Tag Archives: Technology

Books, Technology

Why do we pay VAT on eBooks but not on print books?

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There’s no VAT charged on books – it’s one of a number of exempt products and services that the HMRC sets to be zero rated (For the full list – click here).

…but there is on eBooks. I’ve been searching for an answer as to why (and indeed, why print books are zero rated). I can only assume that – as books broadly speaking ‘better’ or are needed for civilized society, a view was taken that they should be zero rated and that’s been maintained over the years.

As to why eBooks aren’t zero rated? The suggestions I’ve read online indicate that legislators haven’t quite caught up with the concept. Would they be taxing a digital download/service, or a ‘book’ in the traditional sense? In the case of Kindle, you aren’t buying the book but the right to access it from Amazon – so how is that classified by the bean counters?

Irrespective of the logistics of it and whether they should be zero rated or not, this is why the pricing on eBooks is so broken. It is almost inevitably cheaper for me to buy a hardback on Amazon than the Kindle equivalent (given Amazon’s extensive discounting of new mass-market hardback novels). Frustrating, but I’m still paying the digital tax – the convenience of e-reading – not to mention the enormous amounts of shelf space it’ll save me in the long run – is immense.

Technology

The future of human/machine interaction

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I’ve been thinking about this one for a while as well. We all know the scene from minority report…

This has been held up as the way in which people will interact with machines, and – indeed – some people have been working to make it a reality.

But is this the way that people will interact with technology in the future? A big part of me thinks no – too much work! Sci-fi tells lots of different stories, and one of the main things people imagine is voice control.

My own feeling falls down a few different paths. I should flag that my agency has clients involved in a few of these fields – Logitech on the more traditional machine interaction side and Nuance on the voice recognition side – but these views are my own and uninformed by discussions with those guys.

1. Traditional man/machine interaction isn’t going away for a while. Mice and keyboards are very effective at getting through many of the tasks we’ve made for ourselves and are very well entrenched.

2. Voice is going to continue to develop. Whilst voice control has always had its fans and its critics, there will be two key things that both limit it and send it on its way. The limitation – is accuracy. In the near to mid term it’s unlikely to reach the 90+% accuracy levels you get when typing. The driving force – is the need for hands free. There are always going to be contexts in which hands-free control over a machine will be important, more so as mobile computing entrenches itself in modern society. So whether its in an industrial context, in a car or on a mobile device there are platforms on which voice would be an optimum control mechanism.

3. Touch. The ‘hot’ interface right now. As someone who owns and uses and iPad and and iPhone I can tell you that I am a convert; initial mediocre experiences on tediously inadequate Windows Mobile devices, unresponsive and stylus-driven, made me very sceptical indeed but the potential of this for innovative and interesting interaction with different applications is tremendous. But I can’t help but feel that the limitation here is the screen…

Which leads me to…

4. AR interaction. I have no idea how far this will go – at the moment augmented reality provides wonderful toys for marketers to play with and the potential for some retail novelty. But if you’ve read Charlie Stross‘ Halting State (as you know I have), you’ll have read of a world in which everyone wears AR enabled glasses, and can overlay ‘layers’ of Internet reality on the real world. So – an overlay of Google Maps on your current view of the street, complete with turn by turn navigation. An overlay of SquareMeal’s restaurant reviews. An overview of World of Warcraft’s avatars, if you are so inclined. An overlay of the police criminal database, giving you information on individuals, crime scenes, etc. Whilst that’s a fun extrapolation, I think there’s scope for more everyday applications, and – as ever – I have no doubt that marketers will be amongst the first to pick them up. Imagine an AR iPhone app, for example, that allowed you to view special offers on a poster, and interact with them to choose the one you wanted to download (app would recognise a QR code, or some such, download the relevant reality overlay from the Internet alongside an interaction protocol, and let you play!). Or imagine a gaming context – in which you could run around, laserquest style, interacting with phantoms like the one in the Lynx ad.

AR is exciting for much the same reason that the Wii was exciting – it involves every day people in an interactive experience – in the real world. There may be screens or bits of tech to support the interaction but over time they will fade into routine mundanity (is that a word? computer says no). Although I do think that perhaps Gmail’s new features might be taking the concept a bit further than it should go.

5. Direct neural interface. Still far away? I’ve not read anything in the mainstream media about this one. A lot of sci-fi features subvocalisation to intelligent digital agents (Peter F Hamilton (link) calls them ‘u-shadows’). I’ve never been sure what subvocalisation is (oh, that’s interesting, wonder what Nuance is doing there…), and over the years of meeting people, the workings of whose minds completely evades me, I’m cynical about the capacity of a machine to interpret the synaptic instructions of a broad subset of humanity. Not without the Cylons taking over, anyway.

