The term “monopoly” gets thrown out a lot, but it’s often misused because true monopolies almost never exist. The nature of a market depends, among many things, features such as product differentiation and barriers to entry/exit. Markets are also not static, so a company can try to define a market in its own way and, if it’s powerful and successful enough, it can get away with it. For example, a regular watch and a Rolex are both watches but they’re not exactly in the same market and it would be misleading to analyze them as such. Some companies aim at making premium versions of a product and get away with charging a premium as well, largely because they have managed to define their product to fit their market.

Product differentiation is basically the ability for companies to differentiate their products from the competition in a meaningful way (that consumers care about). So, in the case of smartphones, there is clear differentiation between the products that Apple, HTC, Nokia, Motorola, and RIM makes and it is not likely that any of these companies will ever create a product so powerful and superior that it literally kills off the competition. It’d be lucky if it moves the market by a few percentage points.

In addition, some people are likely to own multiple kinds of the same product or service. Social networks are a good example. Whatever Google is concocting for its social network, it is more likely that people will sign up for it while keeping an active Facebook account, because what’s powerful about Facebook is not the unique services it provides, but the network effect it has. That is, the more people use it (i.e. the more friends you have on Facebook), the more powerful and useful it is to its users. Google is not likely going to get 500 million users anytime soon, and it’s not going to be killing Facebook in the near future.

I suppose this “killer” attitude is a way to get readers exciting about something that fundamentally isn’t very important in the grand schemes of things. Admittedly, even I was somewhat caught up in the rhetoric, even though I wasn’t buying any of their analysis. But many other readers are, to the point of being blind to facts and sales figures and (good) market analyzes. Tech bloggers are not likely to stop using “killer” anytime soon ‘cause it generates conversation (and blog posts) but it’d be nice if more of them can take the time to do actual thought analysis instead of getting themselves and their readers swept away by what corporations want them to think.

The keyboard takes some getting used to, but I can type surprisingly fast on it. The iPad does a good job of predicting and correcting my mistakes. There are a few keys thoughts are at inconvenient places, such as the apostrophe. It’s not hard to type a relatively long piece of writing on this thing. Having said that, I wouldn’t suggest typing your dissertation or even a short paper on it. It does allow for a bluetooth keyboard so that would help. You’d have to make do with Pages, which I’ve tried to use in my computer before, to varying degrees of success. iWork Pages itself is great at certain things, but not others.

I kinda have the wireless disappearing on me a few times, although I still have a connection. Not sure what is up with that, but it suggests that the signal isn’t really gone.

YouTube wasn’t as smooth as I thought. The videos were a bit choppy and I expected it to be smoother. Netflix was great, though. I mean, stunningly so. The videos might have been buffered better or something, ‘cause the quality was good. I’m not a fan of this red for ubiquitous entertainment so maybe it won’t be used that often for me. Update: Just tried playing some YouTube videos again and they stream fine. My router speed drops to painfully slow levels sometimes so maybe it’s not the iPad.

Doing HTML on this is not fun. It’s a bit tricky to get the cursor to the right location without it trying to copy and paste or highlight something. Could be there’s something I’m not doing right. The handwriting Chinese input is impressive but it’s only for Simplified Chinese. I kinda realize that it’s not the easiest to handwrite traditional characters on the pad space they give, but at least the pinyin could have afforded traditional Chinese. Probably something they’ll add later.

Maps was great but I give Google props for their hard work. I was stunned to see that they actually have photos of my grandmother’s street in Taiwan. It would be great to see more of this done around the world.

I never owned an iPhone so this whole syncing back and forth thing does take some getting used to.

I haven’t come across too many pages that look off on the iPad. I’m sure there are plenty out there, but I’m guessing more and more sites will try to make their sites viewable without Flash.

