Amazon Kindle, meet your Voldemort. iPad has an ebook store and it’s called “iBooks”. Picture of the store interface after the jump. Publishers include Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette—the big boys. [Apple iPad]
Doesn’t look like books will be cheap, but there should be a healthy price war soon. The example book was $15.
On the plus side, Apple is using ePub, which means books from other stores could work.
Apple didn’t buy P.A. Semiconductor for nothing. And now the fruits of that buyout are appearing: The Apple iPad uses a 1GHz “A4” chip that can decode HD video for up to 10 hours on a single charge. [Apple iPad]
Since I captured this screenshot it’s gone up well over 100k for just the liveblog. (A few asked: It’s Chartbeat!)
Chris Anderson has an important message from the future: Did you know you can outsource manufacturing?
In the cover story of the latest issue of WIRED, Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson makes a claim that at first, soaked as we are in the “maker” DIY culture of the internet and science fiction, doesn’t seem completely preposterous: “micro-factories” are the “future of American manufacturing”—as the title proclaims, “Atoms Are the New Bits.”
The problem is that they so aren’t. Atoms are real, finite things. Until 3D printers can do more than squirt out mono-material resin sculptures—inevitable, perhaps, but not within the next decade—even the at-home revolution that Anderson puts up as an example of a new way of manufacturing consumer goods isn’t actually new at all. Until that glorious day, Anderson suggests American enthusiast makers outsource the dirty work to China.
“Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine,” claims Anderson.
We used to call “micro-factories” “small businesses”, but that was before we knew they were a revolution.
It’s painful for me to point this out, because many of the people involved in this so-called “revolution” are my friends. They’re smart people doing admirable, clever things. But at best they’re changing the way hobbyist and boutique manufacturing works. The future of mainstream industry remains about the same as it’s been for the last thirty years.
Let us fisk. Anderson’s opening example is Local Motors, a shop which is building a $50k “crowdsourced” car with a Creative Commons-licensed design:
The Rally Fighter’s body was designed by Local Motors’ community of volunteers and puts the lie to the notion that you can’t create anything good by committee (so long as the community is well managed, well led, and well equipped with tools like 3-D design software and photorealistic rendering technology). The result is a car that puts Detroit to shame.
I think the Rally Fighter is nifty, but get real: It’s not all that different that designs from major manufacturers. Moreover, you’ll find in the very next paragraph that the design sprung first from the mind of a single person, a design student named Sangho Kim.
So great. There’s a car company building a kit car that uses a BMW crate engine. You can download their plans—but not their parts—for free. They plan on selling a couple thousand.
So what?
There are dozens of kit car manufacturers in the United States. Add in the custom car companies like Devon or coach builders like Sportsmobile and you’re up into the hundreds.
It’s very neat that they designed their car with input from others online. But until I can go down to the local Local Motors dealer and test drive one for myself, you can hardly call it a revolution. Open source is a nice way for information to disseminate, to make a project better; its addition does not guarantee a revolutionary—or even successful—business model.
Everyone knows about Brickarms, right? They make weapons for the Lego men that Lego themselves won’t make. They’re a fun little thing for hardcore Lego fans who want their minifigs to wield Uzis or grenades.
Anderson offers Brickarms up as an example of…something. Perhaps of inexpensive prototyping? Brickarms’ owner, Will Chapman, models his weapons at home on his computer, makes his own simple molds using a cheap CNC router, and then hand-presses the Lego weapons to sell online.
If you go to Brickarms website right now, you’ll see that they’ve stopped taking orders so they can “catch up” on manufacturing. The future of business, apparently, is not having enough supply to meet your demand.
Please also note that in Anderson’s companion video for his piece, he singles out Brickarms’ unofficial Halo gear as an example of something that the market has asked for but Lego and Microsoft have not provided. But when introducing Local Motors earlier in the piece, Anderson notes, “One problem with the kit-car business…is that the vehicles are typically modeled after famous racing and sports cars, making lawsuits and license fees a constant burden.”
