.  So  you either have to reduce price to expand the market our you just have a replacement market. I left out adding more memory?  I am a pretty heavy user of technology.  I have a 64gig iPad but I only really use 32gigs.  I have a 64gig iPhone but I use even less on my iPhone because I do not watch movies on my phone (much).  4G would be helpful to those that us the cellular system for the their iPads.  But most people only us  Wifi on the iPad.  I think the iPad has one or two major product cycles and then what.  Back to cutting prices or having just a replacement market.  And what of the Mac’s.  Apple is doing a good job of increasing the MAC share of desktops and notebooks with innovative and well designed products like the Macbook Air.  There is more head room in traditional personal computers.  But we are still up against limitations.  I have a 27 inch screen that I am looking at right now.  I would not want the screen to be much bigger.  I will of course want more computer memory in the future (I use SSD) and because I am part of the Apple Eco System, I will keep buying macs ever few years.  So here is my point.  Apple became the most valuable company in the world (or close to it) because of the iPod, iPhone and iPad.  I believe that these products  will reach limits that will either force price cuts to explained their markets or slower or declining unit growth.

The guys at Apple are pretty smart and certainly Jobs was.  So what are they thinking?  Well they want to go after the TV industry.  Obviously, home audio visual equipment and the way that media has been delivered by the cable and satiliet companies can be greatly improved on.  But there are many vested interests in particular with respect to the delivery of content.  I don’t see how Apple will be successful in this space but I guess we will have a chance to find out next year.   If they do succeed they will have to do this at a pace that will allow growth even with the decline in the i devices that I predict.  And that means they would have to accomplish this on a world wide basis.

So lets end by looking at a different company and device: The Amazon Kindle Fire.   It is a two hundred  dollar product that  does not compare favorably with the iPad but is a lot cheaper.  It does a great job on books, is ok on video and email etc.  But there is nothing stopping Amazon from staying at the 200 dollar spot and adding functionality and capabilities as the cost of technology declines.  Their plan is to make money on the content.  They have to lock their customers into their own eco system.  It will be harder for them but they have a lot going for them including relationships with so many potential customers for the Fire.

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Do I really need to travel with seven devices

November 20, 2011

This is nuts.  Look what I am traveling with:  1)Macbook Air, 2) iPad, 3) Kindle Fire,  4)Kindle,  5), iPhone ,  6) iPod Touch and 7) AppleTV.  In addition I carry various  thumb drives, a digital camera and wear a flitbit.    And guess what?  They all do different things well.

Macbook Air
Fantastic computer!  It is my main squeeze.  I connect it to a cinema display,  blue-tooth  keyboard, mouse and track-pad when I am home. It serves as my office computer.  Before the most recent model which uses SSD memory, I had a Macbook Pro for my desktop and a Macbook Air as my portable computer.  But the newest version of the Air has enough power and I eliminated my Macbook Pro. Actually it is part of my music studio.

iPad
I mostly use the iPad as a media device.  I watch TV remotely via the sling player, use HBOGO, the DirecTV app etc.  I do read books on it when I need back lighting and will watch TV programs, podcasts and iTunes University while flying on a plan.  I also use it to look at twitter when I am having breakfast, or read the New York times.  I rarely read my email on it and I almost never create anything on it.

Kindle Fire
Just go this.  Frankly, it is the only one on the list I do not really need.  I got it, to understand it’s role better.  I think the the combination of its $200 price point and the Amazon Eco System will make it a winner. I am not sure I will keep using it but we will see.

Kindle Classic
I love my Kindle.  I have had every model.  I read mostly on the kindle.  I love its light weight and its non reflective screen.  It is the only device I can read with while in bright sun light.  I don’t do anything more than read on it. But I am glad that Amazon makes it possible for me to move between the Kindle, iPad with the Kindle App and the Kindle Fire and even keeps track of what page I am on.

iPhone
Love my iPhone.  It is always with me.  I use it to check email when I am out and about.  I use finding all kind of info (maps, google, yelp etc).  It is of course my phone (voice and text).  But I also skype and Facetime on it.

iPod Touch
I really don’t need this one but I have had it for a long time.  I use it when I want to listen to podcasts or music and don’t want to take my phone (mostly when I am abroad).  I like it size.  I also like that I would not be very upset if I lost it since I have had it for years.

AppleTV
I bring an AppleTV with me when I travel so I can connect to hotel Flat Panel Displays (if they have HDMI) and watch movies that are either stored on my Macbook Air or streaming over the net. I can also watch podcasts and share video and play my music through the sound system of the hotel room.

