I'd like to welcome Christopher Lee and AMAC to the Enterprise Innovation Institute, effective July 1, 2010.

The Alternative Media Access Center is an initiative of the Board of Regents University System of Georgia with a mission to improve system wide services for students with print-related disabilities. AMAC has expanded its services nationwide to include all types of post-secondary institutions and other government agencies. They are committed to removing social and academic barriers to individuals with physical, sensory, and print-related learning disabilities by ensuring that all individuals with print disabilities have equal and timely access to print materials at an affordable cost.

To date, AMAC has been funded by the Georgia Board of Regents, and housed at the University of Georgia in Athens. This summer, AMAC will move to Atlanta and their funding will transfer from UGA to Georgia Tech. Christopher Lee and his staff will become Georgia Tech employees, with Chris reporting to me as a director in EI2.

Christoper is beginning to spend some of his time here on campus, and I'd encourage you to welcome him when you meet him. Also, please help introduce Christopher to anyone on campus who might be interested in connecting to AMAC.

Michael doesn't blog very often, but when he does, he nails it. This President may be killing Constellation for all the wrong reasons. In fact, I doubt that this President truly realizes what doors he has opened here.

But, as the Vulcan proverb says, "Only Nixon could go to China."

Only a Democrat President, with the glitz and glamour of JFK, could possibly have gotten this far in killing the hagiography of JFK's space program. No Republican would have a chance.

NASA doesn't work as a method of getting large numbers of humans (and cargo) into space reliably, repeatably, and cheaply. It can't, because it wasn't designed to. To quote Rand Simberg, "in response to the Soviet socialist state enterprise for space, we created one of our own." And, like every socialist state enterprise in the history of mankind, NASA is crippled from inception.

Obama has proposed sweeping away all of the cruft that has accreted around NASA's human space flight establishment and replacing it with private enterprise. After all, if a government employee needs to fly from Washington to San Francisco they don't fly on a government airplane. (Well, unless they're Nancy Pelosi.) They fly on Delta Air Lines, with a discount for volume purchases. Why should low Earth orbit be any different?

As a lifelong space enthusiast and long-time space investor, I'm absolutely thrilled. Because, as I never cease pointing out to people... I don't support "the space program." I support the space industry. And you have to kill the former to allow room for the new industry to breathe.

In the distant past of 2004, I testified in front of the Aldridge Commission. You can read my testimony here, or the commission's final report here. The Obama Administration's proposals are much closer to these free-market recommendations than anything the Bush Administration ever considered implementing.

This has to get past Congress, where there are a lot of entrenched special interests getting ready to fight for their pork barrel spending. And we could still screw it all up by insisting that NASA regulate the "safety" of its successors, when that's properly the job of the Department of Transportation (specifically, AST). This isn't a done deal. But, if Obama is successful, we'll be able to mark 2010 as the year that we finally quit subsidizing a massive socialist Ministry of Space, and launched a multi-billion dollar American-led space industry.

Which, in the middle of all the bad economic news around us, sounds very very good indeed.

Then I read the orgy of criticism that washed over the blogosphere last night about all the device's perceived failings and, on mature and considered reflection...

I still want one.

(Maybe two, so I don't have to fight with my wife over it.)

What really strikes me about the iPad is how "Apple" it is... in the sense of Apple's product introduction strategy for the last several years. Define a minimum feature set to delight a particular constituency, sweat all the details to serve their immediate needs, ruthlessly leave out features near and dear to the twitterati, and leave plenty of room for upgrades later.

(I mean, look at your iPhone. Do you remember how many limitations the very first iPhone had, less than three years ago? Heck, I didn't buy one until the App Store came online... do you remember that wasn't until a year after launch? And global search and cut-and-paste, to name just two features I use daily, didn't arrive until version 3.0 of the OS.)

This is iPad 1.0. We'll see a lot of changes over the next couple of years. (And, yeah, I'll feel like a chump for being an early adopter, but c'est la vie.)

That being said, my thoughts on a few specific perceived deficiencies:

1. No stylus. I predicted this last week. Give him credit for consistency... Steve Jobs has clearly decided that multi-touch and on-screen keyboards are the future, and he's sticking to his guns. I happen to disagree, and wish there had been a stylus option, but he's the CEO, not me. I'm going to optimistically treat this as a third-party opportunity, and wait for someone to bundle a capacitive stylus with an app similar to OneNote.

