Yes/No/Cancel

Seen this morning: PENNY, a german supermarket chain, sells typewriters.

Lunchtime! Vegetables au gratin, not bad after all. In our factory canteen you can only pay cash. We’re nearly the last one. I know of a couple of lunchrooms who do accept only chip cards which you can charge on an automat. This may have some advancements (you don’t have to mess with loose change), but after all, it’s just one step more between me and my food, isn’t it?

Spending the afternoon might become a challenge. My boss cares for the first hour with an unexpected meeting. Meeting is just another word for the collective comparison of PDAs and laptops among my troglodyte colleagues (Me have bigger club. Me leader!). I earn some disbelieving looks and return them with a Yes-I-am-using-paper-and-a-pencil-because-I-have-everything-under-control-anyway expression. — Surprisingly, this works. Even that good that my boss assigns a task to me which was scheduled to someone else in the beginning. I would never have believed that one day ragged paper and an IKEA pencil could become insignia of superiority. Question is: What do they think I want to show that way? That I care for the really important things? That I have everything in mind?

I spend the rest of the day setting up an experiment which is mainly manual work and taking notes. My colleagues are wondering why I’m always coming around instead of using the telephone. This makes me wonder which one is more disturbing: The phone ringing or someone knocking on the door? As for me, the phone causes more stress because it gives you the impression of total urgency: If you don’t pick up the receiver immediately, it will stop ringing and you will miss something important. But once you have picked up, you must start the conversation. If someone comes around, I can tell him to wait for some thirty seconds without him running away again. What do you think?

In case you didn’t know: In Cambridge, bicycles rule the roads. In the the more studenty parts of the city at least. Ok, it’s nothing like what you get in many Asian cities, but by European standards it’s not bad, as demonstrated by this video (embedded below, or follow this link to YouTube):

Of course, I do virtually all my travelling around town by bike — the traffic is congested, the bus service isn’t particularly good, everything is fairly flat and close together, so it’s by far the most sensible option. And during all this cycling to work or visiting customers, it was just a matter of time before I came to think of cycling as a general metaphor for my approach to work. So here goes. Highly tenuous, but maybe mildly amusing.

I must start with a confession: I sense a kind of simple-minded delight when I can overtake cars while on my bike. Which happens fairly regularly in some spots. The cars are all stuck in a queue, but I can put my weight on the pedals, wiggle my way past them, take short cuts via pavements and back alleys. Not only do I get to my destination in a shorter time, and don’t have to pay for parking, I also have more fun in the process.

Then there are the days where it’s cold and rainy. You get out the high-visibility jacket (praying that it’ll save you from getting run over by a lorry), waterproofs, wrap up warm, and get out there on the road nonetheless. Those are the times which put many people off cycling, and they require the greatest level of determination. But, at the risk of sounding clichéd, it’s also invigorating.

The essence of cycling is that you try to get somewhere quickly and efficiently, but completely out of your own strength. This means it’s more satisfying, more flexible and more cool than any other means of transport. Start-up business is just like that. You try to beat the big guys by being quick and agile, by knowing the short-cuts, by avoiding the traffic jams. It’s a sociable experience if you can convince a few friends to get on their bikes and come along too. And who knows, if you take it seriously enough, you might get to cycle in the Tour de France one day.

Working in a corporate, in contrast, is much more like taking the bus. It’s comfortable, but not much quicker than cycling, and it’s always the same route. If you climb the corporate ranks and get into a more senior managerial position, the experience is more like driving a car. Now you have control over some pretty strong forces, but you have to play very carefully by the rules, otherwise you cause accidents.

Driving the car of corporate careers may take you further in terms of distance, but I don’t think it holds the same level of satisfaction as cycling. Think of the Tour de France. You can still be part of it if you’re a car driver — unfortunately you will not be part of the race itself, but your job will be simply to carry the TV cameras. A sideshow, not a main actor.

I think this metaphor is working surprisingly well. Let’s see how far we can push the comparison between different career paths and different means of transport.

• Academic research is like walking. It’s definitely the best way of getting around a new and unknown place, or one with difficult terrain. You get to enjoy lots of nice flowers and other details along the way, but it’s slow — you can’t expect to travel very far.
• Corporate careers are like taking the bus when you start out, and like driving a car when you are more senior. For many people that’s the best way, it’s pretty safe, and maybe a bit unexciting.
• Start-up business is like cycling. It’s hard work, but you get to discover new and exciting places, you get there pretty quickly if it’s not too far, and you get the satisfaction of doing it out of your own strength. Also, when you’re cycling and you have a bit of spare time, it only takes an instant to become a pedestrian, so you have some of the benefits of academic research too.
• When a VC (venture capitalist) invests in a start-up business, I see it as being a bit like attaching a rocket booster to your bicycle, putting on a helmet, lighting the fuse and holding on tight. The kind of thing you might expect to see on Top Gear. With a bit of luck you will leave all the cars behind, find yourself at a garage which will transform your bike into a heavy-duty motorbike, and you can go driving around the nicest places in the world for years to come. With less luck, you will fall off and get a few bruises, but probably you will laugh at the kick you got out of it, and you’ll immediately start searching for another bike and another rocket booster to give it another try.