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Steve Jobs Bio: A review sort

November 6, 2011

I just finished Walter Isaacson’s bio of Steve Jobs.  I would say it is informative but not insightful.  For tech junkies,  especially of the Apple genre, the book has  detailed information about the history of Apple and especially how product and business decisions were made.  This history  is  presented in a clear and factual manor.  Steve Jobs controlled the flow of information out of Apple with a tight grip, until he could no longer close his hand. Isaacson was able to get this history from Jobs in a comprehensive  way and from those at Apple that Jobs allowed to speak with Isaacson (I am sure they all checked in with Steve).  Jobs wanted to control how history would see him.  That is why he sought out Isaacson to do his bio. Jobs said he was doing this for his children, so that they could know him better.  I don’t think this was sincere .  Of course, he  knew that the bio would have to deal his dark side  and the awful way he had treated people including members of his own family. He  knew that he could work with Isaacson in such away that the sting of his behavior  could be minimized and that his accomplishments would dominate the book.  Isaacson was  afraid to fall into the Jobs  reality distortion field and fought hard with himself to maintain his objectivity.  But in the process, I think he may have lost the essence of what made Steve Jobs be Steve Jobs.  Isaacson might of gotten close in discussing how Jobs felt both abandoned by his biological parents and at the same time felt special because he was chosen by his adoptive parents.  But I don’t think this was really what drove Steve Jobs. I think this was just something he fed to Isaacson and was an example of Jobs manipulation.  It had a profound effect on the book with Isaacson coming back to this theme time and time again.  Jobs may not have known what made him the person that he was but if he did he would surely not have shared it.

Steve Jobs was a remarkable man with great gifts.  He was driven by his product visions.  He wanted to leave a mark on the world and he did.  Apple and Steve Jobs were the same in his mind.  The more he realized that he would die the more he wanted to make sure  Apple would live.  As he was dying he put much, if not almost all, of his energy in to making sure that Apple would not only survive but dominate.  Because Apple was Steve Jobs.  He probably saw his wife and children much as he saw his own dying body – as something that had to be left  behind.

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Posted in Business Managment, Technology, The Post PC Period | 1 Comment »

Facebook stop stealing my blog posts

November 5, 2011

I listened to an interesting interview (aren’t all) on Fresh Air about the war between google, amazon, facebook and apple (notice Microsoft was not even mentioned.  By the author of this article on the same topic in Fastcompany Magazine.  Clearly many companies are fighting to control the user/customer.  When I was at Intel in the days of the Wintel, Microsoft and Intel would promote the concept of open systems.  I use to joke, that open systems was what people did on top of what we sold.  It was easier in those days to understand the food chain. It was vertical.  But now all kinds of companies feed information and in a sense their customers back and forth between them.  You can even use your Facebook ID and Password open your Foursquare account as an example.  But what companies really want is to keep the user on their platform and not let them go to another sight.  So they bring information from other platforms over.

Now this is starting to piss me off.  I am happy that my blog posts show up on my Facebook Profile but I am not happy that Facebook copies over the posts so that my Facebook “Friends” can read the post there and comment there and never go to my actual blog (linkedin and Plaxo also do this).  I want people to come to my blog because once there they may read other posts.  Also WordPress gives me get statistics on how visits and how they go there and which of the links I carefully embed in my blog were actually use.  I get none of this from Facebook.  I get “like” and sometimes a few comments.  I have to figure out how to stop this.

 

Posted in Social Networks, Technology | 2 Comments »

Siri

October 16, 2011

This is the first blog that I have dictated. I have dreamed of the day that I could really use voice dictation instead of typing. Maybe this day has finally come. I am doing this blog on an iphone 4s and I am dictating with my voice.

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Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

Steve Jobs and me

October 7, 2011

This is not so much about Steve Jobs but about how Steve effected me.

Like so many, the death of Steve Jobs has played a  big role in my thinking since hearing the news on Wednesday.    Steve played an important role in my life although he hardly knew me.  The first time I met Steve was at the PC Forum in 1982 which was started by Ben Rosen and later taken over by Ester Dyson.  There are some great photos of the PC Forum over the years,  but unfortunately, they start at 1984. I remember setting next to  Steve in the audience  and having some discussion. He was 26 years old and I was 36 years old.  I wish I could remember what we discussed.  At that time Apple was selling the  Apple II.  I had come to announce the Pro 300 series (I was responsible for that product line at Digital Equipment Company which was the number two computer company in the world  then).  It is probably hard for those that know me now to imagine that  I was probably as passionate tabout product design then as Steve was to become later.  Here is the Pro 350:

Here is the Apple II

I will come back to this a bit later because it really  has the most to do with what I am trying to express in this blog.  It is easy to imagine  during my  conversation with  Steve that he could have asked me to join Apple Maybe I would have but probably not.  I doubt that could have seen myself working for someone so much younger than me (ego) and I probably would not have been willing to take the financial  risk.  At that point, my career at Digital was ascending.  I had the strong sponsorship of the CEO (Ken Olsen) and I really thought my efforts with the Pro would change the world of computing.  I could hardly have guess that just two years later, I would be the president of an Apple II Clone company, Franklin Computer, and locked in a legal battle with Apple and Steve Jobs.

