Rolandt

This reads surprisingly like my own path,although I do a fair bit of non-GPU multi-core computing on the side.

☯

Reactions to Apple events are generally either 'that's crazy' or 'that's boring', and reactions to yesterday's were definitely on the 'boring' side. There's certainly a bit of housekeeping (new Apple watch bands, say), but actually, I think there are two things that are pretty important. 

Finally, the cheaper iPhone

New iPhones used to start at $600, with 2 year old ones discounted at $400

Now, iPhone starts at $400 & price goes up for larger screens

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) March 22, 2016

People have been talking about cheaper iPhones for as long as there's been an iPhone. Starting with the iPhone 3G, Apple successfully harnessed itself to the operators' handset 'subsidy' model, and it then passed through the shift from embedded subsidies to unbundled hire-purchase deals without a hitch. But each year's new iPhone still starts at over $600 before that subsidy, and that still works its way through to the consumer in the form of higher monthly charges or up-front payments, and of course prepay (with no subsidy) is a large market in western Europe (and increasingly the USA) and the only significant model outside developed markets. 

So far, Apple has addressed this by selling models from the previous two years at discounts of $100 and $200, taking the entry price before subsidy down to $400 or so. In addition, the second-hand market for iPhones is strong (seemingly rather stronger than that for Androids of similar price), giving another way to increase the size of Apple's ecosystem, though of course providing no direct revenue. And Apple's move to offer its own frequent-upgrade plans gives another way to broaden the base. 

Public data for this has been scanty, but Apple's ASP stayed high enough that it was pretty clear it wasn't selling many of the old models, and yesterday Apple confirmed this, saying that it sold 30m '4" iPhones' (that is, the 5 and 5s) in 2015 out of 230m total iPhone units. 

The last time Apple looked at addressing this directly, the result was the iPhone 5C. Install-base data seems to show that this sold about as well as previous 'last year's model' phones at that price point, but no better - it didn't really change the story, and Apple didn't continue the strategy. It went back to just selling discounted older models again. 

Now we come to the iPhone SE. This is a very different strategy. The iPhone 5C was clearly a different, cheaper product. It looked different, coming in colours but having a bulkier case to no other user benefit and had a lower spec. It was very obviously a 'cheaper iPhone'. 

In contrast, the iPhone SE is effectively a smaller iPhone 6S at a lower price. It has almost all of the same components and specs, and even a better camera than the discounted-to-$500 iPhone 6. It uses a premium design (albeit from an older model). The only meaningful difference from the flagship is that it has a smaller screen and costs less. 

So, I'd suggest that the iPhone SE is not the 'cheap one' any more than the iPhone 6S is the 'cheap one' compared to the iPhone 6S Plus. It's the smaller one, but it's still a top-of-the-line phone. 

Hence, as the tweet at the beginning says, what Apple has really done is moved from selling older models at discounts with the 'proper' iPhone starting at $600, to starting the iPhone range at $400 and scaling up on screen size and price. 

There are a bunch of interesting second-order implications for this. By launching six months after the actual iPhone 6S Apple smooths out the supply chain and reduces cannibalization from people who really want the 'newest one', and probably gets better component prices. But it's still selling premium components instead of 2-year-old components at $400 instead of $600, so I'd expect a long discussion of margin implications at the next quarterly call. And this also points to how misguided it is to poke around in earnings releases from Apple's supply chain to work out iPhone sales. One can also wonder what happens in the next product cycle - presumably the iPhone 6 disappears, the 6S goes to $500 and the SE is refreshed, perhaps without a new name. Or does it go to $300? Certainly it'll be on the second-hand market at $200.  

But the key thing is that after 8 years, the iPhone range really now starts at $400, not $600 or more. With the 6 and 6 Plus Apple addressed screen-size as a reason to buy premium Android and their results are clear in Samsung's financials. Now it's going after price and the mid-range. $400 is still nowhere near the $150 or so that decent Android phones start at (let alone the entry price of $50 or less for one with very low specs), but this is still going to shake things up. 