 

2. No camera. I have to admit, this one surprised me. I was really expecting a front-facing camera for video iChat. I can think of a couple of reasons why it didn't happen. The prosaic one would be that AT&T told Jobs that their wireless network would keel over and die if millions of people started using videoconferencing in 2Q10... but, if that were the case, it could have been limited to Wi-Fi only.

   I'm going to take a more Jobsian view. Whatever device you have with a front-facing camera—be it a MacBook, or one of the Nokias, or an Android device—you never quite make eye contact with the other party. And this is the sort of detail that drives Jobs mad.

   Check out this Apple patent. Conventional wisdom is that the iPad will get a video camera in a future hardware iteration. I'm claiming otherwise. I now believe that you won't see a version of iPad with a separate front-facing camera... we'll have to wait until the technology matures enough that you can look straight into the screen.

   At which point, we won't be able to imagine doing it any other way. Very Apple.

 

3. Connectivity. I think Apple did exactly the right thing by offering a Wi-Fi only version and a 3G-plus-WiFi version... and the price points aren't bad. People in the U.S. can complain about being limited to the AT&T network all they want, but we have no idea how much money AT&T put on the table to maintain exclusivity!

   For me, since I already have an iPhone with 3G, I'm hoping for some sort of tethering between them. If not... I think you could make a compelling argument for buying the WiFi-only version and a Verizon MiFi. I think that's what I'm going to do.

 

4. Charging. Sigh. This was just wishful thinking on my part. I thoroughly understand Apple's need to control the proprietary 30-pin dock for synching and docking and hardware accessories. But I was hoping that they'd have put in a mini-USB jack with only the power pins connected... so, if you're out somewhere and your battery is dying, you can use a standard charger to get some juice. Mini-USB chargers and cables are ubiquitous, because they're used in Blackberrys, and cameras, and Bluetooth headsets, and even my Harmony remote control. This would have been nice, but I didn't really expect it.

 

5. Micro-SIM. This was my only real "WTF" moment of the announcement. So you create an unlocked 3G device, which will clearly ship globally sometime this year, and instead of the bog-standard SIM card that's been around since rocks were soft, you go with some funky new "standard" that no one else has adopted yet? You can't tell me there's not room for a standard SIM card in a device this size! I don't get it. Apple is all about driving adoption of next-generation standards—from 3.5 inch floppy drives to FireWire to USB—but this just strikes me as dumb. Somebody please explain?

 

Anyhow, those are some of my initial reactions to the criticism. (Which I think will eventually look a lot like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.")

I already read a lot of books on my iPhone, and this will clearly be a better solution for that... meaning I was right not to jump into the Kindle/Nook fray.

A lot of my evening Internet consumption will fit nicely on my iPad, and I can always walk across the room to my laptop if I need to compose an email of more than a couple of lines.

I'm actively looking forward to walking into presentations with this and a VGA cable (although someone sorely needs to make a thinner VGA cable, or it will be bulkier than the iPad!).

I'm not going to give up my laptop or my iPhone, but I think there's room in between. In two months, we'll see if anyone agrees with me.

Of course, this being Apple, nay-sayers abound. They seem to come from two different directions.

1. Since tablet computers have been around forever and have been resounding market failures, why should this one be different?

   (Disclaimer: I invested in a company that made software for Tablet PCs in the late 1990s. It was a technological triumph but, as alluded to above, it was a resounding market failure.)
   

2. Apple already has a tablet computer—it's called an iPhone/iPod touch—and it already has a small portable full-featured computer—it's called a MacBook. So where is there room for a "middle product" without cannibalizing existing sales?

 

Lots of good points being made in those links. But I can answer Joe Wilcox's challenge: "What would you use an Apple tablet, or any other, for...that you can't do on an iPhone or laptop?"

For me, it's easy: Take notes in meetings.