Reading on the iPad is pretty interesting. I’ve yet to read a full length book but I’ll have to give that a shot. I got some free stuff from iBooks through Project Gutenberg and also bought a book through their Kindle app (The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson). It’s nice that there are programs like Calibre that converts PDFs to ePub format. They might look a bit off on iBooks but it’s tolerable.

I’m really interested to see whether I can replace my laptop with this at conferences and other presentations. If so, this would be a great device to have.

Need to make sure pug hair doesn’t get into the device.

Schell starts off by discussing the recent success stories in social networking (e.g. Farmville, Mafia Wars) and interactive media (e.g. Xbox achievements), and argues that people are shifting towards more “authentic” experiences than fantasy-based experiences; in other words, that people are not trying to escape from reality, but re-engage with it, often with the help of technology. He offers a reading of the movie Avatar as an allegory of people wanting to use technology to experience the beauty of nature (while failing to note that only the scientists in the movie were interested in that; everyone else was trying to destroy or exploit Pandora). He also envisions a future where people will be surrounded by point rewards systems, much like Xbox achievements or frequent flier miles, and that these points would be ubiquitouse because media will be embedded in everything, from our bodies to cereal boxes.

A few of my own thoughts:

1) Schell doesn’t really say whether this is a good vision of the future. Throughout most of his talk, he seems to describe his prediction as a likely trajectory, but I’m guessing that he approves of this future because he talks about possible benefits. One of them would be that people will change their behavior because every part of it would be recorded for posterity. I’m not sure if that will necessarily make a difference, though. I am personally fascinated by my grandparents’ personal history, but less so about what they ate or drank on any given day. This is something that might sound cool on paper but not so much practice. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a professor, who told me how cool it was that you can browse the Internet through Second Life, and I was thinking “Yes, that is cool, but I can also browse it through a regular browser and it’s a lot faster.”

2) Schell assumes that people will be motivated by points alone, which seems awfully Skinnerian to me. (The fact that he seems to talk about it with awe is a bit disconcerting). In some cases, he suggests that these points will be tied to tax benefits or scholarships, and I can see that possibly being a good thing. In addition, if the recent panic about trophies in the PlayStation Network 8001050F Crash, people do seem to care a lot about their game achievements. (I personally couldn’t care less, but I might be in the minority). At the same time, if everyone starts offering points, I wonder whether this wouldn’t cancel out the effects of the reward system and put people back where they were before.

3) Schell describes Professor Lee Sheldon’s game-like point system for his courses game-like point system for his courses, which is admittedly pretty cool and something I would love to try in some form. Edward Castronova has also blogged about this at Terra Nova.

4) Schell’s frame of reference seems to be awfully short. His analysis that activities are becoming more “game-like” overlooks that play and games has been embedded in human culture for as long as there has been human culture (ala Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens). On that same note, the dangers of having a short frame of reference means that you overestimate the impact of some trends, which may or may not have staying power. Basing a prediction on fad is really not a good idea. (See also Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan).

5) Schell predicts that media will diverge instead of converge. He doesn’t elaborate much beyond that (other than calling it BS), but again, I think that might oversimplify things a bit. It might be true that divergence will occur in the form of hardware, with each media company trying to copyright or patent their content in a way that cannot easily be shared, but there continues to be a market demand for convergence, which means that people will find ways to get their media in one source (e.g. the computer). Pew Research on Internet and American Life already notes that more people are getting their news and television shows on the computer.

6) Schell was surprised at Nintendo Wii’s success. Really? I’m not a Wii fanboy by any stretch but I think it was pretty clear that Nintendo had something cool going on when they first unleashed their control system to the public.

7) Confirmation bias galore. For every success story like Farmville and Mafia Wars, how many failed products did he overlook?

8) He predicts that people will happily become walking billboards and marketing tools, which I find hard to believe. Unless corporations pay people to advertise their products on their bodies, otherwise why would people run towards advertisements? In the age of digital recorders like TiVo or other devices that let you skip ads, why will people suddenly want to run towards them just for points? After spending years watching TV on the Internet, I can’t get used to watching TV in hotels anymore ‘cause the ads are just so ludicrous and invasion. If nothing else, I think people want more control over their media, including what ads they want to watch (Hulu already does this to some extent), and not the other way round.

