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Table of Contents
Curious Technology -- Your private disk drive on the Web
Articles --
Going fishing -- hooking Web page visitors and turning them into customers
The New New Thing by Michael Lewis, a book review
Bridging wired and wireless, and putting the user in control
New electronic texts -- from Gutenberg
Now you can have your own disk drive on the Web -- disk space that you access with the same commands and the same ease as the hard drive on your computer or the shared hard drives on your LAN, only this disk is out on the Web and accessible from anywhere. The space is secure and you can share it with designated partners and colleagues. Check it out at www.mangosoft.com. This is an extension to the Web of your Windows or NT operating system.
You need to download and install their software and pay a monthly fee. But if you have business uses for this new capability, it's well worth the price.
When was the last time you emailed a critical document to a partner or colleague and then had to phone repeatedly to get confirmation that it was received? Unfortunately, email over the Internet is not completely reliable -- many systems have to pass the message on and hardware or software problems anywhere along the path can delay and sometimes even block receipt -- typically when you are in crisis mode, and absolutely, positively need to be sure the other party has that document in his/her hands immediately. If you and the people you work closely with all have MangoMind installed, and if you have given the appropriate permissions for the folder in question (using the exact same commands you use to setting permissions in Windows and NT), then you simply copy the document to the shared folder and they can see it and copy it and edit it immediately. There's no delay and no email delivery uncertainty.
Also, while Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are now popular at some companies, other companies have not yet set them up, and even when they are set up, you sometimes have to go through lengthy procedures to get permission to add new partners. The MangoMind virtual Web-based disk drive resides not on your company's systems, but rather at MangoSoft. That means that with MangoMind you can give your partners immediate and secure access to the documents you want, as you work on them together, without having to give them VPN access to your company's network. They see just what you want them to see and nothing else.
This application feels very natural for shortterm partnerships and projects -- where a group of people needs access to common documents in common file space for a limited time, without going to enormous hassle and expense. It's a natural for publishing and documentation, where several different reviewers and editors will be looking at the same documents, and can use the color-coded version/revision capability of Word to clearly indicate who has suggested what changes.
It also comes in handy for moving around large files -- such as PowerPoint presentations, which are very awkward to upload/download and email. Imagine you have to fly across the country to deliver a presentation, and while you are in transit, your team is making final edits. When you arrive at the hotel, you just connect to the Internet, check your MangoMind drive to see the latest, and copy it to your local hard drive quickly and smoothly rather than having to go through the uncertainties and slowness of email. You can also use this Web-base drive as a common repository for such large files -- a reliable and economical way of distributing documents within a team, without using email.
For those of us who work in a home office, MangoMind also is an alternative to setting up a LAN. For instance, I have a laptop and two desktop machines in my house, all of which are connected to the Internet by DSL, but which are not connected to one another directly. Now, with MangoMind installed on all of them, I can quickly and easily share documents among these machines -- even move software from one to the other, without using diskettes, or ZIP disks, or doing FTP.
Since I work on projects for a variety of remote customers, I can set up a separate folder for each project, and assign access permissions separately for each, using the shared disk space as a convenience as well as a sort of social glue, making the relationship stronger.
A software development team that includes remote programmers might want to use this capability not just for documentation, but also as a place to post code and patches and bug reports.
Basically, Mangomind as a business-to-business tool, designed to work so smoothly with the Windows and NT environment that you don't need to learn anything new -- you just keep working as you did before, with MangoMind as a Web-based extension of your PC and your LAN. You know everything you need to know to move files around, set permissions, edit, print, etc. This Microsoft compatibility also makes this solution easy for IT departments to understand, accept, and implement.
Eventually, as portable diskless Internet devices and wireless devices with very little disk space become popular, the MangoMind solution could become even more important. You could compose your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on full-blown PCs, save them on your MangoMind drive, and then you and others could access them from these stripped down gadgets.
As an experiment I just added HumanClick links to the page that describes my consulting business /consult.html
If you depend on your Web site to bring you customers, consider using Human Click www.humanclick.com. To see it in action, go to my marketing page www.samizdat.com/consult.html There you'll see a HumanClick icon. Click on it and if I happen to be online at that time, we can hold a live chat with one another.
