Olivier Lacan { thoughts }

Gowalla & Crowd Mapping

I joined Gowalla on Octo­ber 8th 2009. While not really being an early adopter, there didn’t seem to be much global excite­ment about it when I joined. I think the first time I heard about it was through Jef­frey Zeld­man’s twit­ter updates. They were odd, sim­ply men­tion­ing a fact and always had a short url like this one http://gowal.la/s/7v4. I clicked on a few and was puz­zled by what I saw. Instead of an ugly twit­ter image host­ing ser­vice or sim­ply a link to a ran­dom web­page, there was a map, a list of names, cre­ators, founders, a pretty icon and a deli­ciously slick XHTML and CSS3 web­site with sub­tle tones and an unusu­ally sophis­ti­cated design.

As a silly web designer I high­lighted some of the text with my mouse to check if the text shad­ow­ing was code or graph­ics. It wasn’t graph­ics: “oooh nice!”. Then I looked around, there wasn’t much expla­na­tion about what was going on. One short video on the home page explained the con­cept. You go some­where, you check in to a “spot”, if it doesn’t exist, you sim­ply cre­ate it. That’s it? What’s the point? It was left for me to fig­ure it out. A few @Zeldman tweets later, I kept click­ing on the links and I fig­ure out (organ­i­cally) that the check-ins were counted, or rather “stamped”. And for some rea­son, Zeld­man had earned some “Pins”. Things like “Vis­ited 10 cof­feeshops” or “Ranger”. Again, no expla­na­tions. But again, inter­est­ing mys­ter­ies. After a dozen Zeld­man nods I finally fig­ured I could sign up and maybe elu­ci­date the mys­tery. And to give credit to the appeal to author­ity, man­ag­ing to turn a father of web stan­dards into an addict made me want to under­stand who these guys from Austin, Texas were and how they did it.

Clearly they weren’t strangers to the web design world, there are nods to the best and bright­est of the field all around Gowalla, from Pins (Airbag Indus­tries, Design­ing with Web Stan­dards, Jim Coudal’s Field Notes) to spe­cial spots with rare cus­tom icons like the Happy Cog HQ. Throw in a Mint leaf and it would be perfect.

Gowalla shares a com­mon issue for begin­ners with Twit­ter. It’s hard if you don’t use it heav­ily to grasp at first how good or even how use­ful it is. Twit­ter is use­less with­out inter­est­ing and ver­bose peo­ple to fol­low or fol­low­ers to dis­cuss ideas and points of view with. Gowalla seems point­less before the game dynam­ics are under­stood (they aren’t explained) and before the social map­ping aspect sinks in. Gowalla isn’t a map, it’s a note­book wait­ing for you to explore and fill it with what you see. Which is explained very suc­cinctly by the slo­gan “Go out. Go dis­cover. Go share. Gowalla.”.

There is a lot of free­dom involved. Some peo­ple will want to map every­thing they see to gain Stamps and obtain Pins faster. Oth­ers will only cre­ate or check-in at the places they really like, to make the expe­ri­ence more per­sonal. The for­mer will not cre­ate a lot of edi­to­r­ial value, but they will cre­ate map­ping value. Since Gowalla uses Google Maps, it can over­lay its data­base on top of it and dis­play innu­mer­able (300,000 so far) user-generated Spots few of which prob­a­bly already existed in Google’s data­base. Because even if busi­nesses have a clear advan­tage if they are listed on Google Maps, most of them don’t know it or sim­ply don’t care. Gowalla gets rid of this infor­ma­tion input bot­tle­neck by shift­ing the incen­tive to map busi­nesses on the client him­self. If it sounds hard to con­ceive, it shows you how bril­liant it is.