To conclude, I’d say that these are all good ways of getting from one place to another, and clearly some people will prefer one type over another. But you should know what the options are, and make a conscious decision. The same thing applies with work.

I’ve just worked out how you could make a 3G iPhone yourself, even adding GPS support, and still get away with a lower cost than buying a regular iPhone. The solution:

1. Get an iPod Touch (from £199).
2. Get a Symbian smartphone, such as the N95, with an internet plan (on 3 you’d pay about £34 per month over 18 months for a N95 and a tariff roughly equivalent to O2’s iPhone tariff).
3. Download JoikuSpot and install it on the N95. Use it to create an ad-hoc wireless network, and connect the iPod Touch to that network.
4. Voilà. Total cost is about £811 over 18 months (compared to the iPhone total cost of £899), you get 3G or even HSDPA, and you get a whole additional handset with Nokia’s awesome features.

JoikuSpot is still a bit limited — rather than just routing packets, it proxies HTTP traffic and doesn’t support anything else, so e.g. IMAP isn’t going to work for the time being. I hope that will get fixed soon. I tested JoikuSpot briefly for plain web traffic on my E65 and it seems to be working.

I’m not going to rush out and buy all those things now, I just find this situation curious.

The Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona is an astonishing experience. And that has not so much to do with its size, its architecture, its intricate artwork or any such outward aspects, although they aren’t bad either. The astonishing thing is that the construction of the building started about 130 years ago, and they’ve still not even started building the main central towers. It isn’t scheduled to be completed for at least another 20 years, and to me as outsider it looks more like it’s going to be another 100 years. That is not because the builders are lazy — people were right there, working on the masonry as I was visiting — but because it is such a massively ambitious project.

Now in history it has not been unusual for the construction of cathedrals to take 600 years or longer, but most of those buildings are now completed (except for eternally ongoing maintenance work). When we are told that it took so many years to build a cathedral, that information usually just washes past us without us ever really contemplating what that means. It means that for about 30 generations, all people saw was a huge unfinished work in their town, a monument from their distant ancestors lost in history, and a heirloom to their distant descendants in a future time which would be very different from their own.

In each of those generations, many stonemasons, woodworkers, architects and others would spend their whole life assembling tiny pieces of a huge work. They would grow up, live, eat, drink, love, grow old and die, and during that time they would still only see a small incremental bit of progress towards achieving the vision of their ancestors. It is impossible to even imagine the amount of human soul which so many people have poured into the endeavour over such a long period of time.

It seems to me that we don’t think about many things on that sort of scale today. In fact, I think that if somebody was to propose to start such a massive undertaking today, like Antoni Gaudí and his colleagues did towards the end of the 19th century, they would only get laughed at. Hell, we can’t even sort out things like climate change and fossil fuels running out, and these are things which happen on a much shorter timescale than the construction of a cathedral like this. Is it possible that the 20th and 21st century, with their ever increasing pace of life, have caused us to lose sight of this big picture — this understanding of the world which includes not just ourselves, but our distant ancestors and our distant descendants also?

Gaudí is given a lot of credit for the Sagrada Familia. That is not because he did a record amount of stone-lifting, but because he had a vision, a vision of a massively ambitious project which would span far beyond his own lifetime, a vision which would inspire the ambition of many other people wanting to be part of the project. I wouldn’t say that Gaudí created the Sagrada Familia — of course it is being created by the large number of workers in the past, present and future. But these workers all have a common ambition, a desire to be part of something much greater than their own lives, and this ambition draws from Gaudí’s initial vision.

The important thing to realise here is that although Gaudí is famously associated with the project, it is not “his” project in any useful sense. The ambition of the many generations working towards its completion are not doing it because of Gaudí, so therefore he arguably has fairly little importance today. The workers are not doing it for their own sake either — if they wanted to show off, they would be better off choosing to work on something which they might see completed within their lifetime. They are not doing it because of competition, or because of any sort of necessity, and they are certainly not doing it because somebody is forcing them to. They might be doing it for the glory of God, I don’t know.