The software (which runs on your PC) is free for now. You designate which page(s) you want covered. Whenever someone goes to that page, a bell goes off on your PC. At that point you can prompt the visitor to chat. If someone asks to chat, another bell goes off.
You see info about visitors, live -- e.g., if they came from a search engine, you even see what they were looking for.
You can use their management capabilities to set up so different people cover different pages, etc.
I've found it a very effective way to turn visitors into leads and customers.
Normally visitors see Web pages, and the business that owns those pages only finds out about it after the fact --
The point is that there is an enormous difference between a experience where the customer (unbeknownst to the vendor) picks up and looks at goods and messages, and one where the store people are aware of what the customers are looking at and can intervene.
In the old environment, you only had a lead if someone registered, or filled out a form, or initiated a transaction, or sent an email. And you had to depend on the prepackaged content at your site to intrigue them and motivate them to do something.
In the new environment, every page view/visit is a nibble, and your people can immediately engage the visitor in text chat to get them to nibble more, and eventually to hook them.
My HumanClick chats have very much been fishing expeditions, and in the best cases, I've hooked people, who if they were just looking at the static Web page would probably have moved on without contacting me. And, in any case, I've had very interesting and informative conversations with people from all over the world. Give it a try.
If you pick up The New New Thing, don't expect it to help you understand how the Internet business environment works, or how to create a successful Internet startup. For that kind of insight read books like The Cluetrain Manifesto by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, David Weinberger, and Doc Searls, The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond, and even High Stakes, No Prisoners by Charles Ferguson.
The New New Thing is really an old old kind of book, with more in common with biographies of 19th century adventurers and soldiers of fortune than with books about Internet startups and the new economy.
It relates the wild and unlikely tale of Jim Clark, with lots of gossipy detail and no useful information. His ability to guess what the "new new thing" will be and to make billions from it, is presented as an unaccountable, almost magical power. Wow! he sets a record by starting three multi-billion-dollar companies -- Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon. And our sense of wonder is heightened by the lack of any connection to practical reality, any lessons of experience that someone could learn from this.
This is a good read, a quick read, a book that lovers of celebrity biographies will enjoy. But the same could be said for The Devil Drives: a Life of Sir Richard Burton (the 19th century explorer/adventurer) by Fawn Brodie. "In a world where there seemed to be very little left to be discovered, he sought out the few remaining mysteries. He penetrated the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina at great risk and wrote detailed descriptions. He was the first European to explore the forbidden Moslem city of Harar in Somaliland, which promised death to any infidel. Then he turned to the mystery that had fired the curiosity of Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, 'the greatest geographical secret after the discovery of America,' the source of the white Nile. Enduring great hardship, he succeeded with John Hanning Speke in discovering Lake Tanganyika, but just missed Lake Victoria, a failure that embroiled him in controversy and tragedy."
Jim Clark, like Sir Richard Burton, had incredible luck or instinct or both, succeeding against all odds, time and again. But unlike Burton, Clark's life was never at stake and Clark doesn't seem to have shown any interest in the meaning of what he was doing. "Richard Burton published forty-three volumes on his explorations and travels... In addition, he translated sixteen volumes of the Arabian Nights, six volumes of Portuguese literature, two volumes of Latin poetry, four volumes of folklore -- Neapolitan, African, and Hindu -- all of which have extensive annotations that help to illuminate Burton's character." Clark, instead of ruminating on the reasons for his success and the nature of today's wild business world, used his spare time to supervise the building of high-tech sailboats. And his biographer does nothing to make up for the central character's apparent lack of self-awareness.
The biographer keeps his eye on the player instead of the ball and the game. Imagine you are watching a World Series game, and the camera remains focused on Mickey Mantle, and the announcer talks about nothing but Mickey Mantle throughout the game. Every once in a while, the ball happens to come to center field and Mickey catches it. Three times, Mickey comes to the plate, and three times he hits home runs. But much of the time, Mickey just sits on the bench while his teammates bat, and the camera captures his face in extreme closeup, and we're entertained with flashbacks and anecdotes about his personal life. Yes, that's entertainment, but that isn't baseball. And yes, this book is very entertaining, but it gives you no idea at all of the game that Jim Clark played in, or how others could do well at that game.