Google tried to do this by mak­ing Image tag­ging “fun” on Google Images so that peo­ple would iden­tify objects and traits in ran­domly shown pho­tographs so that they would become search­able items. Alam­ofire (the cre­ators of Gowalla) suceeeded because they focused on the game. I’m not even sure they ever con­sid­ered how pow­er­ful the game could become for crowd map­ping. If they did, con­grat­u­la­tions to them for man­ag­ing to focus on the essen­tial fun and not the long term busi­ness goal. Because as it’s been obvi­ous to me after the first few weeks of use, and was hope­fully obvi­ous also to the peo­ple who invested 8.5 mil­lion dol­lars in it Gowalla early Decem­ber, the “game” could become very lucra­tive if its soon-to-be immense and individual-powered map of the world was mon­e­tized somehow.

But let’s not for­get about the fun side of things. Alam­ofire is appar­ently a small com­pany. Like Twit­ter it doesn’t seem to be run by com­mit­tee. Instead the guys from Austin grad­u­ally try to make their game bet­ter and acces­si­ble to more mobile users on dif­fer­ent plat­forms. Gowalla is so far only avail­able on the iPhone. It’s not yet avail­able with native apps on the Palm Pré or the var­i­ous Android phones out there. Icons and items are added drop by drop. There doesn’t seem to be a sys­tem­atic approach, it’s sim­ply based on whim or cur­rent events. That may sound care­less for a com­pany that now has a lot of money vested in its even­tual prof­itabil­ity, but this is pre­cisely how you can keep the fire burn­ing for cre­ative peo­ple. And Gowalla is based on them, made for and by them.

One of the unde­vel­oped core fea­tures of Gowalla is Trips. You can obtain badges by com­plet­ing cer­tain require­ments (found­ing 50 spots for instance) but Trips can only be unlocked by check­ing in a spe­cific Fea­tured Spots. These spots have been either cre­ated or edited by the Gowalla team because they are deemed spe­cial in a cer­tain way and also receive a nicely designed cus­tom badge to make them stand out from the rest. Trips are sim­ply sets of fea­tured spots, and if you man­age to check-in at all of the spots in a Cen­tral Park trip for instance, you unlock a spe­cial Badge which can­not be unlocked any other way. Of course these trips require a lot more top-down inter­ven­tion from the Alam­ofire team. But in an email to Gowallers, Josh Williams the co-creator (with Scott Ray­mond) of Gowalla announced that 2010 will see the release of trip cre­ation tools for the com­mu­nity. Another step towards increas­ing user addic­tion, and a very excit­ing perspective.

While Face­book was born on the PC, Twit­ter through SMS, Gowalla is one of the first suc­cess­ful web appli­ca­tion which solely relies on Mobile com­put­ing and geolo­ca­tion. And to fol­low the voices of many, I see a very bright future for Gowalla in 2010.

Posted in Neurons | 1 Comment »Jan 5 2010

Imaginationland

Lost isn’t only one of the best look­ing (cin­e­matog­ra­phy) shows in the his­tory of net­work TV. It’s also one where imag­i­na­tion, science-fiction, and most of all Soci­ety is explored far bet­ter than most peo­ple real­ize. I mean soci­ety as the orga­ni­za­tion of human lives as a group — with or with­out lead­ers — and their inter­re­la­tions. This, to me, is the most impor­tant aspect of the show. In igno­rance of its core con­cept, peo­ple some­times brush it off as silly absurd science-fiction. It’s as if they were read­ing The Catcher in the Rye and com­ment­ing on the improb­a­bil­ity of a kid wan­der­ing off by him­self in New York City. It’s miss­ing the point entirely, and stay­ing fix­ated on the super­fi­cially shock­ing instead of look­ing at the deeply relevant.

Know­ing what Dharma (or Alvar Hanso) is, is indeed inter­est­ing, but what’s fas­ci­nat­ing to me is how fac­tions inter­ract. Who decides that the End Jus­ti­fied The Means, who lets peo­ple make their own mis­takes rather than try­ing to pro­tect them for­ever. Who believes peo­ple are inher­ently bad, and who lies in the shadow of the statue.

