DIY City Releases DIY Traffic

DIY City is a new tech movement aimed at empowering geeks to remake their cities. The site has forums where people can propose projects and then discuss the potential solutions. Since its launch in late 2008 many local chapters have sprung up (start one for you city!).

Today DIY City is launching its first project, DIY Traffic. It uses Twitter to send an receive traffic updates from subscribers. So far there are three cities that have gone live. You can check out San Francisco, Chicago, and Portland to see the app in action or to participate.

The app is very simple ut potentially quite useful especially in a city that doesn't have traffic maps or if you travel on side streets. DIY Traffic will accept traffic updates, let you send out an alert and let you query for the conditions on a specific street. To set up the service for your own city just grab a twitter account, a server and follow the instructions.

I find it impressive that DIY City was able to go from a challenge issued in October and to a released app in under five months. Given that the group has just formed and doesn't have a set structure it says a lot for the level of interest techies have in doing civic work.

John Geraci will be speaking at Where 2.0 about DIY City and how geeks may be their city's best hope.

State of the Computer Book Market 2008, part 4 -- The Languages

In this fourth post (parts one, two and three are found here) on the State of the Computer Book Market, we will look at programming languages and drill in a little on each language area.

Overall the market for programming languages was down 5.9% in 2008 when compared with 2007. There were 1,849,974 units sold in 2007 versus 1,740,808 units sold in 2008, which is a decrease of 109,166  units. So the unhealthy 8% loss in the Overall Computer Book Market was not completely fueled by programming-oriented books.

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Four short links: 25 Feb 2009

Amazon, Apple, Science, and Databases:

1. Amazon's Wheel of Growth -- a fascinating diagram in the middle, the flywheel of customer experience driving sales driving sellers driving selection which drives experience again, and all the while lower costs allows Amazon to deliver lower prices and thus lower selection.
2. iPhone Sketch -- stencils to use when sketching your iPhone app's screens.
3. The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research -- thoughts on the value of feeling stupid ("I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid") and how PhD programs don't prepare students for that feeling. "Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'." (via Titine's delicious stream)
4. First Key-Value Storage Meeting Held in Japan -- yet more work being done with modernized DBM technology. As Joshua said in his delicious comment, plenty of systems I've never heard of before. (via Joshua's delicious stream)

Google App Engine Lets Your Web App Grow Up

Google released App Engine less than a year ago (Radar post). It was the first chance for external developers to use the power of Google's servers. The powerful platform supported Python and was free (within limits). It now supports 45,000 apps and those apps get over 100 million page views per month day. Those pageviews were all free, but they had limits.

That's going to change. After today developers can pay to have more storage, more bandwidth, more CPU time and send more email. The costs as of this morning are listed below with a comparison to the AWS equivalent cost.

• 10 cents per cpu core hour (AWS charges $.10/hr for a small, standard Linux instance and up to $1.20/hr for an XL, Hi-CPU Windows instance in EC2)
• $.10 per gigabyte transferred into AE (AWS charges $.10 for all data transferred into S3)
• $.12 per gigabyte transferred out of AE (AWS charges $.17 for the first 10 TB/month transferred out ofS3)
• $.15 per gigabyte stored per month (AWS charges $.15 for the first 50 TB/month stored onS3)
• .0001 dollars per email (AWS does not have an equivalent)

Without running a more advanced cost calculation it seems that App Engine is slightly cheaper for smaller web apps. Pete Koomen, an App Engine Product Manager, would not say if they would add tiered pricing. I can't imagine it happening until after they add background processing for applications.

Developers will only pay after their app surpasses the free limits (and there are several AE apps that already have like buddypoke.com and mentalfloss.com). The existing free quotas will be reduced in 90 days. The new paid quotas do have unpublished limits, so if you need to support more than 500 requests/sec you'll need to contact Google.

Developer will use their Google Checkout account to cover their apps costs. This means that the new features are restricted to the U.S. and U.K. only. Hopefully the Checkout team expands their scope soon. Google Checkout appears to be available almost everywhere, but doesn't have a page that lists all of the countries. You can check the dropdown of the sign-up page to see if your country is supported and thus you can use the Google App Engine features.

This is a significant step for App Engine. By setting a theoretical limit above the dreams of many web apps they are now putting out the call for serious applications. They've already added Google App Engine Apps to Google Apps For Your Domain. I could envision AE becoming the backbone of an Enterprise Dev Marketplace.