Second, the iPads

Apple has sold over 300m iPads. It has 70-80% share of tablet traffic web share, and tablets are a double-digit share of web use. The users love them. But sales are slowly declining. 

To me, there are two linked issues here. First, tablets are essentially filling a PC use case - a large screen device that's not in your pocket all the time but that can do more - and that market is in decline as smartphones take over more and more of that use. Tablets are selling into a declining market as smartphones increasingly dominate. And second, the replacement rate for tablets, just as for PCs, is slow - PCs are around five years and tablets may be close to the same (it's still too early to say). A three or four year old iPad is just fine, especially if you don't carry it around with you. 

Apple has clearly had a v2 rethink around this, to try to drive greater switching from PCs (and Macs) both within that upgrade cycle and perhaps accelerating it. It has added the pencil and the keyboard (both pretty much the 'right' instance of each), added split-screen multi-tasking and pushed into productivity, both with OS features and the partnership with IBM, while Microsoft has helpfully also put Office (mostly - some elements such of charts are works in progress) onto the platform. It's trying to address the things that keep people on Windows or Mac - generally that one app or use case. Having started with the new larger iPad Pro last year, it's now rolled this strategy out to the 10" format. (It's not clear what happens to the Mini - this is now somewhat marooned between the 10" format and the iPhone Plus, and Apple may just keep it on as a convenient cheap entry point, rather like the iPod Touch.) 

Arguably, after the software changes and accessories, the remaining piece is the difficulty in making money selling iPad productivity apps - partly because of the free or near-free products from the industry giants. On this, I suspect the App Store is the subject of a broader conversation inside Apple. 

All of this sits within a broader generational shift in productivity, though. The iPad has great productivity stories - for example, Paper, Office, Box & Dropbox, Slack, Quip, OnShape, IBM or Adobe. But the real shift is around a move away from typing & filing and towards SaaS, cloud, AI and unbundling of Office itself. That is, you don't compete with PowerPoint or Excel by making better software for slides or spreadsheets. You compete by moving away from slides and spreadsheets. (For more discussion of this see here) 

It is sometimes easy for technology experts to think about computer security in terms of building technology that can allow them (the experts) to be secure. However, we need to think about the question of how secure all of the users of the technology will be, not the question of how secure the most skilled users can possibly be. (The same applies to usability as well, but I think it's more uniformly understood there.) We need to design systems where everybody (not just technology experts) can be secure. Designing software that is secure only when used by experts risks increasing inequality between an elite who are able to use software securely and a larger population who cannot.

We don't, for example, want to switch to using a cryptocurrency where only the 1% of most technically sophisticated people are capable of securing their wealth from theft (and where the other 99% have no recourse when their money is stolen).

Likewise, we don't want to create new and avoidable differences in employability of individuals based on their ability to use the technology we create to maintain confidentiality or integrity of data, or based on their ability to avoid having their lives disrupted by security vulnerabilities in connected (IoT) devices.

If we can build software that is usable and secure for as many of its users as possible, we can avoid creating a new driver for inequality. It's a form of inequality that would favor us, the designers of the technology, but it's still better for society as a whole if we avoid it. This would also be avoiding inequality in the best way possible: by improving the productivity of the bulk of the population to bring them up to the level of the technological elite.

Rob Ford, 1969 - 2016. Photographed in 2010 by Dana Lacey.

Farewell to Rob Ford

A controversial and contrary man, former mayor Rob Ford nonetheless got us talking about bikes. With his sweeping dismissals of bike lanes and cycling in general, he made many of us angry and uncomfortable. And in our discomfort we found we had to act, not only to preserve what little infrastructure we had, but to push for a long-term strategy to support cycling throughout the city.

Swimming with sharks

Even in his more notable attacks on bicycle planning – comparing riding on the road to swimming with sharks, spearheading the removal of bike lanes on Jarvis Street (at a cost of $300,000 no less) – his concern for residents in suburban areas reminded many of us downtowners of the need for an equitable, city-wide approach to planning and policy. As Dave Meslin (founding publisher of dandyhorse) noted four years ago, Ford voiced support for separated bike lanes (by suggesting we widen, then split sidewalks in half between pedestrians and cyclists). And the year before that, Ford spoke with dandyhorse and clarified some of his earlier missives, calling for greater accommodation of bikes on transit.