Posted in Series | No Comments »Dec 6 2009

The Fall of Comcast

First off, let me assert the fact that I’m not a bit­ter per­son. I’ve had my share of DSL issues in Paris (France) with an ISP (NOOS, now Numer­i­ca­ble) which makes Com­cast look like a gen­tle baby seal in com­par­i­son. A con­nec­tion prob­lem on NOOS meant 0.5kb/s down­load speed for a month with no other solu­tion than wait­ing for them to repair the net­work node. And of course, no com­pen­sa­tion offered for the absence of ser­vice dur­ing a month.

That, was ISP hell.

Com­cast, most of the time is only a mediocre ISP. Their web­site is less unbe­liev­ably messy (infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture being the key issue) than BrightHouse’s but still remains a cry­ing shame for a com­pany that is one of the key play­ers on the inter­net. As one of my friends recently put it when I had a con­ver­sa­tion with him about ISP hav­ing con­fus­ing web­sites: “You wouldn’t be on the Inter­net if it weren’t from them, and they can’t even get it right.”

Pre­cisely. If you excuse the web designer lingo, Comcast’s home page sports a hybrid design with nested table ele­ments and nasty spell of DIVi­tis. It doesn’t even come close to val­i­date against the W3C stan­dards (254 Errors, 8 warn­ings). Let’s not even talk about acces­si­bil­ity, why would the hand­i­capped need the internet?

But let’s leave that alone, and just imag­ine that your modem has a con­nec­tiv­ity issue. In my case, slow speeds (100kb/s tops) and recur­ring dis­con­nec­tions for no appar­ent rea­son. No major down­load, no ongo­ing bit tor­rent activ­ity. Now push that sce­nario a lit­tle fur­ther: boom, no more con­nec­tion. Modem dead. How do you reach sup­port? Well you call them. Assum­ing you had the num­ber jot­ted down some­where. Which I guess is what you do when you’ve been a Com­cast user a long time — I haven’t.

So using what­ever way you can — shout­ing in the street, going geek-hunting or… steal­ing your neighbor’s wifi — you fig­ure out the num­ber is 1–800-COMCAST or 1–800-266‑2278. You pro­ceed to call.

- Hello this is Michael Jor­dan.
– And this is Ben Stein, wel­come to Comcast!

What. the. fuck?!
Yes I under­stand the need to asso­ciate your com­pany with lik­able pub­lic fig­ure to appease your cus­tomers and bring them warm and fuzzy recolec­tions of Michael Jor­dan dunk­ing a ball after an very improb­a­bly long jump. But Ben Stein? Really?! This anti-science cre­ation­ist loon? Well sure, if polar­iz­ing your cus­tomers with ran­dom unre­lated celebri­ties is how you like to set them up for cus­tomer support.

After a few min­utes of nav­i­gat­ing the hotline’s menus I finally find the one ded­i­cated to tech­ni­cal sup­port for an inter­net line (isn’t it your num­ber 1 sup­port issue? Why isn’t that the first thing the cus­tomer is offered?). I press what­ever but­ton I was asked to press to be put on hold until the next avail­able representative.

Except that, appar­ently, between the hun­dreds — I hope thou­sands — of cus­tomer sup­port peo­ple Com­cast has on its pay­roll there is sim­ply not a sin­gle one that will be able to answer my call right now. None? Really? Do you just mean the wait­ing time is so long, that the sys­tem was designed to become self-conscious after more than 20 min­utes of wait become necessary?

Of course I’ve seen this before, in France the very relaxed voice usu­ally tells you that this is due to the high vol­ume of calls and that a safe bet is to try again later on in the day, just in case the wait­ing line isn’t so embar­rass­ing any­more. What if the cus­tomer doesn’t want to call again? What if this is a work-related emer­gency from some­one who works at home on the inter­net and has a deadline?