One thing’s for sure – there’s a lot going on in this space and it’s massively exciting. Have I missed any particularly interesting ones? Always interested to read.

Technology

Helpful Mac gestures and shortcuts for Windows users

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I’m still getting used to the MacBook, so discovering things daily. The below are my current most helpful shortcuts and gestures. What do you use? Tell me, Macfans!

Option instead of alt, COMMAND instead of CTRL. COMMAND-OPTION-ARROW (or COMMAND-OPTION-SHIFT-ARROW). Keep messing that one up.

Command tab – switch apps, etc. Command generally replaces CTRL. Command-` will switch between tabs in an application.

Enter to rename files (F2 in Windows)

FN-DELETE – forward delete (delete key in Windows)

COMMAND-SPACEBAR – Spotlight search (keep thinking it should be left-swish – probably will be in Lion)

Loads of cool stuff with Expose, the applicaton switching, erm, application – COMMAND-F3 shows desktop, for example, Expose shows all open windows wby pressing F3 (same as three finger gesture)

Cool touchpad stuff:

Two finger touch gesture – scrolling.

Four fingers swoosh down gesture – view all open apps (or swoosh up to show desktop)

Three fingers sideways swoosh – back/forward

Pinch to zoom

Rotate to… rotate

Technology

International broadbandness

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Because I’m curious about these things, I tend to make a cursory study of broadband connectivity wherever I travel (after all, in my professional life, I helped promote a global Broadband Quality Study three times…). All speed ratings are as determined by the Speedtest.net app on my iPhone.

– In the UK, we get an average of 3 mbp/s down and 0.8 mbp/s up. Mediocre, but serviceable. I’m considering BT Infinity when my contract is up in September – anyone have any insight into whether that might be a terrible idea? This is a suburban reading.

– In Malaysia, which for years has had a fairly consistently terrible broadband service, my parents have recently acquired a fibre optic cable service – resulting in synchronous 10mbp/s internet access for them. It’s amazing, although not massively cheap – at over 40 quid a month, in local currency. This is also a suburban reading.

– In Denmark, the speed as tested was more like 2 mbp/s down and 1 mbp/s up. Which is low, until you consider that somehow they manage to stream HD IPTV over the same line, at the same time, with nary a glitch or artefact. They have some clever traffic management stuff going on to make that happen, although aspects of the connection confounded sense: the router periodically stopped routing to random websites (including Google.com) and the original router supplied didn’t have wifi or switch features, so was tediously difficult to share. Thank goodness for the wifi upgrade Onkel and Moster got! This is a remote rural reading.

I didn’t check Finland – but that was a suburban reading which has been the cause for a little complaint.

No grand conclusions to draw from this except to point out that the fibre experience was almost magical next to the increasing creakiness of DSL broadband, which gets proportionately worse the further you are from a city. My hesitation around BT Infinity stems as much from concerns about how effectively the copper and in-house wiring will carry an increased broadband quality, how crappy the BT provided VDSL modem/router is likely to be… as well as the cost, which is double what I’m currently paying with O2.

I’ll continue to fight a broadband crusade – we need Next Generation Access in the UK sooner rather than later – and look forward to seeing what the likes of BT and Virgin Media do about it. I can’t believe that the Malaysians have managed to provide such a good quality of service, but it’s early days for the product there so imagine TMNet will soon eat its own tail in contention ratios.

Any other International broadband experiences to share?

Books, Software, Technology

Kindle blogstore… ish

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I made good use of the Kindle app over the sabbatical – I read my way through most of Joe Abercrombie’s back catalogue, including the First Law trilogy, amongst others, via the iPad and iPhone, whilst feeding Emily and when on planes, trains and boats.

So it was with some excitement that I realised that I could add my blog to the Kindle store and make it available to my adoring public via another channel. I’ve done so, and you can subscribe here… if you live in the US and have a full-on Kindle device. I’ve no idea why it’s not available in the UK… Can anyone educate me?

As to why is it that Amazon hasn’t provided similar features on the iPhone/iPad that it has going on its own device…? Again, not sure. Presumably to force sales of the Kindle to people that want to read blogs, newspaper etc., and make some money from the hardware sales… But you’d think that they make most of their money from the book sales rather than from the physical hardware??

Technology

Possible disruptions

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I’m having to upgrade to a professional hosting package so there might be some disruption. The avalanche of traffic thanks to the various Outcasts posts has doubled my bandwidth allocation this month and the price penalty made it worthwhile going to a pro account for the year (!!). With my newfound blogging passion I can only hope that traffic will continue to grow so it seemed a worthwhile investment. Good on 34sp for the help with the hosting and migration and my domain registrar 1and1 for providing relevant DNS settings information.