Particularly telling is the description of how Clark ended up founding Netscape. He is portrayed as having been the mastermind behind the "interactive TV" boondoggle, having convinced the rest of the high-roller business world that the public yearned for movies on demand and prepackaged info to be pumped into homes through high-tech boxes connected to TV sets. Lewis indicates that that was what Clark had in mind when he hired Marc Andreesen, creator of the first Web browser for PCs -- Mosaic. Lewis says it was almost by chance that they turned their attention to the Internet as an alternative.
But the fundamental premise of "interactive TV" was flawed and was diametrically opposed to the Internet style. It wasn't "interactive" at all. The idea was for a small number of mega-companies to deliver high-priced content to passive consumers. The idea was to let them consumers have a limited number of choices -- such as which product to buy and how to pay for it. The idea was to keep the consumer locked in to a single vendor, so that multi-billion-dollar investments could be recouped and yield enormous profits.
The Internet, on the other hand, was primarily about people connecting with other people, people creating their own content and self-publishing it, people creating their own businesses on a shoestring and reaching global audiences. The Internet was about diversity, about a multitude of choices, about the beautiful kaleidoscopic anarchy of millions of people connected directly to one another.
As it turned out, Clark's Netscape gave the Internet an enormous boost, with a new browser that speeded up access to Web pages by about four-fold, without the user having to spend a penny. That made the Web fun and useful even at the 14.4 modem speeds that were common in the fall of 1994 when that first Netscape browser appeared; and speeded up the acceptance of the Web by the general public and by business.
But, if Lewis is right, Clark was clueless about what he was doing and what its impact might be on the global economy. He was just as clueless and lucky as Columbus stumbling upon America.
The other instances of multi-billion-dollar dumb luck -- Silicon Graphics and Healtheon -- were matters of mere money, probably without much long-term significance. But it's Healtheon that most of the book deals with -- a questionable business model, sold to the investing public largely on the reputation of Clark's previous successes, at a time when the market was incredibly gullible. And that part of the story doesn't seem at all adventurous or worthy of our awe.
Here is a man with over a billion dollars in assets investing a few tens of millions of dollars in another idea, and succeeding in fooling the public into thinking that that idea could work, without any tangible evidence, and hence raising the value of the stock to billions. His risk was minimal, and his gain was enormous. That's more the story of a successful swindler than a Columbus.
And once again, the biographer gives us no sense of how the man did what he did, how this Houdini made Internet funny money appear and disappear; and no sense of the game and league in which Clark was just one player; and, of course, no sense of the consequences of his actions had on anyone but himself and his close associates.
Every day we see further evidence of the convergence of the world's communications infrastructure. Internet, phone, cable, satellite, and broadcast services are becoming interdependent and, in some cases, interoperable. You might receive a phone call over the Internet, on a cell phone, or even over the same cable that delivers your TV signals. You might receive video content by traditional broadcast TV, through a satellite dish, over cable, or over the Internet. And such services can be combined in creative and useful ways.
Ironically, these infrastructure changes are leading not to greater simplicity, but rather to ever greater complexity for users and for companies trying to reach and serve consumers. You can choose from an ever-increasing multitude of information sources and use an increasing variety of devices and services for connecting to information and delivering and sharing information. Many services are available through both wired and wireless devices. And the choices you face are often bewildering even to the techno-savvy. Devices and services that one day seem to compete head-on, soon evolve their own market niches, and users conclude that rather than having to choose one over the other, they really need several.
Some sort of user-level convergence is inevitable, but what new kinds of services are necessary to bridge the differences between wired and wireless devices, and between online commerce and physical stores? What will be the point of convergence? How will user behavior change? Who will be in control?
Can we expect that a handful of major information providers and merchants will take charge, as in the era dominated by broadcast television? Will we see a reincarnation of the old "interactive" TV concept, with millions of locked-in, controlled consumers?
