Tag Archives: gadgets

General musings

Commerce and the world wide web


I’m old enough (Don’t remind me) to actually remember the ‘world wide web’ being ‘born’ in 1994. At the time I was trying to be a Business Development Executive, writing PR pieces for an IT consultancy amongst other things. Wrote a few trade piece articles, did a couple of local radio interviews. I do so hope they no longer exist. Cringe. I might be lucky as these low points of my career predated even the Wayback Machine. Everyone was trying to work out how to use the Internet to sell stuff and apply old business models to new technologies. Which still happens.

Back in the mid 90’s I recall penning a piece called “The Cybermarket, the future of retailing?” about how virtual 3D shops might work on line if sufficient bandwidth was available. Forget where I managed to place it. Didn’t foresee the rise of Amazon, Craigslist or eBay of course, but you can only get so much into five hundred words. With today’s big plasma screens and cable connections, creating virtual stores like in Second Life would be relatively easy. Think of an HD shopping channel connected to your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts so you could gossip with friends while doing the weekly shop. Cruise along behind your virtual shopping cart and not block the aisles for those with more pressing needs on their mind. No unruly children or other people’s personal issues. No waiting in line at the checkouts. Virtual shop assistants.

There is both an upside and downside of course. You couldn’t choose exactly what Oranges or Avocados to buy or do a first hand check for freshness. Unless there’s a real time arrangement where a robot arm and camera can physically pick and test the exact fruit / vegetable selected. Which is now possible. Delivered directly to your door by Drone. Fewer jobs in the retail sector as the need for physical supermarket premises shrink. More employment in non-public contact jobs like in legal departments thrashing out customer disputes. At first only available to the rich or avid early adopters, then as costs reduce over time available to the rest of the population. Should they want it. Rather like Amazon, eBay or Craigslist.

Distribution

Updates and headaches


Amazon used to do a little ap you could paste the HTML from into a blog sidebar or widget. Having updated my profile on five marketing web sites today, I went looking for the HTML on Amazon without much success. In the end I was forced to create my own profile link to Amazon using WordPress’ handy ‘Image’ widget, which allows a site owner to add a small image weblink from their site to just about anywhere on the web. I was originally tempted to use an adaptation of Amazon’s logo, but then had visions of copyright lawyer emails, closed accounts etc and chose discretion.

It’s the little icon on the right hand sidebar with the moon and a meteor shower. Which I think looks rather cute.
Amazon link logo
There’s one below it for my Lulu.com Author spotlight, which I think gives a more noirish feel.
LululogoM

The biggest source of headaches is trying to untangle the web of HTML and ensure anyone who is interested finds what they’re looking for. Preferably in three clicks or less. I’ve also tried to tidy up the site a little as far as sidebars are concerned. Simply for the convenience of any visitor.

On the distribution front there’s been one minor glitch with ‘A Falling of Angels’. All fixed now, but there was a little bit of hidden code in the manuscript file that iBookstore didn’t like. One line. This means revision and a further two week delay until the eBook gets listed on the main online outlets, but that doesn’t matter so much. I think I’m getting the hang of everything now, and will have proper links to and from all the major players by the end of this week.

After that Angie and I are off to Vancouver for swearing in, so will be incommunicado. Forty eight hours after we get back from the fleshpots we have family coming to visit for three days, so I’ll be busy ministering to their needs and trying to stay sober. Somewhere between now and the festive season I may even do a little proper writing.

Events

Happy Birthday World Wide Web


Today is my birthday. 12th March. I had no idea that Tim Berners-Lee first submitted his proposal for the World Wide Web today, twenty five years. A quarter of a century ago. Although the technology itself didn’t go public until 1993.

So short a time. Back in 1995 I recall penning a thousand word piece called ‘Cybermarket – the future of retailing’. Just a speculative PR article for the trade press. I believe I managed to place it in one of the trade technology journals of the time, although have no idea where it was printed. In the article there were predictions about Supermarket chains like Tesco’s getting into Financial Services and having online stores. Reference was made to the amount of bandwidth necessary to create an interactive online 3-D model of a Superstore, and how it might come about. Now Supermarkets provide online banking and financial services, the world and its wife provide on line shopping, and I think the fully interactive 3-D catalogue is not that far away. Certainly Internet driven home deliveries have been popular for some time now, and the graphics of certain game engines might be adapted to provide a better interface. Maybe the next iteration of online shopping will be a sort of World of Warcraft meets Second Life meets the retail sector.