Dilbertian arguments about meeting productivity aside, I live in meetings... sometimes eight or ten in a day. Sometimes one-on-one, sometimes around a table with a dozen other people. But there are two things I can't do in those meetings:

1. Unfold a laptop, no matter how small or sexy. Because once you have a laptop on the table, you have literally erected a wall between you and whoever you're meeting with.
2. Hold up my iPhone and focus on typing in that teeny-tiny screen. (Holding the iPhone down in my lap and not-so-discreetly reading email is a faux pas, but happens anyhow. But scrolling and reading doesn't take the same level of focus as typing.)

 

So in this year 2010, when we're supposed to be orbiting Jupiter, I'm still taking notes with a pen in a Moleskine notebook. Then I ignore them.

What I want to be able to do is take notes on an electronic device that automatically syncs them with something in the cloud (PBworks, or a Google doc, or something). Then when I get back to my desk, I can edit those notes, forward them to co-workers, add tasks to a timeline, or generally do anything productive with them without trying to read my own handwriting and re-type the contents. And I want to do it with Apple's signature UX and polished UI.

Oddly enough, I used to use a device that gave a vision of how this could be possible... and Apple manufactured it in 1993. It was the Newton.



I won't go into my impassioned defense of the Newton here—once your product has been skewered by Doonesbury, it's pretty much all over. And, really, the product didn't hit its stride until the release of the Newton 2100, only months before Steve Jobs returned to Apple and killed the project because of its guilt-by-association with John Sculley. (The 2100 had an 8x faster CPU, which finally let the handwriting-recognition algorithms keep up.) But I could do something with my Newton 2100 that I couldn't do with a whole series of Graffiti-based Palm PDAs, or a Fujitsu Stylistic tablet, or my iPhone: I could take notes in meetings.

Real-time, as fast as I could write, in outlines that I could rearrange and organize and search while still in the meeting. Because Internet connectivity was still primitive, and wireless basically nonexistent, I had to dock the Newton with my desktop and transfer the notes over a cable... but the core note-taking functionality was there. Transmitting the bits differently would have been a trivial improvement, had the product survived.

And because the Newton stayed horizontal on the tabletop or tilted in my left hand, I could maintain easy eye contact with other people in the room, glancing down at the screen precisely as I do with my Moleskine notebook... a completely different interaction than occasionally peering at them over the lid of a laptop computer.

Apple still doesn't make anything that can do this. Neither does anyone else.

And I fear that, after January 26th, Apple still won't make anything that can do this. Because all of the sexy applications—watching movies, and editing photos, and reading graphically-rich ebooks—can be done with what Steve Jobs calls "the best pointing device in the world... our fingers."

You can't take notes that way. Even with some sort of exotic haptic feedback, typing on a tablet means focusing on the tabletop, not whoever you're meeting with. And fingerpainting lettershape is technically impressive, but slow, slow, slow... requiring you to move the whole hand, not just twitch the point of a pen. And although I know someone who can type 80 words per minute on his Twiddler handheld input device, I suspect the very steep learning curve will keep it out of the mainstream (therefore, out of Apple's product line).

Rapid eyes-up input requires a stylus... either with sophisticated handwriting recognition or with something like Graffiti. And with all the exotic possibilities being hyped for the Apple tablet, no one is mentioning a stylus.

Because Steve Jobs hates the stylus, because it reminds him of the Newton.

Which means we still won't be able to exploit what should the the killer app of a thin, powerful, touch-screen device, nearly two decades after the Newton was released.

Which is a damned shame.

Here is the clip they released as a teaser:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTxCE0JYFtM

This is my new favorite airport.

Take a look at the booths in the airport restaurant: Ample space to spread out, easily accessible power outlets in each booth, friendly service, no blaring televisions, and free no-hassle Wi-Fi.

I spent three hours here, ordering a hamburger and tipping the waitress an extra five dollars for occupying the table. (It wasn't crowded, or I would have moved on.) Who needs a Crown Room?

There's a nifty little military aviation museum... only a couple of rooms, but a nice set of exhibits, including a restored Link trainer. (One of my aunts met one of my uncles when she was instructing on these trainers during WW2.) There are models of spacecraft strewn about the terminal, from the Redstone through Apollo to the Shuttle.

