The $100 laptop finally ships

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) $100 laptop 2B1 Children's Machine laptop developed by MIT's Media Lab has finally made it to the real world. The first few hand-built units of this little machine made it from Taiwan to the US yesterday. It's a nifty green-and-white device that looks suitably toy-like. I hope it is robust, given its intended market.

The technology is interesting: it's intended to be both a computer and a wireless router, so that each machine forms part of a mesh even when the laptop is closed. It comes with a small solar-powered repeater that can be nailed into a tree to get better range. The laptops run Linux using AMD's Geode processor, and have 128MB of memory and 500MB of flash memory rather than a hard disk.

Apparently a bunch of central American countries have put in a purchase order, so it's going to get out there as soon as production-line versions are available. Congratulations to Nick Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab, and of course to OLPC.

Montreux and the ISWC Mothers of Invention

I have always liked Montreux. It is an idyllic lakeside town that would ooze class and opulence were oozing not just too tackily post-19th century. Its olde-worlde feel is overlayed with a general bearing of grace, politeness, and pleasure in service which is neither too obsequious nor too begrudging. When I lived in Switzerland in the 80’s and 90’s, I visited Montreux often en route to or from the neighbouring town of Vevy (home to the international headquarters of Nestlé and Philip Morris), and, as in the rest of the country, not a lot seems to have changed. Tipping is still considered vulgar; people still don’t walk on red at pedestrian crossings; the stores still close for lunch; and the trains still run on time.

Lounging below vine-covered hillsides at the eastern end of Lac Léman (that’s Lake Geneva to the non-Vaudoise), Montreux is the kind of resort town that Merchant Ivory would set movies in, had E. M. Forster ever written stories based there, and, of course, had Ismail Merchant not recently gone to join the choir invisible. As has Freddy Mercury, who loved the town and apparently lived out his last years there, his loyalty being rewarded by an appropriately larger-than-life statue of him jutting out his butt and punching the air in triumph as he glares across the lake at France.

Creative types have always been attracted to Montreux. Lord Byron was inspired by the nearby lakeside castle to write The Prisoner of Chillon whose opening line “Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!” could be the T-shirt slogan of the blognoscenti. Queen owns a recording studio in the Montreux. Deep Purple burned down the casino while recording there some 35 years ago (actually, it was a fire that broke out during a concert by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention), inspiring Smoke on the Water, the guitar riff from which is also commemorated in a lakeside sculpture. David Bowie has a home in Montreux, though nobody in the town would be so indiscrete as to tell you where. Every summer a horde of jazz musicians and fans descends on the town for the amazingly wonderful Montreux Jazz Festival. Where else, as I was lucky to do one year, can you see onstage in one evening Deedee Bridgewater, Van Morrison, Georgie Fame, Santana, and John McClaughlin each playing their own sets and then jamming till the early hours with many other musical legends who are in town to listen and play?


Freddy does Montreux

This year another black-clad crowd of unconventional but somewhat geekier Mothers of Invention descended on the town to enjoy the engineering equivalent of jazz. While the inventors of the air guitar T-shirt were missing from the Montreux symposium, a few hundred other engineering students, professors, policy makers, industrialists, and techno-hucksters from all over the globe converged for a few days of future-gazing, presenting the improvisations, concepts and experiments that must surely be at one of the bloodier edges of bleeding-edge thinking.

The International Symposium on Wearable Computing melded out-of-this-world engineering, ergonomics, and human-computer interfaces with some of the more intense needs for performance improvement that exist in the real world: The GPS-linked head-up-display on fire-fighters’ visors that guides them out of smoke-filled buildings; the doctor’s hospital note taking system that works on arm gestures so as not to take attention away from the patient (pity the unfortunate patient seeing a doctor repeatedly making a sign of the cross at his bedside); the scary guy who uses his skin as a conductor to send 2 Megabits per second of data across his body, eliminating the need for iPod headphone cables; the see-through eyeglass displays and motion-sensing wrist bands that train auto-workers to install headlamps. The theory sessions, covering topics like “Humans – A Tutorial,” were even more mind-bending than the practice sessions.