To put it mildly, we often disagreed with the former mayor. We remember the man with a look back at how we covered his time in office. May he rest in peace.

Ford Fest features burgers and …bikes!

Photo by Vic Gedris

Back in 2013, Vic Gedris attended the block party/ blowout known as Ford Fest. His dispatch revealed that members of Ford Nation actually have a lot of fun on bikes:

I spotted a few small groups of kids zipping around through the park, chasing each other or just going somewhere.  Parents walking along with their little kids riding their first bikes.  Multi-generational families riding together.  A fair number of middle-aged adults on bikes. A couple of people whom I recognized as having ridden from outside of Ford Nation (downtown-ish).  Even a few spandex-clad "roadies" made an appearance.

I have to admit, I was happily surprised.  It seems there's actually a fair number of cyclists within Ford Nation itself.  Does Rob Ford not understand that his "it's their own fault" comments, and votes against cycling infrastructure actually harm his own supporters?  And why do his supporters not flinch when he does this? I have no idea, but I hope all these cyclists at Ford Fest keep on riding, and that cycling catches on with more of their peers.

Dissecting Mayor Ford’s Jarvis Letter – Dave Meslin

In 2011, Dave Meslin tackled the then-mayor's convoluted logic for removing bike lanes from Jarvis. He untangled the arguments that the lanes were a failure, leading to longer commutes for those in cars and their removal would be a low-cost solution to that street's congestion:

First of all, the Jarvis lanes were not an experiment. They were approved by City Council, and are part of our City’s bike network – a network that thousands of cyclists depend on. Second, the lanes have not been a failure. City staff consider them to be a success. Fact: The “longer commute” is negligible, and city staff already have a plan to reduce the wait time by adding an advance green during rush hour…

There is no “low cost” plan that will improve traffic times. It doesn’t exist. That’s why this administration is moving so quickly with removal: because the proposal makes no sense and they are trying to minimise both debate and scrutiny. There is no plan to re-install the signals on the middle lane, so we may even see an INCREASE in congestion because without bikelanes we’ll have hundreds of cyclists trying to share the curb lane! The lane is too narrow for cars to pass bikes, so they will all be forced into the passing lane. This will SLOW DOWN traffic, create enormous levels of tension – and someone is going to get hurt badly.

Should the Jarvis bike lanes be reinstalled?

Photo by Jenna Campbell

dandyhorse revisited the Jarvis bike lane debate in 2014, asking if they should be reinstalled. Amanda Lewis challenged the notion that the opening of lanes on Sherbourne provided a sound alternative:

The installation of physically separated bike lanes on Sherbourne has long been touted as a solution to the “Jarvis problem,” but they are insufficient, lying three blocks east of Jarvis on the fringe of the downtown corridor. Why should cyclists have to ride three blocks out of their way (and three blocks back for anyone working in the financial district) to feel safe? The only other option is to ride in the shoulder of a five-lane thoroughfare without a painted lane or physical buffer — which drivers don’t relish either. Though the posted speed limit on Jarvis ranges from 40 to 50 km/h, cars frequently travel at a faster clip. A cyclist hugging the curb in the right lane still causes speeding cars to swerve around them or slow to a crawl while they consider the conundrum of a cyclist sharing the same lane.

Bike Spotting Rob Ford Out

Photo of Michael Miller by Amelia Brown

We were also there when hundreds attended a protest against the mayor in 2013. Residents shared similar concerns as Michael Miller:

I’d like to see a mayor that thinks cities are a great place to be. A mayor that supports density and walkability, and a city where getting around by bike trumps getting around by car.

The last word: Rob Ford talks with dandyhorse during the mayoral campaign in 2010

dandyhorse: There’s a YouTube video from 2007, now gone viral, that shows you as saying “Roads were built for cars, buses and trucks… my heart bleeds for them when I hear (that a cyclist) gets killed, but it’s their own fault at the end of the day.” This has alienated you from cyclists. Do you still feel this way?