The evening before the forum,  I attended the speakers dinner. It was an amazing dinner and really my first real introduction to the world of PC entrepreneurs.  Amongst the attendees were Steve Jobs, Bill Gates (also 26), Don Estridge who lead the development of the IBM PC,   and Adam Osborne.  Adam I recall said the key to wining in the personal computer market place was building and adequate but low cost product (similar to the net book argument). Steve eventually took the opposite approach.  Of these, only Bill is still alive and is no longer active in the computer industry.   Don died a few years later at the age of 48.  Adam died in 2003 at the age of 64. Steve died just now at the age of 56.  These and some of the others attending were really the founders of the PC era.   My own contribution(not to be compared to Bill and Steve of course)  to creating the computer industry we now know would have to wait a decade more,  when I as Vice President of Corp Development at Intel, drove much of the early development of today’s residential broadband networks.

I left Digital Equipment in early in 1983.  It was clear to me that my work there was not going to be successful.  The Professional 300 series computer that I had developed with so much love and passion was incomplete and two expensive albeit way ahead of their time with the first 5 inch winchester disk, bit map graphics and Ethernet connectivity (all this in 1983).   Digital did not have the desire or ability to really market in the developing PC world.  So for a while, I considered leaving with a few of my most talented staff and to start a local area networking company (by that time I was in love with networking technology).   However, I was too scared to do a start up and when I got the offer to join Franklin Computer, I took it.  You can read a pretty funny article about me and Franklin here. Franklin had a clone of the Apple II just as Compaq had  clone of the IBM PC.  But there were lots of legal differences and Apple sued Franklin in a landmark case.  Apple never actually won but the destroyed Franklin’s ability to raise capital.   We were growing very quickly and approaching 100 million dollars in sales in a first full year of operations.  But without the ability to raise additional cash and with our bank canceling our line of credit the company was headed for disaster.  I had joined  Franklin to use its  momentum  and the money we expected to raise in an IPO (were in registration when the appeal court decided to re hear the case)  to build a real computer company to fully compete in the market.  We tried to work things out with Apple.  We offered to pay them a big licensing fee and help develop the market.    John Sculley who was then CEO of Apple seemed interested in some possible arrangement and settlement but evidently Steve Jobs would hear nothing of it and wanted us dead.  He got his wish.  I left  a few months before Franklin went into bankruptcy for a brief period in order to wipe out the common shareholders.

A few months later, I joined Intel in 1984.   About ten years later, Andy Grove asked me and Les Vadasz  to join him  and visit Pixar with Steve Job.  We went to Steve’s house in Palo Alto. The same house where he died.  We sat in the kitchen with Steve and talked for a while.  His wife Laurene was there and maybe one or two of the kids I seem to remember.  Steve then drove us to Pixar and introduced us to John Lasseter. We learned about the computer automation process they were using.  The purpose of the visit was to expose Intel to the high end needs of graphic rendering and the idea of using multiple PCs to do it.  I was a bit nervous that Steve would remember me and my role at Franklin.  Either he did not remember or he did not care because he was very  civil to me.  That was probably the last time I actually interacted with Steve.  And while that meeting was a good experience, I was no fan of Steve Jobs at the time.  And later when he rejoined Apple,   I felt his closed business strategy was mistake and I was a strong proponent of the Microsoft/Intel approach which was a very open architecture (as long as it was based on Intel and Microsoft).

The amazing transformation of Apple in the last ten years has been and will  continue to be discussed  by so many.  Frankly, I still do not understand  how it could have happened. The combination of insight, marketing and execution under Jobs leadership was exceptional.    About three years ago, I became a convert to all things Apple.  I am writing this post on a Macbook Air.  I read about Steve’s death on my iPhone and later in more detail on my iPad.  My email is housed at www.me.com.  I can’t wait for iCloud.

I am left feeling sad for his death, admiration for his accomplishment and frankly, disappointment that I was no Steve Jobs. And grateful  that I am still alive to love my wife, children and friends.