For someone like me who is engaged at the application and performance impact end of technology, it was fascinating and a little humbling to spend a couple of days in the company of the brilliant minds that actually have to conceive, design, and build the revolutionary tools in the first place.

International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC)

A couple of days ago I was a guest at IEEE’s annual International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC), held this year in Montreux, Switzerland. I was there to judge entries for the annual ISWC Design Competition, and to award the check and prestigious IEEE trophy.

As the sponsor of this year’s competition, I chose to set a challenge that took the thinking away from designing ultra-expensive cyborgian machines for ultra-niche purposes and instead focused on designing ultra-cheap solutions for ultra-mass markets. I wanted to see if anyone could come up with a design for using already existing devices and infrastructures to facilitate education and training in developing countries where computers (and even electricity) are simply unavailable and where a month of web access costs typically more than the annual per capita income.

Though I did not say so in the brief, for some time I have been advocating the idea of using mobile phones (that most ubiquitous of wearable computers) and the extensive wireless phone infrastructures for core literacy and basic business education. While MIT and others are making great strides toward the $100 computer, that’s an idea whose usefulness is severely undermined by the difficulty of distributing the device and the general lack of electrical power or conventional internet access in those areas where such a machine might be most desirable. The cell phone, on the other hand, is everywhere already and it’s already connected.


Jose Gonzales explains his team's entry to Paul Lukowicz, ISWC Chair.

The winning entry was submitted by a team of graduate engineering students from Florida headed by Jose Gonzales, whose day-job is designing data-acquisition systems for aircraft in the US military. If a sign of true creative genius is the ability to dramatically reverse your perspective and still stay clear and focused, Jose is a very impressive intellect. I’d be a little concerned that I liked his design simply because it aligned rather well with my own vision, but the other judges concurred unanimously that the entry was streets ahead of the competitors. The conceptual technical design approach was well-researched, elegant, cheap, and pretty much ready to roll. Now we need the content, instructional design, a little political will, and some kind of sponsorship for both the development and the running of the phone-based learning service.



In essence, the design takes advantage of the ubiquity of GPRS (its coverage around the world is remarkably comprehensive) and its data rate of 115kbps, which is more than adequate for sending text and speech in various configurations. This is complemented by the ubiquity of devices – in places like Kebira in Kenya, more than 8 out of ten people have access to a mobile phone, though they may not have electricity or running water. Hand cranks can provide charges, or for a few cents people recharge their phones from someone running a small street-corner generator. Put your content through a free open-source Java tool that configures it so it will work and look good on any of more than 500 different phone models, and you are (at least in theory) ready to teach.

But what is the economic model? It should be possible, given the low entry cost, to get large corporations, NGOs, or even governments to front the cash for development of the content, and to subsidise the delivery. Large corporations have a vested interest in getting involved in such projects, in part because they believe in good corporate citizenship, and in part because it’s a great marketing opportunity. In fact I had a brief conversation with a Nokia representative after I had made the award announcement, and he was keen to take the discussion further. Watch this space

Podcasting Goes Mainstream in Training

In the autumn of 2004, I wrote a brief guide to podcasting, suggesting that this would rapidly become a useful tool in the training world. Eighteen months later, with podcasts proliferating from the BBC, CEOs, neighborhood gossip bloggers and marketers, it seems like at least for knowledge transfer the podcast has gone mainstream.

But podcasting is still controversial and largely misunderstood in the training world. There are those who look on podcasts as nothing more than upgraded audio cassettes or books-on-CD. Their objection is that there appears to be nothing new to justify all the fuss. Others will avow that passively acquired audio-only is an ineffective medium for learning, so podcasting must be a retrograde step, even if you can now podcast video and images too.

