I was the first to state that Amazon would come out with its own smartphone. This will happen this year, I predict. I have given the reasons why.

Background: http://brianshall.com/search/node/amazon%20smartphone

This article in Wired sums up what has long been my view:

Just like a camera, the best store is the one you have with you. And most of us carry our smartphones with us everywhere we go and buy things all day long.

In a forthcoming consumer study, Nielsen reports that 29 percent of smartphone owners are “mobile shoppers.” This figure is even with a narrowly defined set of “shopping-related activities.” For instance, Nielsen doesn’t include “used a map to find directions to a store or restaurant,” “purchased books, magazines, or applications,” “taking photos of items purchased or desired,” or “sharing reactions to or reviews of a purchase online.” Together, I’d bet that handful of shopping-related activities alone would tip the mobile shoppers figure over 50 percent, at least.

Mobile shoppers are also making use of more than just the web browser. A full 22 percent are using phones to scan barcodes for prices or product details. Overall, getting information through our phones is much more popular than actually using them to make a purchase.

But this is beginning to change, as a new generation of applications make genuine mobile shopping easier.

The smartphone, and especially the tablet, are becoming the storefront. The anywhere, always open storefront. And buying guide and pricing guide.

Amazon will offer its own smartphone because they will have no choice. 

I could remind you all that since at least 2008 I've been stating publicly, boldly, repeatedly, to all who would listen: the smartphone is the computer.

The mobile web is the web.

This changes everything. It changes payments and television, music and gaming, the Internet and connectivity, work and schooling.

The smartphone is the true *personal computer* and will connect, for the first time ever, everyone on the planet. And will create untold riches while ruthlessly and quickly crushing once mighty giants, now mere dinosaurs unable to evolve fast enough.

Nearly everything, certainly all the big stuff that I've been writing about has come to pass or is damn close to happening. 

But tonight, I take no joy in this. Because I am worried.

No country is greater than America. The 21st century is, I believe, to be the American Century. And many of the tools and platforms and innovations, from the world's greatest universities to the greatest smartphone platforms to the globe-spanning social media networks to the latest in biotechnology, are products of America.

We lead the world. With smartphones, thanks to Apple and Google and Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Paypal and so many others, this new medium will carry our message, our values, our culture, to all people, all nations.

And in time elevate our prosperity and the planet's standard of living.

But this is not a foregone conclusion. It takes work, effort, capital, ingenuity. 

Where have these gone?

It seems as if only Apple has been able to truly innovte this century. Google is at least trying. But what of Cisco, of Yahoo, Microsoft, Dell and HP? I often take Silicon Valley's "new media" to task for several reasons: they are owned, owned by wealthy insiders. Which *fundamentally* colors and biases and *limits* what they say and think and cover and do.

And for all their cheerleading of the Silicon Valley "ecosystem" and its virtuous golden halo economic rags-to-riches-to-more-riches effect, they seem to be missing the big picture: Silicon Valley seems incapable of systemwide level innovation.

Facebook is not a replacement for Cisco. Twitter is not a replacement for HP. Pinterest, Path and a thousand mini social networks are no Microsoft.

Why are we not innovating? Is it because true innovation requires actually building things? Physical things? Once that ability is cut off from the company does it eventualliy come to a halt, the way a train will eventually come to a dead stop a few miles after it is unhooked from the engine?

I have mocked Microsoft in the past for not understanding the impact of the smartphone and how it will decimate their entire business if they do not move quiclkly and aggressively. I have ridiculed HP for living off printer ink and expense reports while the entire computing market changes all around them.

I have, and I believe this is wrong, assumed that fat margins, good times and a glorious past blinded them to missing what was happening. But what if they did not miss it? What if they are simply not capable of seizing this change?

What if the new, mobile, social, hyperlocal, real-time web is beyond Ciscos' abilities? What if HP can do no better than build ugly printers that are dependent on overpriced ink? What if Microsoft is no longer capable of building great products that are used in a world where eeryone is away from their desk?

When will we find out? Will it be too late?

I realize the insiders and their chosen ones will point to the Facebook IPO and all the other glorious stories of start-ups and "new media" and platforms and ecosystems that are thriving. 

But these rest upon other's platforms. These live inside other's devices. The software and operating systems and devices that are the foodstuff for all the small, budding capitalized firms ought to be American. And I'm worried that in just a few short years they won't be. And no one in Silicon Valley seems to notice. 

The companies that built the platforms, that built the devices -- that made the money, real money, money that you could hold in your hand -- are faltering. That's not good.