AE still has many significant to-do items on their public Roadmap. Not the least of them is the support for more languages (Java is a good bet as it is used a lot internally) and to add support for background processes.

A huge concern with App Engine is platform lock-in. Google provides a lot of powerful, but non-standard APIs and features that make switching platforms difficult. Developers can extract themselves from App Engine via projects like AppDrop, but it is still risky to use their platform without an SLA. Without a guarantee Google could theoretically decide to raise prices unreasonably. Is it likely? No, but it is something that developers need to think about before committing to any platform.

Google I/O already has many sessions listed for App Engine developers. I'll give a free pass to I/O to the person who suggests the best AE app in the comments. Vic Gundotra, who runs the App Engine team, will be at the Web 2.0 Expo SF in April.

Updated: Correct mistakes about the current pageviews and the availability of the new features.

Ignite Show: Kati London on Botanicalls: Homegrown Terra-rists

Today we are releasing "Botanicalls: Homegrown Terra-rists" the second episode of the Ignite Show. This week's speaker is Kati London, the co-creator of Botanicalls, a device that will let you know when your plant needs watering via Twitter. Kati doesn't spend much time explaining Botanicalls instead she talks about some fun(ny) uses for it.

If you want to learn more about Botanicalls check out their site. Or you can see what the Twitter feed of one Robert Plant (an orchid) is like. Or you can pick up a kit at Maker Shed or ThinkGeek. Botanicalls was created by Kati London (the speaker), Rob Faludi, Rebecca Bray and Kate Hartman.

Enjoy the show!

Kodu: Visual Programming on the Xbox with P2P Level-sharing

How do you make programming fun? How do you make it fun enough for kids to want to spend hours learning how to make loops and if/then statements? Simple you give them simple visual commands that let them control robots on the Xbox -- or at least this is the thesis of Microsoft Research's Kodu (formerly Boku).

Kodu (Boku) made a splash at Techfest two years ago and gave a demo at Ignite Seattle (Radar post). Since that time the levels and characters have gotten much sexier and the controls simpler, but more powerful. I sat down with the Matt MacLaurin, creator of Kodu (get it? Code-You) at MSR's Techfest last night. He told me that we can expect Kodu to be released on the Xbox this Spring (it's in select schools right now on the PC, but there's no word about a broader release).

It takes just 8 lines of "code" (see the image to the right) to create a game. Matt and his team have replicated most game types you would expect including Races, RPGs, Shooters (with cool missiles), Strategy and Puzzle. They've also included Sample Levels that teach a specific lesson (like how to change color, create loops, etc.).

Embedded into the game are the notions of sharing and openness. Any level can be tweaked. In fact the first option after finishing a level is "Edit This Game". I saw a working version where levels can also be shared amongst gamer friends via a form of P2P. When you are online you can choose to share all of your levels. Each level could fit on a floppy disk (not that your kid will know what that is). Embedded in each level is the creator and all subsequent editors. Kodu will track changes and try to determine who has made the most significant modifications to the level. When you start playing make sure you share with the Kodu team. They want to track how far levels are spread to create kind of a genealogy.

I took a lot of pictures and video of the game last night. You can see the video after the jump and the pictures on Flickr.

Visual programming environments are on the rise and something that every techie parent will want to keep an eye on. Kodu seems like the most accessible to me. It effectively hides the programming with "fun". I'm looking forward to its release.

We're featuring MIT's visual programming language Scratch at ETech this year. Use et09ffd code for 40% off the admission price.

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Four short links: 24 Feb 2009

iPhones, communities, the Linux cloud, and open scientific research:

1. Smart Developers Update Often (Marco Tabini) -- I'm really enjoying Marco's updates on his new life as an iPhone app developer. Unlike many other distribution channels, Apple has chosen the curious path of making the App Store something as close to a true meritocracy as possible—you don't get exposure to potential customers because of who you are or because of the amounts of money you are willing to pay the distributor for optimal positioning. Your app either sells on its own merits, or it doesn't. That most people don't seem to grasp what a tremendous opportunity this is truly baffles me.
2. Online Community Management 101 -- notes from Derek Powazek and Heather Champ's Webstock session on community management. I didn't get to the session, but the notes are full of concrete suggestions. Scores create games. First post - game in which you win by being a dork and writing ‘first post’ - adds nothing. How do you observe without changing the outcome? Don’t show tally during vote, don’t show outcome of poll until vote is cast. Randomness - instead of a top 10 list, take a top 20 per cent and show nine randomly.
3. New Ubuntu to Target EC2 -- a leading Linux distro targeting hosted cloud-like environments. "Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the API's of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to setup their own cloud using entirely open tools."
4. Of Mice and Academics (PDF) -- academic paper concludes closed research produces far fewer new basic research directions than open, thus greatly retards the progress of science. "openness of upstream research does not simply encourage higher levels of downstream exploitation. It also raises the incentives for additional upstream research by encouraging the establishment of entirely new research directions." (via Glynn Moody)

How Many Links Are Too Many Links?