Guess when worrying about licensing fees is unnecessary? When your business is too small to make big money.
There are several other vaguely supportive examples in Anderson’s piece, but the one I find most grating is DIY Drones, Anderson’s own company which sells inexpensive kits from which you can build your own UAVs. It’s a fine little company with a fine little project, but to hear Anderson talk about it he’s stumbled on an entirely novel way to run a business, when in fact he’s simply experiencing what it is like to run a business in the modern era.
Here’s how DIY Drones makes their kits:
1. Anderson hires a “21-year-old high school graduate from Mexico” to help him create a design.
2. They send their design to a Colorado company, Sparkfun.
3. Sparkfun sends the design to China, where elfin robots make “millions of them using automated etching, drilling, and cutting machines.”
4. “That’s it.”
Except it’s not. Those PCBs are made by human beings in factories. Factories that are at the best of times less than cushy, populated by workers without a union.
To marvel that you can convince a Chinese company to make a small batch of electronics for you? In many cases, that’s when conditions are worst. Try to get something that is more than a greenboard made and you’re back to standard manufacturing issues like making dies for stamping parts. Why? Because real 3D printers don’t exist yet.
Using the web to communicate with Chinese factories is an improvement…over the fax machine. But the real revolution is that it only costs a few bucks to ship a part from Shenzen to Sunnyvale. You want to talk revolution? Thank FedEx.
Here’s Anderson’s penultimate paragraph, right before his Wired-by-numbers “Welcome to the next Industrial Revolution” kicker:
How big can these small enterprises get? Most of the companies I’ve described sell thousands of units – 10,000 is considered a breakout success. But one that has graduated to the big leagues is Aliph, which makes the Jawbone noise-canceling wireless headsets. Aliph was founded in 1999 by two Stanford graduates, Alex Asseily and Hosain Rahman, and it now sells millions of headsets each year. But it has no factories. It outsources all of its production. And though more than a thousand people help to create Jawbone headsets, Aliph has just over 80 employees. Everyone else works for its production partners. It’s the ultimate virtual manufacturing company: Aliph makes bits and its partners make atoms, and together they can take on Sony.
Here is the key deception: a line drawn between hobbyists making a few items for sale, and western design outfits that work essentially as branding consultants for Chinese conglomerates.
Just because an entrepreneur can turn the former into the latter with more convenience than ever before doesn’t make it novel. It certainly doesn’t make it moral. And it damn well doesn’t make it good for business.
It’s great that hobbyists can make ever more complex items, sell them on the internet, and have a small business. But the same process used by Aliph to manufacturer Bluetooth headsets (and bear in mind it takes 80 people just to coordinate this!) is exactly the same outsourcing process used by Apple to make iPhones.
But the difference between an Apple or a Sony versus a Brickarms or a Local Motors is vast, both in ancillary services offered like warrantees or technical support, to the only metric by which any industrial revolution can be measured: profit.
Atoms are not bits. Bits are unlimited resources. Atoms, as the fundamental, literal elements on which a market of scarcity is based, are not.
Owle Bubo isn’t an obscure Star Wars bounty hunter. It’s a $130 billet aluminum iPhone case, complete with swappable 37mm macro lens. It’s well-made, attractive, and makes iPhone video easy. But you probably don’t want this one.
Products like the Bubo confuse my little retail suggestion brain. For some of you, $130 is a pittance to get a sturdy case with four female tripod mounts, a cold shoe for lights and microphones, and two comfortable handles that steady up your iPhone videography.
For others, $130 is nearly the price you paid for the phone itself—or the price of a decent Kodak or Flip video camera.
Let’s start with what Owle gets right: The design—from packaging, to the physical feel of the Bubo in your hands, to the friendly instruction manual complete with jokes about Perez Hilton)—is excellent, especially considering it’s Owle’s first product.