What's that? You say you're sick of all the Steve Jobs coverage? Yeah, well, I haven't cared for Madonna at all in the past 30 years. How's that working out for me? Now be quiet and pay attention!

This article/book review from the New Republic, of which republic I know not of which they refer, is quite valuable for those of us who never will read the Walter Isaacson biography. Below are a few excerpts but if you are so interested in the subject matter, I highly recommend it.

It took a Syrian-American college dropout—a self-proclaimed devotee of India, Japan, and Buddhism—to make the world appreciate the virtues of sleek and solid German design. (Braun itself was not so lucky: in 1967 it was absorbed into the Gillette Group, and ended up manufacturing toothbrushes.)

There are few traces of Jobs the philosopher in Walter Isaacson’s immensely detailed and pedestrian biography of the man. Isaacson draws liberally on previously published biographies, and on dozens of interviews that Jobs gave to the national media since the early 1980s. He himself conducted many interviews with Jobs (who proposed the project to Isaacson), and with his numerous colleagues, enemies, and disciples, but as one nears the end of this large book it’s hard not to wonder what it was that Isaacson and Jobs actually talked about on those walks around Palo Alto. Small anecdotes abound, but weren’t there big themes to discuss?

As Isaacson makes clear, Jobs was not a particularly nice man, nor did he want to be one. The more diplomatic of Apple’s followers might say that Steve Jobs—bloodthirsty vegetarian, combative Buddhist—lived a life of paradoxes. A less generous assessment would be that he was an unprincipled opportunist-a brilliant but restless chameleon. For Jobs, consistency was truly the hobgoblin of little minds (he saw little minds everywhere he looked) and he did his best to prove Emerson’s maxim in his own life.

Jobs’s engagement with politics was quite marginal—so marginal that, except for him lecturing Obama on how to reset the country, there are few glimpses of politics in this book. He did not hold politicians in anything like awe. We see him trying to sell a computer to the king of Spain at a party, and asking Bill Clinton if he could put in a word with Tom Hanks to get him to do some work for Jobs. (Clinton declined.) 

“PURE” WAS THE ultimate compliment that Steve Jobs could bestow. 

THE BAUHAUS LIVES ON in Apple also in other ways. In addition to its minimalism, the Bauhaus also championed an obsession with functionalism—the idea, revolutionary in its time, that form follows function. The Bauhaus enthusiasm for “function” is the precursor of Apple’s enthusiasm for “essence.” But how did the Bauhaus designers and architects explain the functions of their products and structures? Where did they come from, and how were they discovered? 

The task of the designer, then, was not to please or to innovate. It was to uncover and to reveal—rather like scientists; for design is just a tangible, natural, and objective byproduct of history. 

APPLE’S LINKS to Bauhaus, Ulm, and Braun suggest that the company has always operated in a much richer intellectual tradition than is generally recognized. The conventional view—that Apple is unique, so exceptional and so unpredictable that it defies easy categorizations—says more about the inability of technology analysts to cut through Apple’s design philosophy, which, while dense, has been quite consistent over time. While this philosophy has produced a bevy of beautiful products that are tremendously popular with the general public, it would be wrong to ascribe Apple’s success to superior design alone. Jobs never hid the fact that ultimately he was in the business of selling not computers but dreams. He was quite sincere about this. However harsh his business practices were, in his beliefs there was not a trace of cynicism.

APPLE’S EXTRAORDINARY success in the last decade has been owed, to a large extent, to its dogged and methodical commitment to understanding and avoiding the failures of other technology companies. Apple respects business history like no other company. 

Even Google, with its naïve technocratic ethos, is more committed to questioning the impact that it is having on the Internet and the world at large. They fund a bevy of academic and policy initiatives; they have recently launched a Berlin-based think tank dedicated to exploring the social impact of the Internet; they even started a quarterly magazine. Granted, Google is doing this partly in response to mounting regulatory pressure, but even so one must acknowledge that Google has not shied away from engaging many of its critics. Apple, by contrast, holds itself above the fray. 

I found this BBC article on the misconception of a requisite 8-hour sleep cycle to be rather interesting:

A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.

His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.

These references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.

File under: the destruction of everything.

Did any of you even know that sleeping patterns were so radically different in the past? 

How much have we forgotten, I wonder? About everything. How much did agraianism then industrialism change our fundamental human behaviors?

We may never know.

Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of a pattern of first and second sleep.

"If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in their first sleep, which custom will have caused to terminate by itself just at the usual hour.

"And then, if they turn upon their ear to take a second nap, they will be taught to look upon it as an intemperance not at all redounding to their credit."