My understanding is that they are working on this cathedral because it is something they think is worthwhile, something bigger than any single human being. This ambition is going to be successful because it is the collective goal of so many people. Ambition, viewed in this way, is a very selfless thing.

The word ambition has picked up negative connotations. It has become associated with ruthlessness, with striving for success at the expense of others, with egocentricity and self-importance. I found the Sagrada Familia a refreshing reminder that such a self-centered understanding of ambition is short-sighted, because it limits whatever you want to do to a single person’s lifetime, which isn’t very much in the grand scheme of things.

Instead, I see the Sagrada Familia as an example for a general pattern for doing amazing things. If you want to do something amazing, you first need somebody with a vision to inspire other people. Once that is done, the best thing that person can do is to step back, to surrender a lot of the ownership and control over the project to the people who will actually get it done, and of course let them take their reward.

The way Gaudí did this is by setting the scope of the project so large that it was way beyond his lifetime, and hence also way beyond his control. He is said to have commented on the expected duration of the construction: “My client is not in a hurry.”

A warm welcome to Johannes Hauser, who is joining me as a co-author of this blog. Johannes has contributed two posts and a number of comments so far, with a particular focus on the interaction between technology and everyday life. I hope that Johannes will give a bit of a balance to our content — if I head off on a technology tangent, he brings things back down to earth. I have worked with Johannes before and appreciate his well-founded and clearly articulated opinions. We are looking forward to reading more from him on Yes/No/Cancel over the coming weeks and months.

Having finished breakfast, I need to pack my stuff. It feels somewhat strange not to pack in the usual stuff like the mobile phone and the MP3 player. (I even remove the LED lamp from my key ring.) On locking the door, it comes to me that once I was even planning to install some electronic house access system which would render the house key obsolete. But it turned out that there is no fall-back system in case of a power cut. Who invents such a bullshit?

In the bus to work I have to show my monthly ticket to the conductor. I have to admit the ticket has an integrated chip, but that one is used on a self-service station only, not for daily routines. I guess we can turn a blind eye to that. But I know that some other bus companies give out smart cards which you have to check on a sensor on entering the bus. Luckily, mine hasn’t started that sort of stuff. Anyway, I could buy a single ticket which is printed on paper (by a onboard computer, sadly), paying with loose change. Dodging the fare is not advisable today because the controllers use some sort of handheld computers where they would enter my data, requiring me to subscribe with a digital pen on a touchpad.

While entering my workplace, I realized that usually I would have to check in - using a smart card again. Good thing is, we are allowed to note down the time as an alternative, if the check-in does not work or we’re working abroad. Today I declare it as ‘not working’, period. And now things are getting tricky: What do you do all day long if you are usually working on a computer or in a lab with high-tech equipment? First thing I do is to tidy up my desk and file away piles of old papers. This keeps me busy for about an hour and a half and leaves me with a certain good feeling and a blank desk. But there are at least two hours left until lunch break. Perfect time for the reading of some papers about my next task. I printed them the day before since after all paper is friendlier to read and easier to highlight. You see, I’m cheating again: It’s not like I’m not using computers at all, It’s just that I planned carefully to avoid computers today, having prepared for that before.

All the time I’m happy the phone doesn’t ring, because it is - you may guess already - some high-integrated Voice-over-IP-based digital telephone system bling bling. I am certain my phone possesses more computing power than the machines which controlled the first space flight. Only for comparison: The first working prototype of a telephone was constructed in 1861, and one of the first ever transferred sentences was “Das Pferd frißt keinen Gurkensalat” (The horse doesn’t eat any cucumber salad). Which has about the same amount of meaning as what usually comes out of my phone receiver.

Since it is Lent now, our roman-catholic friends are doing without meat for 40 days. I am protestant and vegetarian anyway, so this does not really mean much to me. Anyway, some of them asked me if I would also forswear something for that time. I usually answered that I’m trying to pass the days without golfing. This is not a great relinquishment since I’m not golfing anyway, but it usually leaves them sufficiently impressed.

But all that made me think of one thing: Would it be possible to spend at least one day without computers, integrated circuits, digital devices and all that? Let’s think it through. I use the following rule: I may not use any semiconductor-operated device at all. Other electric devices will do ok, although I will try to avoid them. Also I will let others use digital devices for me. You may call that cheating, but I can only control myself, not others as well, and I cannot entirely shut down public life.

First, I would have to replace my radio controlled alarm clock by some good old mechanical device. And there’s the first drawback: I can impossibly sleep with a ticking clock around. Of course, I might wrap it in lots of fabric, but then its ringing will also be muffled. Not good. Also I would have to rewind it from time to time, but that’s a minor problem - at least if it doesn’t stop in the middle of the night, which according to Murphy’s Law it will do the nights before important meetings and stuff. But my digital clock once let me down also, because I failed to program not only the time but also the weekday. (Let’s call that a draw.)