The cool metal feels wonderful in your hands. The mounting points allow for nearly any combination of accessories, a quality I’d love to see emulated by other cameras and rail systems. (Consider that even most pro video cameras have a single tripod mount and a single hotshoe.)
Video quality is improved over the iPhone 3GS’s default, simply by dint of the large glass lens that rests over the iPhone’s sensor. It adds a slight fisheye effect, but one that is generally welcome, alleviating the typical claustrophobic feel of iPhone video.
But is it over a hundred dollars worth of improvement? Depends. Below I’ve embedded Owle’s video they shot during CES that shows a side-by-side comparison of video with and without the Bubo.
Pretty good, right? Well, below are two videos I shot within seconds of each other of a mossy rock and then uploaded straight to Vimeo. Frankly, besides the wider lens and slight difference in sharpness, I’m hard pressed to see anything profoundly different.
So fine. It’s better with Bubo, for sure, but not much. You can’t judge the Owle Bubo without remembering that the power of its camera isn’t that it’s particularly high-quality, but that it’s wedded to a phone with hundreds and hundreds of useful, fascinating apps that extend its capabilities to a fantastic degree. (It’s hilariously true to say the iPhone is the most powerful camera in the world—if you discount image quality.)
But a couple of things about the Bubo make me wary to recommend it quite yet.
It’s heavy. Heavier than the iPhone on its own, certainly. Heavier than many “real” camcorders I’ve used. According to the box it shipped in—there’s no weight information on Owle’s website—it’s just under two pounds before you put the iPhone in or mount any lights or microphones. On my light Manfrotto tripod, it kind of made it want to lean a little, although if everything was tightened properly it seemed to be fine. No big deal, but for handheld shots I could see it getting tiring. (Then again, all cameras are tiring after a while.)
The system for holding the iPhone in place scares me, too. You’re forced to put your iPhone in a rubberized case. (One was included with my test sample, but several others from major case manufacturers are supported.) Then you jam that case into the back of the Bubo where it is held in place by tension alone. I never once had an issue where my iPhone started to slip out, but still…it’s a bit scary. A simple flip-down tab would go a long way toward appeasing my fear of seeing the heart of my camera system go clattering to the concrete.
Finally: price. It’s not too expensive for its level of quality—solid hunks of aluminum aren’t cheap—but it does take it out of impulse purchase territory for most, which is a pity. A planned composite (read: plastic) version is in the works which Owle expects to sell for around $70. Considering the optics and tripod mounts will still be the same quality as the Bubo’s, that seems like a fair price.
One final niggle I’d like to see improved in future versions: It would be nice to see a divot in the bottom tripod mounts for stabilizing pins, common on most tripods. That would help prevent the Bubo from potentially spinning itself out of the tripod screw during all-day use.
Appealing design that looks like it came from Night Owl’s lab
Turns the iPhone into nearly any sort of recording rig you can dream up
Improves video and imaging quality, if even slightly
Expensive
Heavy
iPhone mounting system seems iffy
Flash an exotic prototype, then—Presto!—get people to buy your more boring stuff. That kind of thinking still rules at most electronics companies. Apple under Steve Jobs only shows off actual products. The difference? Apple’s arcane secret to success.
A specter harrows the consumer electronics industry: malaise. Like washed-up Catskill magicians unable to let go of old routines while a brash upstart steals their audience, nearly every maker of consumer electronics in the world clings to a quaint song-and-dance about prototypes.
“Here is your possible future,” they bark, flourishing the latest conceptual product from the lab. “Now watch us make it disappear!”
Apple’s chief magician knows better, pulling solid objects out of the aether; products you can actually buy.
If this sounds like a minor complaint about most of the industry’s lack of imagination in marketing, you’re misunderstanding the whole act. The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry. It evokes a feeling of trust between Apple and consumers—that when Apple actually reveals a product, it’s something that they’re confident enough to support for years to come.