Please bear with us…

Culture, Technology, Travel

Generational vs cultural differences for the Internet in Malaysia

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Malaysia is the 5th “most connected” country in Asia (data 3 years old but should still hold mostly true). So it’s with some surprise when I come visit home that there are vast differences in the way we do things. We don’t check online for local garages – we drive around and find ones that look good or word off traditional word of mouth recommendations. On the other hand, Dominos Pizza in Malaysia accepts online payments, in a country that has traditionally shied away from e-commerce due to high levels of fraud, and we managed to pre-emptively order a lot of Emily’s baby kit from an online store before we arrived.

Hard for me to always establish which differences are due to culture – it’s a hard-bargaining, fraud-averse environment here – and how many are due to generational differences. Most of our visits here are spent with my parents and aunts and uncles – who are of a different age, shall we say.

Regardless of what the cause is, I’ve taken some delight in spreading a few bits of my digital-era practices here. A couple of aunts have been introduced to Apps, I’ve been evangelising true Smartphones whilst battling against aging Nokias and so on. The motivation is more than slightly self-interested – it’s lovely to have my family more connected to our lives as we share them digitally – including the ongoing development of young Emily and our other adventures…

Cousins – what do you think?? Digital Guru Shayna?

Technology

Garmin vs TomTom

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Have tried using a Garmin SatNav box in Malaysia – we use a TomTom in the UK. It’s been a bit of a challenge getting used to it – unlike TomTom, which is generally pretty precise on postcode lookups, the Garmin box is fairly useless on address lookups – on three or four separate addresses, taken us within range but not actually close enough to be useful.

What’s bizarre is the usefulness of the Garmin Nuvi 1420 box in looking up specific destinations – restaurants, venues etc., – if you treat it more like Google Maps than like a postcode/address lookup, it worked pretty well. Lane control was good, maps were good… the voices are terrible, and the touchscreen isn’t quite as responsive as the TomTom, but otherwise it worked pretty well.

Don’t know how much of the bits that worked badly – address lookup, voices – were a feature of poor localisation to Malaysia. It seems to be the main brand present here, so you’d think they’d sort those issues out properly.

Technology

Family technical support

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I’ve had a few tasks since being here, including:

1. Rebuilding an old PC (I love the speed of a fresh XP install in the morning)
2. Retrieving data off a failed hard drive
3. Sorting out the wireless networking on the new FiOS net connection they have here
4. Sorting out a networking solution for my Dad’s Skype enabled Panasonic Viera TV
5. Setting up the new Logitech HD camera and Vid we got my Dad for his birthday (they’re a client but I paid full – well, Amazon – price for a matched pair) so they can talk to their grandchild in HD when we’re back in the UK. I’d use Skype but their HD certification is not very well entrenched with the manufacturers yet.
6. Setting up for remote access etc., so I can help them when things go wrong when I’m not here
7. Patching the hell out of all their software (thank you FileHippo)

It’s all gone fairly smoothly. Two points to note – first, PC Expos absolutely SUCK in Malaysia. Rammed full of people, the one way system forces you to plough your way through a massive crowd for limited satisfaction. Incredibly badly designed thoroughfare that I’m sure violated every fire and health and safety regulation there is – if such things were enforced in Malaysia.

Second, Powerlink networking really is the absolute simplest way of getting a big house online! I actually bought the kit to connect the Viera TV, which didn’t come with built in wireless and requires a Netgear wireless adapter that no-one here stocks, but it could just as easily have been used as a range extender on a Wifi network (with a second AP) etc. Impressively simple stuff from the nice people at TP-Link, who I’d not heard of a few weeks ago but now seem well entrenched, both in the UK and here, as the budget networking solution of choice. With Linksys going Cisco-upmarket and 3Com doing the HP thing, I guess a few people had to take advantage at this end of the market.

Anyway, hopefully I’m done with fixing things (just need to figure out how to configure Viera-Skype), and can continue to focus on baby, family, my lovely wife and get started with the writing. And the fitness training. Crikey, I’m trying to fit a lot in!

Technology

iPad 2–I’ll give it a miss

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I’m really hoping I stick to that. Even though it sounds like they’ve made some design (thinner, lighter!) and performance (dual core!) improvements, and it has cameras and HDMI, there’s not enough there to make me want to switch. Besides, I am unlikely to get more than £400 for my existing iPad on eBay (I did check…) which makes the upgrade officially unaffordable!

I’d rather have a (sigh) Macbook Pro/Macbook Air. Using my (otherwise very good) Dell Studio XPS’s mediocre touchpad has me missing the multitouch gestures of the Macbook I experienced on Tom and Chris’ machines.