Click to enlarge this visualization. Created using Processing by Nick Bilton. Data collection by Evan Sandhaus.

I repeatedly hear from people with information overload disorder. From news and information sites to blogs, social networks, tweeters, emails, and on and on, the blizzard of information has easily surpassed category 5 levels.

To understand how much content effluvia we're subjected to, I wanted to see how many links are on the homepage of popular websites. For example, if I go to the homepage of the Huffington Post, I see 720 links, in one shot. Then click inside to a story and you've nearly doubled that number—it ads up pretty quickly. What about the tech blogs? BoingBoing Gadgets, 514. Gizmodo, 468. Engadget 432, all on one page. And on average, fewer than 1% of the links on news sites and blogs actually point to rich content, 99% are navigation and other article headlines. Aggregation site Techmeme has a whopping 1081 links.

This visualization takes 98 of the top websites, from different genres, and organizes them alphabetically, with varying circle sizes to represent the number of links on their respective homepage. That's 36,128 total links from these 98 sites. You can easily see how a day spent online navigating your favorite news, blogs, and information sites, checking in with your Google Reader feeds, following a twitter stream of a couple of hundred people, and clicking on your email a few dozen times (likely an understatement for most of us) can expose you to well over 100,000 links in a single day.

Granted, we probably don't see all these links, but they're being pushed at us in the hopes that we do. And maybe this isn't such a bad thing? The beauty of the internet is the ability to link. To thread through the content flow and create our own narrative. Or, is today's internet akin to the wild west of the early days of newspapers, where there were 80 to 100 headlines on a single front page?

Managing monopolies and dominance in the Net age

Guest blogger Mike Shatzkin is Founder and CEO of The Idea Logical Company, where he has focused on supply chain and digital change issues since 1979. Mike has spoken at and organized publishing industry conferences all over the world. He recently launched The Shatzkin Files blog. One of Mike's several books, The Ballplayers, forms the core of BaseballLibrary.com.

Our thinking about "monopoly" may need to be recast in the Internet age. This is a complicated question to consider and we need to start gathering some good minds around it.

Network effects were noticed before there was an Internet. Both the phone company and the electric company were networks, and it became clear about a century ago that everything worked better for everybody if they WERE monopolies and everybody was hooked up to the same network, not competing ones. So phones and electricity became regulated monopolies, with prices and other behavior, including mandated service levels, controlled. Whether because of a changing ethos or because things became more complicated, or both, "competition" has been introduced in both spheres over the past two or three decades. With debatable results.

Amazon's dominance -- which is not a monopoly but which certainly looks like unassailable hegemony in the world of online bookselling -- can be largely attributed to brilliant execution and maintaining a tight focus on serving the customer. But part of their success at eliminating meaningful competition for online book sales has to do with the nature of the Internet. Online likes one winner in many spaces because it serves the users better NOT to fragment aggregations. If Amazon's reader reviews were spread over 1000 web sites, they wouldn't be as useful to the consumers. And their recommendation engine thrives on data; fewer customers would mean less helpful recommendations for those customers remaining, and the concentration at Amazon means less useful recommendations come from all their retailing competitors. This is an edge that may not stay with the retailer forever, though, because the playing field for information about books is being leveled by social networking sites. That's why Amazon is investing in them.

This tendency to concentration makes it urgent for publishers to get into niches and start trying to own them while they have legacy advantages. If the history of the Net so far is any guide, each information and interest niche will end up being owned by a very small number of players; often it will boil down to one. We seem to have been pretty fortunate with the dominant players (perhaps we should call them "monopoly threats") that have emerged so far, among them: Amazon, Google, ebay, Craigslist, wikipedia, and a now-emerging Facebook. They've executed well and kept their eye on the stakeholders they serve. They, so far, have been more benign dominators than were Microsoft and AOL, two big winners on the previous go-round.