Ford: You know, I grew up in Rexdale, where there are no cyclists on the roads—they bike on the sidewalks because it’s less dangerous. Here the roads are multi-lane and are pretty much highways. How can you compete on the road with 18-wheelers doing 60 kilometres an hour? So back in 2007, when someone asked me about bike lanes, I thought it was a non-issue. But now that I’m running for mayor and have started to see what’s happening in other wards downtown, I see that there are a lot of cyclists.

dandyhorse: So does that mean you would support bicycle infrastructure?

Ford: There are ways that cycling can be included in transportation plans, like allowing bikes on transit like the Go Train during rush hour. It’s ridiculous that there’s no way to bring your bicycle out to my ward in Etobicoke during the busiest hours.

dandyhorse: What about the Toronto Bike Plan?

Ford: The problem with bicycles is that they have become a political issue – saying I’ll put in bike lanes gets the support of cyclists, but the rest of the voters will hate me. The debate has become equivalent to abortion – whatever I say, someone will be angry.

Related from the dandyBLOG:

Catching up at city hall: are the Ford follies coming to an end?

Other cities love bike lanes

Showing bikes some love – Bikes vs Cars hits Toronto

Another small step forward for bike lanes on Bloor-Danforth

 

 

 

 

At last week’s “emergency meeting” on Vancouver housing affordability, local MLA David Eby struck a chord in his opening remarks.

After accumulating more than a thousand tabs (in OneTab) over the last few months, I whittled the collection down to a couple hundred, which I’ll post at a rate of a couple dozen or so at a time.

I’ll start by highlighting two new posts in Stephen Lewis’ excellent Bubkes.Org:

• Multiple Faces of Istanbul: Mannequins, Metaphor, and Saturday’s Bomb Attack
• Reconsideration: Eye to Eye, Squint to Squint, and Thoughts on Who is Photographing Who

And then leave the rest un-sorted, since I need to sleep and get on a plane early tomorrow. If I get a chance, I’ll sort them later. If not, enjoy anyway:

Why Espressos in America are not Good? — Medium

Re NPR and podcasting

Entefy | Redefining Digital Interaction

Love your response Doc! — Medium

Something I said

PeerStorage

How to block the companies tracking you on Facebook – Tech Insider

It’s a battle for internet freedom – TOI Blogs

Free Basics protects net neutrality – TOI Blogs

Scientists have uncovered exactly what makes a photo memorable – The Washington Post

Deep-learning algorithm predicts photos’ memorability at “near-human” levels | MIT News

We’re in a brave, new post open source world — Medium

What if data was established as a legal asset for everyone? * Why Hernando De Soto Is Relevant to the Biggest Issue Facing Us Today

What America’s top technologist has to say about online harassment – The Washington Post

P.R. Wild Pitches: Spring Edition 03/21/2016

What we’re doing to the Earth has no parallel in 66 million years, scientists say – The Washington Post

The powerful woman behind a news site about refugees

The information age traffics in speed. To adapt to it wisely, we must slow down | Aeon Videos

Personal APIs Are Not Just A Local Destination, They Are A Journey

Why pushing will get you slaughtered in advertising; and pull is the future. — Medium

Carbon Emissions Haven’t Been This High Since Dinosaurs Went Extinct

Girl Teaches Herself Dubstep From YouTube Videos | POPSUGAR Moms

What if we don’ need advertising at all? |

Startup uses ultrasound chirps to covertly link and track all your devices / Boing Boing

digitando – simplify your online shopping

What if data was established as a legal asset for everyone? * Why Hernando De Soto Is Relevant to the Biggest Issue Facing Us Today

Share of Ear: 18-24s Cross the Threshold — The Infinite Dial

Julie Meyer: What If Data Was Established As A Legal Asset For Everyone? | Influencers Insights

New Online Tool Shows You What The Heck Privacy Policies Actually Say – Consumerist

Nielsen Finds Little Demand For Ads In Video-On-Demand, Apathy Growing 03/17/2016