Luckily my bathroom works on a somewhat hydraulic base, I even switched back to shaving foam some years ago since the electric razor broke and left me half-bearded one morning. But on the breakfast table I am unsure again about whether toasters and coffee machines are usually IC-controlled or not. On closer examination, the toaster has a simple bi-metal control, so I can use it safely. About the coffee machine, I still don’t know, so I decide to postpone the coffee to when I am at work. (The machine there is certainly not under digital control, and even if it would be: it’s usually my roommate who’s handling it because in earlier times I never got the amount of coffee powder right. But that’s another story.) Looking around in the kitchen, I notice that nearly all devices have at least an LCD display which means there are semiconductors at work. Well, except for the fridge which is that old it’s even strange it works on electricity and not on steam power. By its energy consumption and noise radiation, it wasn’t invented long after that. Usually this annoys me but this morning I even feel something like gratitude. Good old fridge.

Note to self: Replace it.

John Crowcroft (a leading authority on communication systems, and a former lecturer of mine in Cambridge) has written a short informal paper on new directions in mobile communications. It is sub-titled “How to Learn to Stop Hating the Cellular Telephone Industry”, and more informally sub-titled “Rant about the cellphone industry’s failure of imagination”.

The paper draws analogies between the history of the internet (which has been absolutely astonishing over the last 30 years) and what the mobile phone industry could have done in the same time, had it taken the same sort of approach to innovation. Instead, the mobile telephone operators chose to lock down their systems, tightly control everything which goes in and out of them, and as a result have hardly experienced any innovation at all.

The key problem appears to be the fact that the telecoms companies have made a LOT of money from massively restricted services in the past, and they are continuing to do so today. If they open their systems and make it easy for third parties to provide services on top of them, they are probably going to lose some of that revenue in the short term. What they don’t realise (or do realise, but don’t want to face, for business or organisational reasons) is that they could make MUCH MORE money in the longer term by having an open system and providing great innovative services on top which people will happily pay for! The internet has proved that there are thousands of business models which are not only viable but actually extremely lucrative. You just need to be bold enough to take the risk of opening your systems to the competition.

Fortunately, there is a bit of movement — European mobile networks have at least made a few attempts at being reasonably open, and the US is gradually catching up too. But still it’s two steps forward and one back. Plenty of new devices (notably the iPhone) are still locked to one operator and don’t allow third-party software to be installed (unless you jailbreak it, of course). Eventually, we will probably get the same sort of innovation on mobile as we are getting on the internet, but it’s not going to be that quick.

Check Jon’s paper for a few business ideas, and then form a start-up. The more people try to make it happen, the more pressure there will be on the operators to open up, on the handset manufacturers to become compatible, etc.

Mobile internet usage is one of those areas which is hyped a lot, but it’s actually pretty hard to lay your hands on some real figures detailing the number of users. In this week’s NMA, there’s an article by Tim Barber of Continental Research which gives a few useful figures to quote.

If you add up the figures, you see that there are currently a total of 7.4 million mobile internet users in the UK, which corresponds to 12% of all mobile phone users. I think that’s a pretty impressive figure already — it shows that mobile internet use isn’t just a toy for a small number of geeks, but it’s actually fast en route to mainstream adoption. (I don’t have an up-to-date growth figure, but I do know that from 2006–2007 the number of page views from mobile devices went up by 16%, according to the Mobile Data Association.)

Speaking of geeks, the data from Continental Research breaks the population into four rough categories: whether or not they are interested in technology, and whether or not they are interested in style. Considering just the former criterion:

• Those interested in technology (the ‘geeks’) constitute 25% of mobile users, and of these people, 28% use the mobile internet. In this group, we therefore have 4.4 million mobile internet users.
• Those not interested in technology constitute 75% of mobile users, and of these people, 6% use the mobile internet. In this group, we therefore have 3 million mobile internet users.

Spot something? A techie is 4 or 5 times more likely to use the internet on a mobile phone than a non-techie. However, the reality is that there are also 3 times as many non-techies as there are techies. This means they almost cancel out — right now, there are already plenty of people using mobile internet services even though they don’t care about gadgets and technology toys.

This is pretty good news: it shows that the general population has a genuine need which mobile internet access can address. It’s not just a toy, and we don’t simply use it just because we can. It’s actually something which can make our lives better.

Viewed in terms of Gartner’s Hype Cycle, right now, the mobile web and mobile internet are stepping out of the Trough of Disillusionment (into which they fell with the failure of WAP to match expectations) onto the Slope of Enlightenment.

I think this calls for a graph.