For the better part of the last century—starting arbitrarily with the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair and its stark, Randian slogan: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms”—the producers of consumer goods have stuck to a basic formula: Show off a prototype; gauge public response; then release a commercial product that is less ambitious, if released at all.
It worked in part because it told a compelling story. “Here is what the future looks like; and here’s an intermediate step towards that future that you can buy today.” Electronics’ sister industries followed the same tack. Car shows were populated with prismatic concept cars hewn with non-Euclidean angles rotating on raised daises. Videogame tech demos showed graphics too impossible to believe, but entrancing enough to betray our better judgment.
But in Jobs’ encore performance, Apple has changed the routine.
Outwardly Apple’s showmanship is competent, workmanlike. Jobs-as-performer wears an understated uniform that does not distract from the act. His humor, when it exists, is subtle. The closest an Apple keynote gets to pomp are pie charts that look like wooden logs.
Yet when Jobs reveals the company’s next product, there’s a critical difference: It exists. When possible, it is available for retail purchase the same day. There are few maybes or eventuallys tempering the presentation: “Here is the tiny miracle we’ve created. We want to sell it to you today.”
As a counter-example, let me pick on Lenovo for a moment: At CES this year, they showed off the Ideapad U1 prototype, a netbook with a screen that could be decoupled from the keyboard to operate as a multitouch tablet. Clever idea, seemingly well considered and brain-bendingly not available for purchase today.
Do you see the story that Lenovo is spoiling for themselves? First, they’ve deprecated the imagined utility of every other laptop they sell without the flashy removable tablet screen. Yet they’ve also whispered a nervous apology to potential customers: “We could make something this cool, but we’re not so confident in our plans to fully commit to them. Maybe you could tell us if you think you’d like this trick?”
Lenovo might make the U1. They might sell a few units. But simply by revealing it before it was a living, breathing SKU on retail shelves, they’ve relegated it to a quirky sideshow.
See also: The Chevy Volt, announced so long ago that GM has gone through a bankruptcy and shotgun CEO transition without actually being available for sale. Bet those will be flying off the lots.
Some of Apple’s peers understand the need to manage expectations. Have you ever seen RIM show off a BlackBerry prototype? What about Nintendo? They don’t pull a Microsoft-like move of showing very early-stage products to reporters and potential customers. They simply pull out a Wii or a DS and say, “This is it. Give it a try.”
Everybody loves a prototype. Engineers get a chance to strut their stuff. If you’ve got a 40-inch OLED TV in a lab somewhere, bring it to your trade show. Executives take pride in their company’s technical prowess. Marketers get an excuse to throw an even fancier party. And customers and press get idyll fodder for a daydream.
None of those things equal units sold. None of those things turn a customer into an ardent fan.
That an industry exists around rumors and leaks for unreleased products may be useful to Apple, but it is a side-effect of their product strategy, not the basis of their marketing. Consider that when Apple finally does release a product, the marketing tends to showcase the device itself in clear, comprehensible ways. Apple isn’t shy to make claims about the grandiose, epiphanal nature of its products because—whether they pull it off or not—they have built a culture in which every product they make is designed to be world class.
Instead of prototypes, Apple makes patents. Although I’m certain Apple would keep these patents behind the curtain if they legally could, their existence proves something amazingly pedestrian: Behind the scenes, Apple is essentially the same sort of company as every other electronics star in the world.
They’re developing prototypes. They’re trying new tricks, seeing what works. They know experimentation is the lifeblood of innovation.
But like the consummate showmen they are, they temper the wooly process of building the future with something missing from nearly every other technology company: restraint. Apple may come off at times as a bit soulless, but at least they’ve got class. And when that class allows them to sell more products that make happier customers, I’ll take class over flash every time.
That the Consumer Electronics Show is held in Vegas is no accident. It’s a derelict spectacle meant to cater to mid-level buyers, gilt with the threadbare trappings of Innovation and Progress, but sending most of its audience home with nothing but a hangover and a t-shirt.