Didn’t foresee the rise of eBay or Amazon, but those were then outside the scope of the article.

Anyway. Happy birthday World Wide Web. Well I never. So far so fast.

General musings

Prezi


I’ve been thinking about experimenting with the way a story is told for some time now. A new tool has dropped into the box called Prezi, which is intrinsically a tool to create shareable presentations. I’ve decided to convert a couple of short stories into this format when I make the time. Just to see what they look like as a kind of visual précis.

In the meantime, progress on all other projects is slow. There’s too much going on in the real, paying the bills part of my life at the moment, and when I’m done there rarely seems to be enough energy to plough full steam ahead with ‘Darkness’ or ‘A Falling of Angels’. Maybe I should do the Prezi thing to help clear the junk out of my head, post a link or two and see what feedback happens.

Angie wants us to move, so a lot of time is currently being spent on looking for a new home further south. I need, and am actively looking for, a new job in the Victoria area to help pay the bills. I’m also signing up on Simon Fraser Universities Techcomm courses to update my billable skillset. All of which detract from writing the next books. Although I’m sure there’s time to be squeezed into the schedule somehow.

Technology

New profile picture


Martyn K Jones new profile After so long hiding behind work cap and shades on my profile picture, I’ve elected to change my profile avatar for something more realistic.

This picture was taken with Angies new iPad while she was getting fixed up with new contact lenses this afternoon. Cameras and sound on those things are surprisingly good. If I didn’t have other pressures on my finances, I’d buy one like a shot. With a wireless keyboard of course, but the screens are that good there’s little of the eyestrain associated with less advanced kinds of LCD monitors. Don’t even get me started on the various ‘aps’. Saw one yesterday which gave live weather data and sea states. Stunning quality. Awesome. And I don’t use that term lightly.

Now Angie’s told me to step away from the keyboard and take some time out. Our subscription issue of Psychology Today just arrived and I need to do a little reading up on addictive personality types for ‘A falling of Angels’.

General musings

We are now officially cool….?


My wife now has a 4th Gen 32Gb iPad (With cellular data package) for work. iPads are supposed to be ‘cool’, therefore so are we, I think. Possibly. Maybe. Is it possible to be ‘cool’ when you’re over 55? I don’t know.

A lot of Angie’s high school level learners have Mac and iPads, and throw out documents in Mac format. They use Apple’s video messaging as opposed to Skype. Therefore she needs this piece of kit to work and communicate with them more effectively.

Playing with her new iPad on the deck via the house wi-fi while drinking a very nice Belgian beer, chilling and watching some serious boats go by, it is interesting to see, close up, how an iPad works. Very intuitive, polished, and slick. I can see why some folk get fanatical about them.

Me, I’m sticking with my old Acer Windows 7 laptop until it breaks, or gets so slow it’s not worth booting. Then I might, if budget allows, look at a MacBook as a replacement. I’ve always looked at it this way, it’s no use buying a sports car (iPad) when what you really need is a van (PC). Although the iPad 10 hour battery life is very appealing. Like with our Kobo eReader, battery life is crucial when you’re far from home and travelling with no available charging ports.

Anyway. Thanks to Marc, Victor, Scotty, and the guys in the ‘engine room’ at Nanaimo Future Shop for great, dare I say ‘awesome’ service and letting us make up our own minds. Having the Apple guy in store is a seriously good piece of service end marketing on Apples part. Hope we didn’t give the boys too much of a hard time. We’ll be back.

Stars Trilogy

A thought from the idea factory in my head


I was reviewing ‘Darkness’ this morning, and began re-editing a sequence where five of my Asteroid miner characters are getting ready for a new expedition. It got me thinking, what will be the next development in caller ID on cell phones? With software that is capable of reading emotions under development, and I’m sure some form of holographic touch screen in someone else’s ideas file, I thought to myself, what would such an ap look like?

In ‘Darkness’ an E-Avatar is a 3D animated iCell figure that reacts to the callers emotions. When in no-vid mode, the cell phones internal software generates a little figure that mimes, dances and reflects nuances from the callers voice patterns. Animated Gif are already available for cell phones as caller ID avatars, so how long before a more reactive version becomes available? Not just reading micro expressions, but also tonal nuances in a callers voice. Maybe firstly as a 2D version, but as screen technology improves, 3D.

Just a thought. The pace technology is moving, I’m sure I’m not the first to consider the idea. Wonder if the idea isn’t original, but simply a derivation of something I’ve seen before on TV or in a movie?

Technology

Is Kobo the eBook of the future?