Or can we expect that millions of users will come to depend on a handful of Internet sites designed to help mediate the complexity and immensity of the new communications environment and make it manageable, like portal/search/directory sites do today?
Yes, complexity is difficult to deal with. But does that necessarily mean that the vast majority of people will want to abdicate choice and control? Having experienced the diversity and immensity of the Internet -- a world in which they can be players and creators, not just passive consumers -- and having rushed to it from the traditional world of limited channels and choices, should we expect that they will now rush to a new kind of limited-choice environment?
Or is there a third alternative, one which keeps the user in control, which lets you do what you want, how you want to do it, and yet bridges the wired and wireless realms and mediates differences among devices?
Services available today for users of palm-style and wireless devices exemplify each of these three possibilities:
Traditional media -- newspapers, magazines, radio, and television -- operate in "push" mode. You subscribe or you tune in to a limited number of information sources, and editors decide what you will see and when and in what context. Media companies expected that the Internet would evolve in that direction, but it has not. On the Internet, push-style information delivery is a relatively small niche market, suiting the personalities and needs of a certain set of people for a certain type of information. Meanwhile "pull" -- people deciding what information to access and when and in what context -- has become the dominant mode on the Internet. In this mode, the user is in control and decides among millions of choices, rather than just a few. In fact, the distinction between consumers and providers of information has blurred, with person-to-person communication by email, personal Web pages, forums, chats, instant messaging, etc. dominating the Internet.
AvantGo enables push-style distribution of information to palm computers and wireless devices. Users "subscribe" to particular channels, and information providers decide what gets sent to those subscribers. Their service helps media companies deliver content to mobile audiences and to relate to them in new ways -- filling an old need in a new way.
Sync services
Today, many people have more than one computer and more than one way of connecting to the Internet. Over seven million people have palm computers, and the vast majority of them also have desktop and/or laptop PCs. They use the one or the other depending on where they are and what they need to do. But sooner or later, they need to coordinate the information stored on these various devices. That's where the sync services come into play -- filling a new need in a new way.
For example, with FusionOne, a hub Web site acts as a continuing common repository for user information. You may have many devices, but you have only one home base where you store and coordinate the information that matters to you. If you enter a phone number or an address on one device, by way of such a service, that information will sync to all your devices. Similarly, a hub of this kind can store your email or frequently-used documents, so you can get to them from any device, rather than being limited to what happens to be stored in the memory of this one or that one.
Typically, such services strive for exclusivity. They want to be the one place you go to for your calendar or addresses and phone numbers or documents. One or another may have features or capabilities that you find useful on one occasion or another. But, typically, the user is locked in by the design of the client software -- e.g., you can have only one sync calendar service. Likewise, Web sites are forced to choose which such service to partner with to make their information easy for users to select for later syncing.
The needs of today's mobile users
Today over 7 million people use palm devices, and only about 1% of them -- 70,000 -- use wireless palms. Wireless usage should grow at a rapid rate, but most of today's "mobile" audience typically connects to the Internet using the HotSync capability of their palms. These people have pressing concerns that need to be met today, and that future wireless solutions will also need to address.
If you are a palm user, what are the practical everyday problems you face?
You know where certain information is on the Web but your wireless connectivity varies depending on where you happen to be. You can't be sure you'll be able to connect when and where you need it; and airtime/wireless connectivity costs you money. So you want to save the information you're likely to want to look at again rather than have to return to the same Web page repeatedly.
Your local memory is very limited so you want to capture not entire Web pages, but rather just the information that matters to you. This is prime real estate -- private property. If your device can connect to others, you want to put up no trespassing signs, no spamming signs.
You use this device for time savings and convenience. But the input mechanism is awkward, slow, and error-prone. Whenever possible, you'd prefer not to have to input information by hand.
You also want to store your information in ways that make it easy to find it when you want it and help you see it in the context of your normal activities. For a palm device, that means your schedule and address book. And you don't want to have to go through multiple operations to move the information you want to the application and format that you need it in.