In dis­be­lief, I try to call again, same answer. After a few fum­ing min­utes, I decide to go back to Comcast’s dreaded home page and look for inter­net chat sup­port. I’ve tried it a cou­ple of times on other ser­vices and one clear advan­tage is the lack of uplift­ing wait­ing music. And for transparency’s sake, here’s what hap­pened next. Let me be clear, you shouldn’t read this, as much as I shouldn’t have had to read it being slowly typed into my browser. But if you do read it, con­sider the time my “sup­port expe­ri­ence” took.

Live­As­sist Tran­script
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chat id : 3c8408a9-255d-48e5-83a5-3cba34fd5f59
Prob­lem : Slow con­nec­tion, con­stant dis­con­nec­tions on the com­cast modem. Not a router prob­lem, was test with 2 dif­fer­ent routers with same results

Olivier > Slow con­nec­tion, con­stant dis­con­nec­tions on the com­cast modem. Not a router prob­lem, was test with 2 dif­fer­ent routers with same results

Loren > Hello Olivier, Thank you for con­tact­ing Com­cast Live Chat Sup­port. My name is Loren. Please give me one moment to review your infor­ma­tion.

Loren > Please wait, while the prob­lem is esca­lated to another ana­lyst

Gre­gory > Hello Olivier, Thank you for con­tact­ing Com­cast Live Chat Sup­port. My name is Gre­gory. Please give me one moment to review your infor­ma­tion.

Olivier > Hello

Gre­gory > How’s it going today Olivier?

Olivier > Could be bet­ter

Olivier > I’d like to know if there are known net­work issues in my area or if my modem could be at cause

Olivier > Com­cast plan is under my landlord’s name, [redacted]

Olivier > Her phone is [redacted]

Gre­gory > Just one moment please.

Olivier > sure

Olivier > Hello?

Gre­gory > I can help you with that, can you hold for one moment while I process your infor­ma­tion?

Gre­gory > Try­ing to pull up your account infor­ma­tion.

Olivier > ok

Gre­gory > Let me run a health check on your modem for you.

Olivier > Ok

Olivier > just so you know, I’m con­nected to my neighbor’s wifi right now

Gre­gory > I see what the issue is Olivier.

Gre­gory > Let me get you directed to the cor­rect depart­ment.

Olivier > and the issue would be?

Gre­gory > Just one moment please.

Gre­gory > Please wait, while the prob­lem is esca­lated to another ana­lyst

Olivier > alright

Andres > I am more than glad to assist you today with your order. It will take me just a few min­utes to pull up your account in our ystem. I will let you know if I have any ques­tions.

Olivier > Andres, here’s hop­ing you’ll be more talk­a­tive than Gre­gory

Andres > How are you today Mr.Lacan?

Olivier > I could be bet­ter.

Olivier > How are you?

Andres > How are you today Mr.Lacan?

Andres > I am doing great! Thank you for ask­ing me! Sure I will assit you today Mr.Lacan.

Olivier > Ok

Olivier > Gre­gory appar­ently found what was the issue with my modem. At least that’s what I gather

Olivier > Could you please enlighten me?

Andres > So you are hav­ing prob­lems with your inter­net Mr.Lacan?

Olivier > yes

Olivier > dis­con­nec­tions, reg­u­larly. Slow speed, for a few days/weeks now.

Olivier > The web being my work, it’s crip­pling.

Andres > Mr.Lacan I apol­o­gize for the incon­ve­nient but my area is not trou­bleshoot­ing. I rec­om­mend you to call to 1–800-Comcast and they will put you with a tech­ni­cian and he will help you.

Olivier > I did

Olivier > And they redi­rected me to Comcast.net

Olivier > which is not a sup­port site.

Olivier > The phone num­ber is appar­ently over­loaded. So I sug­gest you maybe do what two of your col­leagues did before you: trans­fer me to some­one who can (hope­fully) chat and trou­bleshoot.

Andres > Ok Mr.Lacan I will trans­fer you to another agent. I apol­o­gize for the incon­ve­nient.

Olivier > Thank you

Andres > Have a nice day.

Andres > Please wait, while the prob­lem is esca­lated to another analyst

Michael > hello

Olivier > Michael! So glad to meet you.