When Apple pulls a tablet out of its hat next week, it’s likely that we won’t be able to purchase it for a couple of months, but rest assured that’s only because of regulatory pitfalls. And besides, there will be no doubt that when Jobs shows us his vision of the future, Apple will be doing everything they can do to get them into our hands.
That’s the trick of it. Consumer audiences have grown wary of nearly a century of predictable sleight-of-hand. We’ve seen too many companies promise us the future, then fail to deliver it.
I believe that there are dozens of companies out there with the talent to pull the future toward us along some retail tesseract. But until they conquer their stage fright, leave aside the vaudevillian antics that savvy, jaded audiences no longer find compelling, and embrace a more honest and practical sort of conjuration, Apple will continue to be the defining technology performance of our age.
When Allegra Fullerton got married last November, her niece was the flower girl. Like most her niece was a bit awkward going down the aisle, but Allegra’s sister stood in the wings and encouraged her on. What a sweet robot.
Allegra’s sister Laurel is “into robots”, we’re told, and decided to built the flower-blowing bot for her sister’s wedding to Andy Fischer. From the pictures it looks like the bot was a hit.
The Flower Girl even took a turn on the dancefloor.
I spoke to Allegra just moments ago. She explained why she had a robot in her wedding:
I have always, always loved robots and have a collection of books, toys, and now an actual robot! How can you compete with a robot crusing down the aisle spitting out flowers on the ground? I wanted my wedding to have a playful feel and pay tribute to my upbringing (Dad and sister are both engineers) and really give a San Francisco feel to the event.
My sister built the robot and has been building robots since she was in high school. The ah ha moment for having a robot flower girl was one sunny afternoon at brunch with my fiance. I had a vision, thankfully he shared it and after a chat with my sister (who was a Mechanical Engineer Grad Student at Stanford at the time) she said she would make it happen and we went from there.
Update! Engineering Sister Laurel writes in with details of the build:
WeddingBot (or so I call it) was built for my sister, Allegra, since she didn’t know any young children to act as flower child or ring bearer. I had recently finished building a water-squirting remote-controlled duck boat for a class (details at: http://www.stanford.edu/~laurelf/duck/ ) so she asked me to make her a remote-control robot that would spew flowers.
WeddingBot was mostly designed and built during my internship at Pocobor ( http://www.pocobor.com/ ) a small mechatronics consulting company in San Francisco. When I wasn’t working on projects for them they were happy to let me to use their software and tools to design the circuit boards and program the bot.
The chassis of WeddingBot was pretty simple, two boxes from Daiso, some wooden columns, and a motor kit with wheels. A large computer fan with plastic ducting was used to blow flowers out of the top. The bot was powered by RC car batteries (purchased at a hobby shop) and had a circuit board I designed for translating wireless commands from the controller (sent via an xBee Pro) into motor/fan responses.
The controller was based on an old Microsoft Sidewinder joystick I’ve had since middle school. I took it apart and connected the button and stick position outputs to another circuit board to translate the joystick inputs into wireless commands the robot could understand.
Both the joystick and robot circuit boards had microcontrollers that I programmed in C.
Driving WeddingBot was pretty straightforward. The amount the stick was tilted forward or back determined the overall speed and the left/right position determined how much it would veer left or right at that speed. Holding the trigger button would turn on the fan so that flowers would launch out. The back button would switch left/right turn commands to make driving the robot towards you more intuitive (since your left and the robot’s left are opposite in that situation). I added an extra red button that could be used to re-center the joystick if the default position somehow became skewed.
We’re inside the halls of CES right now, just checking things out. Maybe we’ll see something interesting.
Some editorial teams might wilt at the lack of seating in the Venetian’s press room; your faithful editors instead hunker under the closest faux-gilt Italian furniture. Meeting executives may be awkward, as we ask they bring their own chair.