You have multiple devices for accessing the Internet and don't want to have to learn multiple ways of fetching and saving what you want. And your business associates and friends have a variety of devices. You want to be able to share with them without having to worry about the details of what kind of device they happen to be using and whether they have a wireless connection right now.
Also, what matters to you is likely to matter to your business associates. So you want to be able to readily share the information you've gleaned from the Web and in ways that make it equally easy for your associates to use and retrieve it. Face-to-face, you are used to using the "beam" function on your palm to move business contact information and details about meetings directly to the address book and schedule of colleagues. That's simple and fast. It moves only the information you want to move and puts it right where it will be most helpful to your associate.
A user-centric solution
A new service from Coola (www.coola.com) provides a quick and easy way for transferring pre-selected chunks of information from Web pages or email messages to a palm device. You click on a "Coolet" -- a link on a Web page or in an email -- and the associated information will be added to the appropriate application on your palm (schedule, address, or memo) the next time you HotSync. If you have a wireless connection, you'll receive the information the next time you open the Coola application on your palm.
This free service makes it easy for you to make your information readily accessible for future reference by friends, customers, and business associates who use palms. It just takes a minute to fill out a form at their Web site and get the code you need to include in email or on Web pages to make it easy for others to move your information to the right application on their palms.
You can even create a "Coolet" with your contact information for inclusion in the standard signature automatically attached to you email messages. If Coola-registered Palm users click on such Coolet, the information will automatically move to the address book on their palms the next time they HotSync. This feels very much like beaming your contact information, but the two of you could be on different sides of the world, and don't have to coordinate your activities -- the recipient can click and then sync, or open the Coola application at any time.
This is a new approach that can lead to new ways of dealing with information and relating to companies and other people.
Coola's solution is general, not device-specific. Today it works for all Palm OS devices using the HotSync function, and also serves wireless palm users directly.
Future plans include WAP cell phones and other popular mobile devices, with development priorities set according to demand.
You can get used to this service with the devices you have today, and then readily adapt that style of operation to new devices later.
Likewise, merchants and information providers can use this service to satisfy and delight today's mobile users, to learn about their styles and preferences, and the same Coola links they put on their pages today will work for any and all popular mobile devices in the future.
Adding dozens of new titles every month, Gutenberg has over 3000 etexts available for free over the Internet. These include classic works of literature and history, as well as out-of-print and little-known works by great authors. If you can, connect by ftp, rather than the Web, to get the most recent ones. Here's a list of those recently added, alphabetized by author. The file name is useful for fetching the text from the ftp site. Unless otherwise noted, the directory is the one for 2001. Text for earlier years are corrected editions. Many of these texts are available now or will be soon on diskette from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK for those who cannot get them themselves. For the current catalog, check http://www.samizdat.com/catalog.html.
Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
Mary Agnes Fleming -- The Midnight Queen (mdnqn10.txt)
E.M. Forster
Thomas Hardy --
James Legge -- The Chinese Classics (Prolegomena) (prolg10.txt, while
this file in in English, it contains many Chinese characters)
Moliere -- The Middle Class Gentleman (mcgnt10.txt)
Albert Paine -- Mark Twain, A Biography (mt1bg.txt, mt2bg.txt, mt3bg.txt, mt4bg.txt, mt5bg.txt, mt6bg.txt)
Francis Pretty -- Francis Drake's Voyage Round the World (fdvrw10.txt)
Marcel Proust -- A L'Ombre Des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs (1lomb10.txt = volume 1, 2lomb10.txt = volume 2, 3lomb10.txt = volume 3, in French, available as html and as plain text)
Tacitus -- On Germany, Translated by Thomas Gordon (tctgr10.txt)
Octave Thanet -- Stories of a Western Town (wstwn10.txt)
Charlotte M. Yonge -- Two Penniless Princesses (2pnpr10.txt)
ftp://ftp.prairienet.org/pub/providers/gutenberg/etext02/
Victor Appleton -- Tom Swift and His Airship (03tom10.txt)
Neltje Blanchan -- Wild Flowers (wldfl10.txt)
Allen Johnson -- Jefferson and his Colleagues (jandc10.txt)
Rudyard Kipling -- Stalky & Co. (stlky10.txt)
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