Olivier > Do you do trou­bleshoot­ing?

Michael > Please wait, while the prob­lem is esca­lated to another analyst

June > ikThank you for vis­it­ing Comcast.com. What ques­tions can I answer for you?

Olivier > Hello, June.

Olivier > Can you trou­bleshoot?

Olivier > Or do I need to be intro­duced to my fifth ana­lyst?

June > I do apol­o­gize, Olivier.

Olivier > Thank you.

June > As what I read in the pre­vi­ous chat tran­script, your issue is regard­ing your modem.

June > Is that cor­rect?

Olivier > Yes.

June > Thank you for ver­i­fy­ing.

June > You have been routed to a Sales depart­ment.

Olivier > Ah.

June > Let me con­nect you to our tech­ni­cal depart­ment.

June > Will this be fine with you?

Olivier > That’d be great.

June > Thank you for under­stand­ing.

Olivier > All I can do.

June > Please wait, while the prob­lem is esca­lated to another analyst

Susana > I am pleased to assist you today, how are you?

Olivier > I’m doing some­what less good than 5 ana­lysts ago. But thank you, how are you?

Susana > I def­i­nitely under­stand how incon­ve­nient it must be in your part. Let me do every­thing to get this issue resolved for you within this chat smile

Susana > I am doing great.

Susana > Since when did this issue hap­pen, Olivier?

Olivier > I’d say a few days if not weeks.

Olivier > But it did hap­pen before.

Susana > Are the wirings secure and is every­thing plugged cor­rectly?

Olivier > Yes, eth­er­net cables have been checked.

Olivier > And I’ve used two dif­fer­ent routers to test the WiFi reception/Ethernet rout­ing

Olivier > The coax cable going to the modem is also secure.

Susana > I will now run a series of diag­nos­tics to check on the sta­tus of your con­nec­tion and devices from my end.

Olivier > Ok.

Olivier > Oops, clicked the wrong but­ton.

Olivier > Can you still see me?

Susana > Yes I can still see you

Olivier > Ok.

Susana > There indeed is a slight prob­lem detected with your con­nec­tion. How­ever, do not worry as this is noth­ing that I can­not fix remotely on my end. Can you please hold for a few min­utes while I per­form the nec­es­sary trou­bleshoot­ing steps from my end?

Olivier > Of course.

Susana > Thank you for your patience.

Susana > Done. Now let me run a final health check to val­i­date that the sig­nals have improved before we end the ses­sion.

Olivier > Great.

Olivier > Was it a firmware problen on the modem end?

Olivier > In case you didn’t see my mes­sage: Was it a firmware problen on the modem end?

Susana > Firmware prob­lems only occur with routers, Olivier.

Susana > The rea­son for this is just a sys­tem glitch from our end. How­ever it is now improved.

Olivier > Ok, great.

Susana > Great news, I just retrieved the results of the final health check and it is show­ing that the con­nec­tion has improved with a more sta­ble and higher speed. All sig­nals are in green, the sys­tem has been refreshed and prop­erly con­fig­ured.

Susana > Now all you need for the changes to fully take effect on your end is to pow­er­cy­cle your modem cor­rectly as out­lined on this link: http://lite.help.comcast.net/content/faq/guid/e1b0fbaa-ebee-4553-a55d-d529dab07e09#power

Olivier > Thank you for your help.

Susana > You’re wel­come. I can’t be more glad know­ing that your sat­is­fac­tion is guar­an­teed.

Susana > Is there any­thing else that I can resolve for you aside from this?

Olivier > Who should I con­tact if any­thing sim­i­lar hap­pens?

Susana > Since you are now online, you may want to watch videos for free as a com­cast sub­scriber at www.fancast.com.

Susana > Please con­tact your local office at 1800 266 2278 for a modem replace­ment if same issue occurs.

Susana > How­ever I doubt that.

Olivier > Ok,

Susana > It should be good to go

Olivier > Thanks again.