2 Comments

Yesterday Angie and I finally bit the bullet and purchased an eReader. Specifically a Kobo Glo. Since then it’s been information overload. My learning curve is tightening like a hairpin bend. Libraries. Distributors. A whole world we knew nothing about. The scope and size of the opportunities it has brought up are simply enormous.

Up until yesterday I thought I was, in my own small way fairly well informed about eBooks, Digital Rights Management and the various electronic formats, but I’d like to say this; my mind has officially been blown. Megaton range. All via a Kobo Glo. No other eReader has quite opened the door like this. Not to just a whole new world, but a whole new continuum. I actually feel a little overwhelmed. I think I’ve just caught a glimpse of an almost unlimited publishing future, and it has the Kobo label firmly stamped in one corner.

What with that and learning how to produce my own hams from pork shoulders, plus our wedding anniversary, this is going to make for a full weekend.

Observations

Reasons not to like Apple


Last weekend I agreed that yes, we should have some extra entertainment in the house. I won’t pay for cable TV, as so much television is simply not worth the subscription. So we went to Future shop and bought an Apple TV. We asked about not installing the dreaded iTunes on our business PC’s and were informed that no, we wouldn’t have to do that, we could set up the Apple TV over the phone. Fine said I, and stumped up the cash.

Minor issues with the Apple TV box not liking the first HDMI cable it was plugged in with, but once I’d swapped it for a non-ethernet HDMI cable, no problem. We switched on the TV, reading the instructions, following the steps and the Apple box fired up nicely. The screensaver looked very nice, and we were looking forward to buying and viewing premium content from the iTunes store. All well and good.

Today Angie asked me to get her an account set up to buy some movies. Apple ID created, great. The Apple TV box itself working, wonderful. Went to buy some content and……..ah. Despite having a verified Apple ID, credit card registered with Apple and everything else, we were unable to purchase a movie or TV series. After two and a half frustrating hours I gave up and called Apple support. After ten minutes the operator told me that I had to have iTunes loaded on my PC to register and connect via the iTunes store. There were no workarounds, no buy by phone, it was iTunes or nothing.

I’ll confess a prejudice here; I don’t like having Apple software on Windows machines, and won’t have it anywhere near a business machine for one simple reason, it’s bloatware. I’ve had Apple software like Safari and iTunes on PC’s before, without registering for the iTunes store. These have been the source of many system slowdowns and even the occasional crash. I’ve also spent too much time rootling around in registries getting rid of all the little surprise packages left behind by iTunes to trip up the unwary. Ergo, that application is forbidden on any system I administer. To me it is a timewaster. An unnecessary complication. If you can’t do it via web browser SSL, there’s something amiss. Amazon and eBay manage nicely, so why not Apple?

So today I have wasted over three working hours on a product that won’t let me use it. Tomorrow I will waste an hour and a half getting the guy at the store to help me verify my Apple store ID, but there is no way on Gods green Earth that I am allowing iTunes on a business PC. It may be just me, but thinking about it there’s also something rather posey about Apple Macs and sometimes their owners that just put me off. Something to do with the implied exclusivity of Apple products I don’t much care for. It’s a computer, not a religion for goodness sake. Full blown Apple Macs are great for DTP, animation and a whole bunch of other things, but overall I feel they’re rather over priced for what they are.

Funny thing; I was actually contemplating buying a Mac until this morning. Now I won’t. Not ever. Because of over four working hours lost unnecessarily. Four hours wasted, all because I couldn’t verify an iTunes store ID without clogging up my system with iTunes.

Observations

A reply to popping the Kobo question #SelfPublishing #BookMarketing


While I was Hors de combat recently, those nice people at Kobo sent me an answer to my query regarding Kobo eReaders as a distribution platform for the Cerberus eBook series. The best word for their response has to be ‘comprehensive’. I’m still working my way through the ramifications.

Essentially, since I own all the rights to the work, I can create special editions so long as they are marked with a separate ISBN via Kobo, or whoever’s existing publication platform. This seems to indicate I’ll have to go through Kobo’s own self publishing programme, as I can’t afford the prices they’re asking for commercial ePub conversion and Metadata services. Not sure about Amazon and the Kindle, although this may prove to be a similar situation. Last time I checked, I was led to the conclusion that the Kindle agreement required exclusivity to a given title, although at the moment I’m not sure.

This merits further investigation, and since my brain is only slowly returning to full function, I will be taking my time about it.

On the plus side, I’ve found a local proof reader for a reasonable price.