Even the bathroom floors have a "space" theme, with Hubble images at the entrance and a galactic mosaic on the floors:

Then you go out to the concourse, through an efficient security checkpoint. (I am continually amazed at how friendly and helpful TSA agents wherever I travel except Atlanta. At ATL, the agents have the demeanor of prison wardens in a bad movie.) And there are more power outlets near tables everywhere, including these little self-contained carrels:

(There are power outlets on the desktop surface, but my angle was wrong, and I didn't realize it until after boarding.)

The only bad thing I can say about Melbourne International is that Delta serves it with the dinky little CRJ jets that are comfortable only for children and hobbits. A guy my size can be crippled by sitting in one of those things for a couple of hours. But that's not the airport's fault!

I don't know who is running this place, but they're doing a darned good job. Can we put them in charge of Hartsfield, please?

Another of my letters-to-the-editor that will never be published, so you can read it here. This one was sent to Scientific American regarding their November 2009 issue.

Imagine my dismay, therefore, when this month's issue arrived with a cover article promising "A plan to get all energy from wind, water, and solar power by 2030." This is nonsense. One can be strongly in favor of greatly expanding renewable energy resources without supporting this illogical and impossible "plan."

Just to take two issues:

(1) The authors have "assumed... that most fossil-fuel transportation can be replaced by battery and fuel-cell vehicles." This is unsupported by any engineering reality. I suspect battery-powered vehicles will do a good job of replacing the four-door sedan for urban commuters. But without a fundamental breakthrough in battery technology, batteries will not be powering over-the-road trucks, or locomotives, or oceangoing vessels. Confusing "the transportation sector" with "automobiles" is an amateur error, and I would have expected better from these authors.

(2) In a single sentence, they declare that hydrogen, generated by electrically-driven hydrolysis, will fuel aircraft. No, it won't. Even tossing aside the incredible inefficiencies in manufacturing, transporting, and storing liquid hydrogen, the energy density of liquid hydrogen is only one-seventh that of gasoline or jet fuel. Ask today's airlines if they could survive with vastly more expensive fuel, but flights limited to only a few hundred miles.

It is certainly possible to greatly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels -- especially through a renewed commitment to clean, safe, abundant nuclear energy -- but the authors are not making that argument. By promoting an absurd vision for deriving "100% of the world's energy, for all purposes... from wind, water, and solar resources," the authors have actually done the clean-energy movement a disservice.

Which is nothing compared to the self-inflicted loss of credibility suffered by Scientific American. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

I suddenly noticed how many music technology companies have recently sprung up in Georgia!Here's a quick list, but I am probably missing some:

• BandMetrics
• BeatTweet
• FreeAllMusic
• Khu.sh (LaDiDa)
• Maestro.fm
• Music Intelligence Solutions (uPlaya)
• Neurotic Media (Amplified.com)
• Rank 'Em
• Vertical Acuity
• Zooz Mobile

Some of these have raised substantial venture money, some are operating on a shoestring, and at least one has multiple millions in revenue already.  One of the neat things is that these are coming from multiple directions—Georgia Tech, SCAD, even the Athens music scene.

Then you add in all the music studios that call Atlanta home. Think we're seeing a cluster being born? IndieMusicTech seems to think so...

The hours for position are Monday-Friday 8am-5pm with travel.

Selection process will include pre-employment background screening and education verification.

Duties: Provide technical leadership across the organization from strategic decision making to project planning. Maintain, support, and upgrade the organizations portfolio of software applications through designing and implementing (and/or evaluating & selecting) information systems that support core organizational functions and new strategic initiatives (and assure their high availability throughout EII). Promote new emerging technologies both within EII and within customer and partner communities. Function as both an internal and external consultant by tracking the latest technology trends and determining their applicability towards the advancement of both the organization and EII external customer goals and objectives. Incumbent must be able to promote and gain organizational commitment for new IT systems.

Education: Bachelors Degree in a related field or an equivalent combination of education and experience required. MS/MBA is preferred.

Experience: Six to ten years experience in IT application development demonstrated by code samples and actual websites (either screen shots or live sites), eight to ten years experience preferred.

Required Skills and Responsibilities

Six to ten years experience in or a combination of:

Link here.

Duties:

Reporting to the On Line Communications and Marketing Manager, the position will:

Link here.