Susana > After this chat ses­sion, there may be a quick 3-question sur­vey that will pop up. It would really mean a lot to me if you con­sider this issue resolved. Are you okay with that?

Olivier > A sug­ges­tion

Olivier > Yes, the issue seems resolved so far

Olivier > Quick sug­ges­tion, if it mat­ters. Who­ever cre­ated this chat sys­tem might want to have the lines wrap­ping inside the win­dow, so users don’t need to scroll hor­i­zon­tally every time the ana­lyst says some­thing to see it.

Susana > It is, I assure you

Susana > Thank you very much for the sug­ges­tion. I will make sure it is passed

Susana > smile

Olivier > Good.

Susana > Thank you very much Olivier, please click on the END SESSION but­ton to answer the sur­vey as the issue has been resolved smile

Olivier > Good night.

Olivier > Alright, thanks for being the most effi­cient per­son I met today.

Susana > Ana­lyst has closed chat and left the room

As you can see I jumped a line in the tran­script every time I was “esca­lated” to another “ana­lyst”. Five times, 5, Cinq, or rather five fuck­ing times where it wasn’t the ana­lysts but I who had to even­tu­ally fig­ure out if they were the com­pe­tent per­son to solve my prob­lem despite them already hav­ing read a tran­script of my prob­lem descrip­tion. Or maybe this is part of the prob­lem, maybe being “esca­lated” sim­ply means that what­ever ana­lyst came before sim­ply dumped me onto a new one with lit­tle to no infor­ma­tion about my issue. That would cer­tainly explain the few min­utes of niceties before they real­ized that — oh, wait — the couldn’t help me. But they sure all stuck to the script when it came to the niceties.

A lit­tle ques­tion for their man­agers. Would you rather some­one be cour­te­ous and waste 5 min­utes of your time in a slow inter­net chat back and forth and this for 5 con­sec­u­tive instances, or would you per­haps like to get on with the fuck­ing prob­lem already and assume I am not hav­ing a great day, or else why would any­one spend it talk­ing to cus­tomer support?

So, skip the “How are you?”, and don’t dare tell me “How can I help you?” after I described it at length with:
– your online sup­port chat form
– the first “ana­lyst“
– the sec­ond “ana­lyst“
– the third “ana­lyst“
– and the fourth “analyst”

“Nice to meet your Mr. Smith, I am look­ing into the cause of the prob­lem you described to us and will come back to you shortly with more infor­ma­tion”.
Take it, it’s free. That’s all you need. That’s how you engage a cus­tomer by mak­ing him under­stand that what­ever action he first took to describe his prob­lem prop­erly in the hopes of mak­ing his support’s job eas­ier wasn’t com­pletly wasted. Addi­tion­ally it sets him up for the unavoid­able wait while a tech­ni­cian (not an ana­lyst, ana­lysts work at the CIA, or on Wall Street) runs a series of tests (phys­i­cal or log­i­cal) to nar­row down the cause of the prob­lem. Of the five peo­ple the peo­ple I talked to, only two (June and Susana) referred to my pre­vi­ous chats and seemed to at least have glanced over my pre­vi­ous descrip­tions of my problem.

By read­ing the end­ing of my dis­cus­sion with the very nice Susana, you would assume that my prob­lem was thor­oughly resolved, right?
Nope. After care­ful test­ing — which I couldn’t do or didn’t think to do after I was told that every­thing was “green” — I real­ized that my band­width was still nowhere close to the 6mpbs I could reach only two weeks prior. And my very strange down­load speed con­tin­ued.
It would go up to 300kb/s then sharply drop to 150, and finally oscil­late between 80kb/s and 110kb/s.

So I called again, this time I scored some­one on the phone. Lucky me!
I had a friend’s DOCSIS 2.0 Motorola modem with me to test and see if the prob­lem wasn’t related to the rental Com­cast modem. After a few long min­utes of tweek­ing, the Motorala modem was func­tion­ing prop­erly, with no a drop more band­width. The prob­lem was evi­dently net­work related.