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State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 3: The Publishers

In this third installment, (see part one and part two; part four to come later this week), we will look at how Publishers fared in 2007 when compared to 2006. The chart below shows our dashboard view of the Large publishers’ results for 2007. The most notable factor is that Wiley continues to hold the leading spot as the largest publisher, with 30% market share of units sold, while Pearson lost 2% market share and O'Reilly gains 1%. (We’ll look at revenue share later in the analysis.)

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ETech Preview: On The Front Lines of the Next Pandemic

With all of the stress and anxiety that humanity deals with on a daily basis--confronting the dangers of global warming, the perils of a financial system in meltdown and the ever-present threat of terrorism--the fact that there's yet another danger lurking out there ready to destroy mankind: the threat of a global pandemic, may be easy to forget. But although you and I may have driven thoughts of Ebola and the like from our minds, Dr. Nathan Wolfe worries about them every day. Dr. Wolfe founded and directs the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative which monitors the transfer of new diseases from animals to humans.

He received his Bachelor's degree at Stanford in 1993 and his Doctorate in Immunology and Infectious Diseases from Harvard in 1998. Dr. Wolfe was awarded the National Institute of Health International Research Scientist Development Award in 1999 and a prestigious NIH Directors Pioneer Award in 2005. He'll be speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in March. His session is entitled, "Viral Forecasting." Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Nathan Wolfe: My pleasure.

James Turner: So why don't we start by talking about the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative. How is it different from the work that the CDC and the WHO and similar organizations do monitoring disease spread?

NW: Well, what we do is we actually focus on the interface between humans and animal populations. When we looked back and investigated the ways in which disease got started, the ways that pandemics really originated, what we found is that really the vast majority of these things are animal diseases. So rather than monitoring for illness, at which point it could potentially be too late, we've taken it one step backward. We actually focus on people who have high levels of contact with animals. And we set up large groups of these individuals and monitor the diseases that they have, as well as the diseases in the animal population. So the idea is to be able to catch these things a little bit earlier.

JT: The last disease that really made a big splash with the media was Ebola, earlier in this decade. But we really haven't heard much recently. Have things calmed down as far as new and novel diseases? Or are we just hearing less about outbreaks these days?

NW: Well, I mean I think we've had really substantive important pandemics. If you take a look at SARS, for example. SARS really only infected about 1,200 individuals, but its impact was tremendous. It was billions of dollars of economic impact all throughout the world. Even in a place like Singapore, where you had a small number of cases, you had an incredibly substantive financial impact. And then, of course, right now we have H5N1 which is -- they call it the bird flu. Actually, most influenzas are bird influenzas, so it's a little bit of a misnomer. But H5N1 is a virus which is spreading around the world in birds. And if it does make a transition into humans, which some bird flu will over the next 20 to 30 years, it could be incredibly devastating. So I think that these are kind of constant and present dangers. They're things that are increasing over time simply because of the way that we're connected as a human population.

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Four short links: 23 Feb 2009

1. Work in Small Batches -- I'm obsessed by the pursuit of quality, but at human scale and not in the stultifying ISO9001 process. The ever-wonderful Startup Lessons Learned blog ties together Toyota Quality, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment, with good explanations of why it works. (I'm reminded of "yes it works in practice, but can it work in theory?")
2. RSS Hits the Big Time -- the stimulus bill requires government departments to offer Atom or RSS feeds of how they spend the money. The "omigod wow RSS in law!" comments remind me of when I first saw a URL on a billboard: it was the all-digital world impinging on my real physical world (or vice-versa). Reminded of William Gibson talking about our fleeting separation of digital and physical worlds.
3. Objective C Internals -- talk by Kiwi Foo Camp alumnus and recent emigre (Pixar's gain is Australasia's loss) about the innards of Objective C. I always find that I understand language features better when I understand an implementation mechanism for them.
4. Prime Minister Delays NZ's Insane Copyright Law -- the delay isn't the important bit, it's the committment to abolish the bad law if the ISPs and the recording industry can't reach an agreement. I was at the press conference, twittering furiously, and it was quite clear that the PM felt the law was crap and if the two parties hadn't been mid-negotiation then it would have all been repealed. Optimism!

Recent Posts

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• Four short links: 17 Feb 2009 | by Nat Torkington on February 17, 2009
• State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 1: The Market | by Mike Hendrickson on February 17, 2009