Our smartphones and the mobile web keep us connected almost everywhere we go, at all times. Some of us can't put them down, it seems. Or refrain from going online, or tweeting, or updating, or responding or searching or reading or watching.

They are already changing how we work, when and where we work.

Perhaps this is good. Perhaps we've been doing something as basic as sleep all wrong all our lives. And our parents and our grandparents.

As Crosby Stills and Nash sang, "we got to get ourselves back to the garden." That doesn't have to mean going backwards, I suspect. But instead, moving forwards.

Fire Ballmer. Fire Ballmer now. 

I know I'm still another voice in the Fire Ballmer chorus. I know the stock has been a flatline for this millennia. But, damn...he's simply not the right man for the job.

He has numerous skills. But leading Microsoft through the smartphone wars is not one of them.

Which is almost *exactly* what I wrote yesterday when discussing that odd psuedo-humorous video Microsoft put out about Google Docs.

It's a fun if not altogether funny assault by Microsoft on Google. More specifically, on Google's efforts to offer a Microsoft Office competitor. 

The problem is not that Microsoft is right about this, which they are.

Nor is the problem that the video itself is just peculiar.

The problem, of course, is that Microsoft actually has to do this. 

They still -- still! -- have no viable competitor to Android and iPhone.

A day later and how does Google respond?

With their own not-quite-so-clever video retort? With finger pointing?Legalese?

No. Something far more powerful. A video that shows an updated version of their product working on Android smartphones (and the mythical Android tablet).

There is time for Microsoft. They have the resources, products and ability. But every day they fall still further behind. Ballmer must go. 

I understand Business Insider needs to eventually make a profit. I realize that the keyword-SEO-Adwords-pageviews model is fundamentally broken, but with few real options.

I know the site is ostensibly business focused which means that the vast majority of its readers are men.

And, as a man, I know the dirty little not-so-secret: no amount of money or happy homelife can replicate the unique joys of having young tits and young ass.

Still...

This is how they showcase their story on "THE COLLAPSE OF US MANUFACTURING!".

Why would they reduce themselves to a joke like this? Shit, just run another 10-page presentation on, I don't know, the hottest daughters of the top hedge fund managers in Manhattan. Yes, it's bogus but at least there's a path to justifying the pictures.

This just makes them look way too desperate.

I suspect they are not generating nearly the views, click thrus and ad pennies they want us all to believe.

What a marvelous phrase the ABC newsman uses to describe the amazingly large Foxconn factory complex that builds your iPhone.

At nearly 6 minutes long, this is about as in-depth a television news report you're likely to receive on the subject, at least from an American broadcaster. And...it's quite well done. Certainly, we can't trust Foxconn (or China) to reveal the full truth. But, America -- and Apple -- have grown far too dependent upon China and Chinese factories. The more attention we bring to bear on this issue, the better.

As I wrote yesterday, what Apple receives from China is far more than "assembly". Apple *needs* China. 

Which is bad.

We need these factories and their technologies and scalability back in America. At the very least, the *ability* to make the most advanced personal computers on the planet is something we ought to consider as a worthy national objective.

And Apple no doubt needs to make itself radically less dependent on China.

Most shocking to me is just how much of the construction of iPhone is dependent on human hands. This seems wrong, somehow. Though fascinating.

Overall, well done. Worth your time.

The other segments, including Apple's need to launch a PR assault on this issue are here:  http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline 

From an interview with the author of "Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think."

The cellphone in your pocket is as powerful as a mid-'70s-era supercomputer for a minute fraction of the cost. These are the poorest people on Earth, the so-called bottom billion. We have renamed this group the “Rising Billion” because, thanks to the exponential spread of communication and information technologies (like the smartphone), these people are coming online for the very first time. Their voices, which have never before been heard, are suddenly joining the global conversation. Aided by these technologies, the Rising Billion are beginning to pull themselves out of poverty. They are already on their way to becoming a powerful and significant consuming segment of humanity, and many companies are rushing to develop ultralow-cost products to meet their needs. This effort will drive down the price of basic goods and services in a fashion that will benefit everyone. But the Rising Billion have also become a producing and consuming segment of humanity, generating new ideas, insights, products, and services that add to the overall wealth of Earth.

At a global level, the gap between wealthy nations and poorer nations continues to close. Across the board, we are living longer, wealthier, healthier lives. Certainly, there are still millions of people living in dire, back-breaking poverty, but using almost every quality-of-life metric available—access to goods and services, access to transportation, access to information, access to education, access to lifesaving medicines and procedures, means of communication, value of human rights, importance of democratic institutions, durable shelter, available calories, available employment, affordable energy, even affordable beer—our day-to-day experience has improved massively over the past two centuries.