Still the per­son I talked to on the phone insisted it might be due to the house’s wiring. So she asked me if I would like to have a tech­ni­cian come by and check the house. I was reluc­tant, since it was Fri­day, and it would surely mean some­time dur­ing the week, when I’m usu­ally very busy. But to my sur­prise, she offered Sun­day, between 4 and 7pm. I was amazed, you could never dig out a tech­ni­cian on a Sun­day in France. No they would rather work dur­ing the nor­mal week, when peo­ple are at work and can’t answer the door. Or bet­ter yet, have them take half a day off — so that it fits the Inter­net technician’s schedule.

The man was very nice, he checked the modem, saw my friend’s Motorola and told me it was much bet­ter than the default one and that a DOCSIS 3.0 wouldn’t make much of a dif­fer­ence now, but that the new faster speed was being rolled out soon enough. Less than a year he made it sound like. Then he checked the coax­ial lines inside the house and found some noise on the upstream. He seemed to have an eureka moment about this, but I could hardly see why a slight loss of upstream could be caus­ing a 80% loss of band­width. He went to the attic and fixed the upstream noise issue. Which made me very hope­ful. We tested the band­width: no change. He went out­side to the check the con­nec­tion with the node, and came back empty handed. He told me he would have a col­league come by the next day to check the net­work in the area.

This was the last I heard of Comcast.

Today I sub­scribed to AT&T’s U-verse. Not because it’s cheaper: it isn’t. On the con­trary AT&T is far too expen­sive. The equiv­a­lent of the com­plete U-verse bun­dle (Free­box) retails in France at $45 per month, with the high­est speed by default. I chose them sim­ply because their web­site is orga­nized, offers actual infor­ma­tion about the ser­vices pro­vided and most of all, because their band­width poli­cies aren’t reminscent of the late 1990’s.

Of course the com­par­i­son is unfair, I haven’t yet had any sup­port issues with AT&T, but that shouldn’t be Comcast’s prob­lem. What should be Comcast’s prob­lem, and what will be its down­fall in the fol­low­ing months, is that a com­peti­tor as expen­sive as AT&T could com­pare so favorably.

To the Com­cast exec­u­tive who will in the fol­low­ing month strug­gle to under­stand the mas­sive loss in cus­tomers they will likey suf­fer, I can only point to Jeff Jarvis’ excel­lent book “What Would Google Do”. The title is deceiv­ing, it’s not just about Google. In it lies the answer to why the likes of AOL and Yahoo faded away in favor of com­pa­nies who didn’t try to pro­vide con­tent — which is funny since Com­cast is appar­ently try­ing to acquire Dis­ney as an attempt not to be seen as a “dumb tube” — but instead good ser­vice to as many cus­tomers as pos­si­ble for the low­est mar­gin possible.

If that still doesn’t con­vince you, look up Free’s suc­cess story. The French ISP who started as a free alter­na­tive to France’s national oper­a­tor France Tele­com before lead­ing the way in the DSL rev­o­lu­tion and chang­ing the way tele­coms work in the coun­try. Which lead to France becom­ing one of the best and most com­pet­i­tive Inter­net mar­kets in the world, can­cel­ing a 10-year lag in national Inter­net usage.

Posted in Serious Stuff | No Comments »Nov 22 2009

You can either work on the some­what com­plex project you have to fin­ish pre­ping for Monday.

Or do some­thing fun and easy.

Posted in Creations | No Comments »Oct 31 2009

“I don’t eat “light” or “diet” prod­ucts, gen­er­ally — if something’s bad for me, I just eat less of it.”

Marco Arment — Lead Tum­blr developer

Reas­sur­ing to see that peo­ple in the Web world aren’t all Edamame–eat­ing health/organic nuts and that some can actu­ally man­age their eat­ing habits like grown ups (or not).

Marco Arment has a very inter­est­ing blog where he dis­cusses the Web and other inter­est­ing things.

Posted in Neurons | No Comments »Oct 15 2009