9) Schell argues that people are more into “authentic” experience today, like getting “real, organic food” or “real” whatever you can think of. While I agree with that trend, I’m not sure I think it’s due to a change in consciousness, but a change in technology, which, for example, extends (often artificially and dangerously) produce to withstand longer life, refrigeration, transportation, and so on. HIs point is a bit Baudrillardian in that he almost suggests that people are expecting the real thing to be more real than reality (I don’t think he actually says that point blank, so this is just my interpretation of his talk). If you’ve read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, you know that that has a ring of truth; corporations insert and exaggerate certain tastes to make them more noticeable to consumers. It’s a bit disturbing that Schell doesn’t comment on whether these experiences are genuinely authentic, or whether it’s just a marketing ploy.

Having noted all these criticisms, I do think his talk is engaging. He’s a whimsical speaker who definitely makes some good points. I would love to hear what anyone else thinks of his presentation.

I found the iPad strangely appealing to me. I’m not a gadget guy. My cell phone is falling apart, and I have no immediate plans to replace it before it disintegrates in my hands. I don’t play mobile games of any kind, and don’t plan on doing so. I don’t really want to look silly watching TV on the subway, either. Oh, and I LOVE that I don’t have cable. So, all the shortcomings about the iPad—not being 16x9, not having HD output—doesn’t really apply to me. (Some of the criticism fall along the lines of complaining that it lacks features that you wouldn’t really use but want it anyway ‘cause it’s the latest thing. You need it to have HD output so you can plug it into your high-def TV. Really? How often were you planning on doing that?)

The thought that I can one day bring an iPad, and ONLY the iPad, to a conference presentation is extremely appealing. I’d get it for that reason alone. I’m also beginning to warm up to the whole ebooks idea. I don’t care for the Kindle. It’s too bland for me. Not that I like flashy colors in my books, but lots of stuff I read does need color. If I can take notes and carry ebooks with me on the iPad, that’d be extremely useful for me, especially since I often lug around at least 3-4 books to every conference I go to. Jobs only mentioned five publishers, so we’ll see if others get on board. If their success with iTunes is any sign, they will.

I also think that most people are viewing the iPad too much as an isolated product, and not as part of a larger community of networks that include its apps store and iTunes music and movie store. I’m not sure if Apple had planned ahead of time when they developed this community, but it’s definitely making it an easier sell for people who are already familiar with these networks.

A couple of complaints, though. Why no camera? Unlike some of the other criticisms, video is actually useful. Not needing to bring a laptop to do video chat is great, and Apple already has a camera in its iPod Nano. This seems a bizarre oversight. The lack of Flash is also potentially problematic. These seem to be things that they can build in into a later model or upgrade, so it’s not too bad.

One of the tech reports I read described the iPad as similar to the Nintendo Wii—as in, being a product that doesn’t have the fanciest things but eventually gained mass appeal for having the right pricing and for attracting casual gamers. I think that might possibly be the case here as well. The iPad is probably not going to be that appealing to people who already have smartphones, e-readers, or netbooks. I’m not even sure anyone would want to carry an iPhone, iPod Touch and an iPad when they leave home. It’ll appeal to those who don’t have all those things.

I’m not a fan of getting products right when it’s launched. But I definitely see myself getting one eventually.

What I’ve started to notice is that news sites like CNN are about a day behind when compared to Digg. That means that some of the news that gets submitted into Digg show up on CNN.com a day later (and sometimes more). It seems that, with the exception of breaking news, Digg.com is a faster way to get news than CNN (and many other leading news networks).

This doesn’t really mean that news networks are slower than Digg. All Digg news posts usually have to start out as news reports first, and if they’re interested, people vote on them and they pop up on the site. But Digg serves more as a filtering device that lets you prioritize (to the extent you want a mass of strangers prioritizing your news for you) what news the “Internet as a whole” finds interesting.