Steve contributions will stay with us but  his greatest gift  may yet  to come; the book he allowed and helped Water Isaacson to write,”Steve Jobs”.  Maybe, we will finally understand.  We need to understand.

 

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Posted in about business, Avram's Past, Business Managment, Technology | 2 Comments »

The Idea Man by Paul Allen

April 24, 2011

Just read the Idea Man by Paul Allen.  I don’t usually review books and certainly not here on my blog.  And this post is not really a review as much as it is a commentary.

The first 50% of the book deals mostly with Paul’s experiences with Bill Gates including the formation of Microsoft and the first  seven years of it’s  existence until  Paul left Microsoft (although he stayed on the boad until 2000).  I am eight yeas older than Paul and ten year older than Bill but our computer careers started about the same time (the second half of the 60s),  so I can relate very much to many of the experiences that Paul discussed about that time. I enjoyed Paul reminiscing about his feelings when he saw a transistor for the first time or what it was like to use a ASR-33 teletype for programing.  So the early part of the book was like “home week” for me..

Paul’s description of his relationship with Bill Gates rang true as did his description of Bill himself.   I meet Bill the first time in 1981 when I was at Digital Equipment Corp.  Bill was 26 by then. IBM had brought out the IBM PC and Microsoft was marketing  MS DOS.  We interacted  a few time  over  the next several years. From about 1992 to the time I left Intel in 1999, I had much more contact with him.  I meet Paul Allen during the 90s.  I certainly had a lot less interaction  with him and he did not impress me. I use to call him the richest 80 thousand-dollar-a-year programer in the world.

The book is an attempt to demonstrate that Paul actually played an imporant role in creating Microsoft i.e. he was the “idea man” and Bill was the “implementor” and therefore he played an  important role in creating the computer industry.  I think this  is probably true from what I read but Paul tries to demonstrate that the relationship was balanced and he contributed as much to Microsoft as  Bill.  This I doubt. There could have been many Paul Allen’s but there is only one Bill Gates (thank god).

Then there is the part of his story that deals with his first diagnoise of Cancer ( Hodgkin’s lymphoma).  I could easily relate to that having my own bout with cancer (although at a much later stage of my life). Later, he discusses his second cancer ( non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma). Paul also suffers from heart problems and has a pacemaker.

There is a lot about his investments in the second part of the book.  I have to say that during the 90s Paul was considered “dumb money” by many in the venture business.  He describes his investments and I think is pretty open about what went well and what went badly but you can tell that while Paul had a pretty good insight into what would happen in the future,  his  judgment about timing was pretty bad.  Also, I don’t think he was a good judge of people. Most importantly, he was spread way to thin.  Paul does not explain why he made these investments.  He was/is extremely rich.  Did he do this for money or to influence  the future?   I thought he was very honest about his investment in Interval. I had a lot of dealings with Interval.  There was a lot of value in the concept but the implementation was problem.  Again, Paul was not on top of what was happening.

I skipped over his discussion of investing in sport teams.  I have no interest in sports.  He discusses his involvement in entertainment. I was glad to see that he now realizes that he was “taken”  by SKG Dreamworks although I am surprised that he actually made money on his investment.

There was a lot about his philanthropic efforts.  Again, you can see he is all over the map.  It is interesting to compare the Gates Foundation with the Allen Foundation.

There is little about his personal life as  an adult.  He mentions two girl friends in the book.  This link  has some speculations.  When I was active in “Hollywood” in the 90s, I heard some stories but who knows if they are true.   Then again, there are some interesting stories about Bill and show girls. I always thought of Paul as a pretty lonely guy.  I remember that once I was in Portofino, maybe around 1997,   with the woman in my life at that time.  Paul showed up in one of his Yacht’s -  the  Méduse.  He was by himself.  I thought about saying hello but was afriad he would ask us to join him on his Yacht.  Paul was rich but in my opinion not very interesting.  We walked the other way.

Then there is Paul the consumer. The way he spends money is distasteful.  He appears to live like I imagine Donald Trump would like to live.  And sadly, I think there are a lot of hangers-on.   I once stood next to Paul at an Allen Conference (Herb Allen who is not a relation to Paul)  and listen to Paul discuss Yacht building with a woman I did not know.  The woman asked if he had a Helicopter Port on his boat.  Paul looked at her as if she was from Mars and said ” where else could you put your Helicopter?”.  He then told her that his boat had two. I wanted to puke.

Paul clearly wrote this book to demonstrate that he was and is relevant.  He was of course, and after reading this book, I raised his salarly.  He is now the richest 100 thousand-dollar-a-year programer in the world.

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Posted in Avram's Past, Technology | Leave a Comment »

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