Then there are those who see accessibility issues looming – what about learners who don’t have an MP3 player? On the other end of the spectrum are the techno-zealots who, predictably, over hype podcasting as a revolution in learning. But in the middle are an awful lot of people who are quietly just getting on with it, and are making learners rather happy.

As for the view that iPods are like CDs or cassettes: is TiVo like a VCR? Is BitTorrent like the BBC? Just because the digestible output is similar does not make the user experience or the benefits the same.

Yes, the end product is audio content, but then you get that from the telephone, the radio, and the towne crier. Where podcasts differ, and they are significant differences, is in:
1) Their ease of creation and immediacy.
2) Their disintermediation of lengthy and expensive supply lines.
3) Their ability to time shift delivery.
4) The user's ability to seek and even automate acquisition of only those targeted pieces that are of interest.
5) The ease with which they can be integrated into other web 2.0 resources such as blogs, discussion forums, communities of practice, and so on.

Try doing that with a commercially produced and distributed CD system.

What about the argument that audio-only is a poor training medium? Well, that may be true for many subject or skill areas. But it’s not necessarily a poor learning medium for many other fields. You can’t blindly accept the conventional wisdom that you retain only ten per cent of what you hear, and make sweeping decisions about all learning on that questionable precept.

It's alternately amusing and annoying that bogus "statistics" like the "10% from hearing" notion manage to embed themselves so deeply in the folklore of training.
Many have no academic study behind them; others have questionable studies to support them; others may have a sound study or two in the background but have been widely misinterpreted or misapplied. We all like simplistic rules by which to manage our work, but often what we take as fact is nothing more than gross generalization at best, pure mythology at worst.

Podcasts will be created badly and used inappropriately by many, but this is true of any technology that enables (democratizes?) content creation - PowerPoint, web video, the digital camera. It was only a few years ago that the august professors at Stanford were putting talking-head videos of actual lectures online and selling it as e-learning.

I have wasted a lot of time partially listening to bad podcasts. They suffer from fuzzy audio, atrocious speaking styles, muddled structure, and often simply incorrect content. But, as with other resources, you learn to discern good from bad, and you select those sources which are useful to you.

There are a lot of things that I would not choose to learn in an exclusively audio mode, but I find that podcasts are a very convenient way to stay in touch with what is going on in my fields of interest. Being able to hear the voices of people who I respect adds a dimension that holds my attention, often better than their written words.

It's not easy to podcast well, even if the technology is simple and you have well designed content to convey. I've made many attempts, and find I just don't have the voice, but I keep on experimenting (watch this space..).

I can see a time in the next year or two when podcasting skills training will appear in the catalogues just as presentation skills training or webinar skills training does. Now there's a business opportunity for someone …

Stupid in America

American schools in general do not turn out high school “graduates” with a decent education. They do turn out people with almost belligerent assertiveness, and boundless (though unfounded) self-esteem that makes it difficult for them to perceive that they have anything more to learn. In an individual this is tragic; in a corporation, it’s dangerous; in a nation it’s disastrous.

Over recent years studies have shown that illiteracy, innumeracy, and inability to communicate are among the major workforce challenges facing American corporations. Schools no longer produce employable graduates, forcing companies to launch their own basic education programs – or, more recently, simply set up shop in India. Last week a report titled “Stupid in America” was aired by a major television network in the US. Though its focus was the sad reality of American schools, it struck me that there were some important lessons for corporate training.

In essence, the piece described how, between the ages of ten and fifteen, kids in the US get left behind in basic knowledge and ability levels by kids in two dozen other nations, and argued that poor teaching is at fault. (This is all about averages, of course, and there is no denying that there is a positive end of the bell-curve where excellent schools do a superb job). The study is nothing new – I can recall reading of similar dismal results years ago. Yet American schools and teachers’ unions continue to resist any attempt to measure teaching performance. How odd it is that in corporate training we stress evaluation of impact against learning objectives, and are increasingly held accountable for ROI, yet that concept is scorned in school education, where the foundation for future growth is laid.