Now Advertisers Can Watch You Watch TV – Fortune

How Marketers Use Big Data To Prey On The Poor – Business Insider

Continuing the Conversation About Encryption and Apple: A New Video From Mozilla — Encryption Matters — Medium

Enders Analysis ad blocker study finds ads take up 79% of mobile data transfer – Business Insider

Privacy and the New Math — Medium

Apple Opens Mobile News App to Publishers in Bid for Readers | Media – AdAge

Databite No. 46: Malavika Jayaram || Data & Society

Going Beyond Data-Driven Marketing To True Intent-Driven Campaigns 03/15/2016

You can now Google your home to see if you should go solar

Conversational commerce — Chris Messina — Medium

iRespond | No matter where, iRespond

The Long March to Fiber Will Take Many Roads…. — Medium

Rebooting Work: Redefining the digital economy | Douglas Rushkoff | LinkedIn

About This Book — Leadership in the Age of Rage — Medium

You Didn’ Notice It, But Google Fiber Just Began the Golden Age of High Speed Internet Access — Backchannel — Medium

The Internet of Things is going to need an Internet of Me — The Internet of Me — Medium

68% of U.S. smartphone owners listen to streaming music daily

Mobile App Security and Encryption Forum

Epic Country-Level A/B Test Proves Open Is Better Than Closed — Backchannel — Medium

The One-Two-Three Sucker Punch That Is Killing Digital Media 03/07/2016

Marketing to Humans In the Digital Age – Brand Marketers Wake Up! | Gary Milner | LinkedIn

Hope everyone has been having a great 2016 so far! Here's my resolution for the rest of the year:

When I think something nice, say it aloud.

For example, I recently told a startup founder that I thought she is building a really great product. My resolution also works for more trivial things, such as telling someone I like their shoes or jacket (I've done both this week!). For social media, I've been trying to Like more posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (why not?).

Last year I tried to not say anything mean on social media... which proved rather difficult and I certainly failed a few times. It turns out social media seems perfect for griping and complaining! I really didn't stick to the goal as much as I'd hoped, but will continue to try to only say positive and interesting things.

So this year I'll try to say nice things when I think them (honesty! not just saying nice things for no reason) and to refrain from posting anything negative online. I hope it works out!

Reply to this post

 

 

 

 

 

The breaking of Moore’s Law will make software even more important.

• Intel’s significant change in the rhythm of its die shrinks is the biggest indication yet that Moore’s Law is finally beginning to break down.
• Since before almost any of us can remember, the technology industry has been governed by the concept of Moore’s Law.
• This states that the number of transistors inside an integrated circuit will double every two years or so.
• This has had massive repercussions because in practice it means that computing power has doubled every 2 years while the cost has stayed the same.
• It is this law that has underpinned the breakneck pace of innovation in the hardware industry and has allowed many companies to compete by producing cutting edge hardware.
• In its latest 10K filing, Intel has stated that its Tick (process) – Tock (architecture) rhythm before moving to another geometry will now have an extra stage (optimisation) added making three stages rather than two.
• In practice this means that Intel will spend longer on the 14nm and below geometries with three product generations per geometry rather than two.
• I suspect that it has done this for reasons:
  • First. Each geometry migration is meaningfully more difficult than the last, requiring more time to get yields to the point where they are commercially viable.
  • Second. The cost of each migration is also increasing substantially necessitating greater revenues in order to make a return on the investment made.
  • Third. The industry is rapidly approaching a time where smartphones and tablets have enough computing power meaning that technical specifications will no longer carry a high price premium.
• For Intel, this represents a huge risk.
• This is because it has always competed on its technical prowess in being able to make transistors so small that its devices could always outperform those of the competition.
• By lengthening the amount of time it spends on a particular geometry, Intel will give the competition more time to catch up and offer an equivalent product at a much lower price.
• However, these days how the silicon is implemented can be more important when it comes to performance than the exact specifications of the silicon itself.
• Consequently, it looks like Intel is intending to compete along these lines more in the future rather than marching as quickly as it can to smaller and smaller geometries.
• For the rest of the technology industry it is an indication that the speed of commoditisation as going to accelerate even more than it has done already.
• As smartphones and tablets become powerful enough to do almost anything that the user is likely to expect, the value attributed to adding even more power on top will vanish.
• This will mean that differentiation will move even more into the functionality and into the software that sits on top of the hardware.
• This will be true for all devices not just smartphones and tablets but TVs, home appliances, consoles, wearables and so on as they become relevant to the Digital Life and Digital Work ecosystems.
• The ecosystem is the glue that holds all of a user’s Digital Life together in a seamless, easy to use and fun way.
• It is here where differentiation will occur and where the winners of the technology industry will earn their profits.
• It comes as no surprise to me that the ecosystem companies: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Amazon and Facebook have a greater market capitalisation than almost all of the others combined.
• There are of course exceptions to this which tend to be companies that have developed a sustainable differentiation in hardware.
• Examples of this are ARM which owns the core processor technology for mobile devices, Qualcomm which has an edge in cutting edge cellular radio and MediaTek through its low cost production and media expertise.
• For everyone else stuck in the middle, the choices are to either eke out a commodity existence (like Samsung does very well) or try and differentiate in the ecosystem.
• It is the companies that make this bold choice that are likely to outperform the most but at the same time they also carry the greatest risk.