Not surprisingly, most of the news that get bumped up on the lists are interesting, bizarre, or funny in some way. Mundane stuff usually don’t get bumped up, and there seems to be an uneven amount of posts devoted to animals (usually cats). Much of the submissions are also devoted to lists (e.g. “most underrated games of all time”) and similar pursuits.

The site also allows users to comment on the posts. These are usually somewhat funny and give you an idea of who the Digg users are (I’m guessing, mostly males, 18-30, left-leaning, techies).

Digg was founded by Kevin Rose in 2004, and it’s turned into quite the Web 2.0 phenomenon since then.

Climategate has created quite an uproar. Those whose emails have been cited try to downplay the significance of the events, arguing that this is really how scientists work, and that no malice was intended in the emails. Much of it, they argue, have been taken out of context or simply misunderstood. Others point to these emails as examples that climate research scientists are far from objective and that global warming is just a hoax.

I haven’t read anyone who’s actually questioned why scientists would actually go so far to create such a hoax that really wouldn’t benefit them all that much. It’s also interesting that people are more concerned with the contents of the email than with the fact that these private emails have been illegally hacked and released to the public.

I’m quite curious to see what academics in science studies will say about this. Science studies (or social studies of science, or studies of science and technology) is a field that investigates the social practices of scientists (mostly “hard sciences” like physics, chemistry, etc.). One of the earliest (if not the earliest) work was Laboratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, although people (including scientists themselves) have written about this kind of thing decades before (e.g. Thomas Kuhn).

The fundamental misunderstanding seems to be that scientists are and should always been 100% objective. While I think they are usually objective, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re unbiased. In the academic papers I’ve read, I notice that people tend to cite people they know and are friends with, which tend to also be people who, more or less, share their points of view. I think the pressures of the academic community also makes them more guarded about their data, and how they interpret it. At the same time, the public needs to have a better understanding of how scientists work, and that, in fact, Climategate isn’t really a sign of a hoax as much as it is a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how scientists communicate. Too much of our lives are run by people behind closed doors. That includes think tanks as well as large organizations like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund whose decisions impact millions of people around the world. These folks could use with a lot more disclosure themselves.

The premise of the book is simple enough. Basically, his thesis is that we think we know more about the world than we really do, and that there are “Black Swans” out there that exist beyond any models of forecasting we can build. The Black Swan notion comes from the belief people had for centuries - that all swans were white because no one ever saw a black swan, until they discovered it in Australia. Because people tend to imagine the world based on their empirical observations, people tend to have a “confirmation bias” that makes them notice things that fit their worldview, and ignore what they can’t fit in.

Taleb relentlessly criticizes financial analysts, economists, statisticians, and bad researchers, especially those who cling onto quantitive data and misuse it for their own purposes. For me, I think his book throws a wrench on design-centered approaches to game studies, especially since he questions any that we can model social (or even natural) phenomenon. He suggests going to observation to theory (or design) instead of the other way round (which is what design-centered studies tend to do). What I found particularly refreshing is that Taleb points out the many common errors of judgment that we make, not only in everyday life, but even in the conclusions we reach in research. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a study (usually quantitative) that made me scratch my head and wonder how such a flawed study went unnoticed. If nothing else, Taleb’s book will sharpen your focus on you approach your decisions and steer you away from erroneous predictions.

My only gripe is that Taleb is a bit of a name-dropper. It was a bit annoying in the beginning, but once you get past it, it’s a great and thoughtful ride. There’s a lot of wit in his writing, but you often have to know the people he mentions to fully appreciate it. I don’t know if this would turn off non-academic readers, but I certainly think everyone can learn from it.

Nearly everyday I think of someone else to recommend it to. His bibliography is to die for, so if you’re reading this, please try to get your hands on this book, and after you read it, get it for someone you know.

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