Educational authorities, in turn, blame the lack of learning on lack of funding, but there is evidence to show that more money often leads to poorer performance – schools tend to spend budget increases on offices, sports facilities, computers, security systems and so on, rather than on better teachers and better educational processes. By contrast, smaller low-budget schools led by passionate educators who have no computers, gyms, or even janitors are producing exceptional results.

Does throwing more and more money into organizational training have any payback if it is primarily directed at hardware, computer systems, and more prestigious “corporate campuses”? And how does the recent trend toward having training run by technocrats rather than trainers affect our focus on the core mission – helping people perform better? Often the technology we adopt serves to further entrench legacy models of training rather than encourage new thinking. The more we standardize learning around enterprise technology systems, the more we suppress the individual passion of trainers and instructional designers.

I am a product of a number of colonial schooling systems that could all best be described as totalitarian, more “Brick in the Wall” than “Ridgemont High.” While my American peers were hanging loose, I was enduring daily beatings because my hair was a millimeter too long or my handwriting was too angular. So I am sympathetic to the libertarian laissez faire approach taken in many schools today. That freedom and concern for the individual choice is one of the great attractions of learning 2.0. But the needs of the individual employee and the needs of the organization are often on divergent paths, so some structure and focus is called for.

I don’t buy the argument that the blame for the dumbing-down of America’s youth falls exclusively on the educational system. It seems clear to me that culture, particularly the culture in the family, has failed to instill a strong enough veneration for learning and corresponding intellectual curiosity. Parents abdicate responsibility for educating their kids, particularly when they get a little difficult in their early teens. It is easier to concoct a host of external reasons for a child’s learning problems than to acknowledge personal failure. But learning takes place within an evolving ecosystem, not in isolated instances.

Companies make the same mistake – they think that performance problems should be solved by training, and if that doesn’t work, training gets the blame. How many times do we hear trainers bemoan the fact that the environment to which trainees return almost guarantees that what was learned will never be reinforced or applied? It was only after I left school that I understood the real purpose of homework was not to keep me from going fishing, but to get my parents engaged in the education process. We should do more to integrate learning with the workplace and engage managers and the immediate “work family” in supporting the ongoing development of new skills. Blended learning should blend what happens in class or online with what happens back at work, and that means getting the learners’ immediate colleagues engaged as a support network.

Looking from the outside at the way schools perform can teach lessons and prompt questions about corporate training. Are issues of choice, teaching passion, learning culture, and budget echoed in corporate training? Is it not more important to build a culture within the organization that overtly values and rewards learning, rather than use it as a reward in itself? By outsourcing much of our training, particularly to vendors who are not held accountable for anything more than smile sheet scores, do we risk the same abdication of responsibility and dilution of influence to which so many American parents have apparently succumbed?

Thinking outside the idiot box

The current buzz about IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) makes me realize how rapidly some industries are evolving, and how relatively slowly the marketing profession is responding.

In 1998 I engineered an invitation to the Royal Television Society conference, the biennial Cambridge gathering of 200 of UK television’s elite. Much of the conference was spent in presentations, planning, and self-congratulation on the recent coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral. The only two presentations that still stick with me were a history professor’s singularly unpopular assertion that TV was creating news rather than simply reporting it (much hissing from the audience), and a demonstration of WebTV by the now CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer.

At the time a mere VP, Steve Ballmer was actually heckled. From the audience I heard all the superior snickers of disbelief and the whispered dismissals of the very notion that television might become interactive. The leading decision-makers in the industry were so conditioned by their past experiences of television that they could not conceive that any significant change might be possible, let alone desirable.

I had seen WebTV unveiled a couple of years earlier in New York, before Microsoft acquired it, and had been captivated by the notion that you no longer needed a computer to surf the web. In those days I was all about convergence, and would assail anyone who would listen with my predictions that TV, the web, and mobile telephony would collide and facilitate revolutions in entertainment, communication, and education. Of course this was not original thinking – lots of people were working toward achieving that convergence, and it was an uphill battle.

One of the people at the conference who I tried in vain to convert was a producer of Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast, whose resolute position was something like: “The internet is rubbish. I’d rather have my children watching TV than wasting their time online. You can’t get more educational than a television documentary.” The Big Breakfast was at least innocent, entertaining, predictable, and vaguely informative. But, to my mind, it seemed more worthy of the “rubbish” label than much of what was available online.

The singular lack of vision, with an edge of defensiveness, demonstrated among the television cognoscenti at the time was frustrating, but not unexpected. Even highly intelligent and wonderfully creative people have their limiting horizons and their comfort zones.

What is remarkable to me is not so much that attitudes and behaviors have changed, but how rapidly they changed. The technologies have advanced significantly in the past decade, but so too has our willingness to use them. Our notion of what a computer is has dissolved – it is no longer a grey box under a desk connected to the world with cables, but a palm-sized clam-shell on our hip. It has become almost second nature to take and send images and video using a mobile phone. E-commerce is rapidly going mobile – in Japan you can rent a car, or even get a Coke from a vending machine, by pushing a few buttons on your phone. Bloggers proliferate, entertainment and commerce exploit new media, and news coverage and commentary have decentralized and gone real-time. Now, with the imminent arrival of the millions of channels made available by IPTV, convergence is almost total.

But what of marketing? Where are the revolutions in thinking, the exploitation of new possibilities, the creativity and experimentation? I still work with companies, some with seemingly limitless resources, who are slowly “putting their ads online” and trying to catch up with a paradigm that now belongs in the last century. It baffles me why we in marketing are so slow to evolve. Our role in training is to prepare brands for the future, yet we cling tenaciously to the past.

Is it because marketers define themselves too narrowly, and think of themselves in “activity” terms instead of in “outcome” terms? Or is it because companies don’t consider the value that marketing can bring to the organization is sufficient to justify the potential cost of innovation? Or is it, perhaps, that the current generation of management is still conditioned by its own past experiences, and is not capable of seeing that marketing does not have to be that way? I know that we have only recently accepted the benefits of online engagement, but perhaps we should continue to peer over the horizon instead of settling into a new zone of comfort?

If you did not have a website or the capacity to run TV or print ads, but you and all your target customers had web-enabled mobile camera-phones, how would you exploit the technology more efficiently and effectively help build your brands and grow revenues?

Constructive disruption, presence and focus in a wireless world

The other day I was running a workshop to define competitive strategies at a client company. Five minutes after the scheduled start time the first few participants wandered in. Twenty minutes later everyone was there. Were these lapses in discipline clues to their competitive problems, or simply the way it is in business today?

The fact that everyone was eventually there physically, did not mean they were mentally present. Mobile phones vibrated constantly. Blackberries were consulted obsessively. People left the room to take calls. Thumbs compulsively punched out SMS messages. Much of the communication was task-related, with people seeking input from clients and colleagues or remotely accessing data on their desktops; much of it had nothing to do with the task at hand. Yet the work got done, everyone contributed effectively, and the result was better than any had hoped for.

This apparent lack of focus is not a unique phenomenon, nor is it a recent development. But it has become more and more pervasive over the past few years. There was a time when I would ban mobile phones from meetings. Then I simply banned their ringing out loud. I realize that we are living in a radically different communication paradigm to that of a few years ago. We are now able to multitask in a way that was simply not done in the 1980s. Back then, most people did not have the skills or the tools to “parallel process” productively, and if they did, it was something done in the privacy of their own office. Politeness was our way of denying that we were unable to do many things at once without chaos, or apparent rudeness, ensuing. It’s interesting how digital deftness has corroded punctuality and redefined attentiveness, by changing our sense of time, place, and focus.

Our perceptions of what is "normal" behavior are determined by the habits of our most familiar peer groups. Over the years I have done a lot of work in various Latin American and Asian countries, South Africa, and most of Europe. In a business meeting context, the sensitivity to punctuality and attentiveness is always less cultural than contextual, and within that context you cannot make sweeping statements about national cultural attitudes or behaviors because corporate culture plays a major role in guiding those attitudes.

There are a couple of companies that I have worked with in Mexico and Brazil where -- counter to the false national stereotype of unreliability and lack of urgency -- I am always the last to arrive at my meetings, the other participants eagerly glancing at their watches as start time approaches. Conversely, there are companies in the US and UK where -- counter to the false national stereotype of task-focused discipline -- I have given up expecting more than half of the participants to be punctual, and where participants come and go at will (physically or mentally) throughout the meeting. Our concept of appropriate ground rules for interacting in a formal business meeting, no matter what its purpose, is being changed, not by e-learning, but by a growing culture of constructive disruption.

Some of us, fortunate enough to have graduated in the age of Aquarius, are most comfortable with the lava-lamp mindset, where we can endlessly watch things unfolding slowly and elegantly. We were succeeded by the MTV generation, a society of sound/video-bite junkies, who couldn't focus for more than 15 seconds on anything unless it moved dramatically, constantly. Then the post-MTV perpetually-looping CNN mode of communication produced people who assume that there is no beginning or end, believing that they can always catch up no matter where they start or how often they get distracted.

That fractured attention span seems to be getting even more fragmented with the advent of SMS and other remote communication technologies. The latest generation of company recruits thinks and behaves in genuine non-linear random-access modes. This internet generation, the “digital natives” born into a world where personal computers were already pervasive, is a society of text-bite junkies who can't think unless they are thinking about many things at once. To support this, text is making a comeback, fleshed out by a resurgence in cryptic iconography. Instant messaging, SMS, chat-room style communication, ticker-style news highlights on TV. All of it is text, but not as Shakespeare knew it. Text has a new Morse code that evolves and mutates daily. If u hve smthg 2 say, it takes 2 long to cre8 a pic. Or it did before camera phones came along. :-) LOL.

A picture is not worth a thousand words to communicators who can instantly infer complex meanings from cryptic alphanumeric string-sets. A picture is too limiting, too defined, too unambiguous, too unchallenging -- and way too unspontaneous.

Is internet culture overwhelming organisational culture? The digital divide (if we think of it in terms of those who have embraced connectedness versus those who just get by) is just getting wider. True, "smart mobs" can coalesce and disperse with split second precision. But these are funky folks on the fringe, not mainstream people in the workplace. What may become more pervasive, particularly as mobile phones become smarter and Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous, is a blurring of the line that separates "presence" from "absence". Perhaps technology will be used to inflict punctuality and attentiveness. Or, more likely, technology and parallel-processing mental modes will make these concepts unnecessary, outmoded, and counter-productive.

Give your supermarket the finger

In September last year I suggested the JIT lattes concept: service businesses like fast-food outlets and coffee shops provide regular customers with RFID cards, so that on walking in the store the kitchen can be notified to prepare their normal order and shave minutes off the time it takes to process each customer.

But that means customers have to carry more plastic in their wallets. You get around this by ditching the card and injecting the RFID chip under the skin of the customer, as some European beach clubs are doing to help members leave their wallets back in the room-safe. But your average store customer is not yet ready to implant a bunch of Cyborgian chips in their bicep. Along comes biometrics, allowing German shoppers to now use their fingerprint to pay for groceries.

It's early days, of course, and privacy issues abound. I can see the CSI team earnestly looking to identify a partial print from a crime scene: "No hits on AFIS. Better try WalMart."

Will people who would go to court to prevent the government from getting their fingerprints on file be willing to let their supermarket have a record of their fingerprints? Of course they will. If e-commerce has taught us anything about consumers, it's that convenience beats out privacy and security every time. It's your finger -- don't leave home without it.