Today we have an article for you written for us by CEO Riku Salminen of Jongla – the free messaging app that’s taking the world’s less developed regions by storm.

Our thanks to Riku for this contribution.

—–

Jongla was co-founded in 2009 by myself and Arto Boman with a simple aim: to develop a cross-platform application that will offer free messaging and give people better tools to express themselves beyond just text. Our dream was to create a service that will replace SMS and MMS in personal messaging. Although we have made several changes to our service and strategy during this journey, we are still working to make that dream a reality.

When most people hear about instant messaging, the likes of Whatsapp and Facebook spring to mind. We’re always hearing about the huge user numbers they have. Whilst the big players have been hogging the limelight, Jongla has been flying under the radar. Can Jongla compete with the numbers of Whatsapp and Facebook? No. But where we’re winning the battle is through innovation and creating a full-featured app that connects less developed regions across the world.

Our development team is based in Helsinki, Finland and we have an APAC office in Jakarta, Indonesia. We do everything in-house from design to server-client development, quality assurance, customer care and marketing. We’re a business that cares about people, so building a winning team has been always a key priority for me. The Jongla family today has 24 professionals from 14 different nationalities – a truly global team to build a global service.

Lighten up

To say the mobile messaging space is crowded is a huge understatement. Despite the competition, we believe there is still untapped potential when it comes to offering a messaging solution to the new generation of mobile natives in emerging markets. Within the next four years there will be about 6 billion smartphone users worldwide and the driver for that growth is the low-end smartphone sector.

With our app being the world’s lightest full-featured messaging app at just 2.4MB on Android (Whatsapp is 19MB) and being an open platform which enables users to message with all their contacts, regardless of their messaging app of choice, Jongla has the competitive advantage to utilise this opportunity.

With our ‘Lite’ and ‘Open’ approach, we have been able to solve the technical limitations and challenges in emerging markets without needing to compromise on functionality. We are always striving to make instant messaging possible especially for people in these areas without high-end smartphones and limited access to a mobile broadband connection. No matter where you are in the world, Jongla keeps on helping people to connect with the world around them, in a fast, reliable and secure way.

Our approach is paying off. We have seen the best traction, viral growth and partner uptake in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Countries where we are growing the fastest include Indonesia, Thailand, India, Brazil, Mexico and Turkey. In 2015, we more than doubled our  user base in these regions.

Looking ahead

I believe the success in emerging markets, driven by our ‘Lite’ and ‘Open’ approach, will continue. Operators are looking to invest in better networks and device manufacturers are producing more affordable smartphones. Based on this, we can expect that the generation of mobile natives in emerging markets will soon ask for more when it comes to messaging and communication, and – we’re well placed to deliver that.

In 2016, we will add new social and collaborative features to Jongla that will go way beyond traditional messaging. The next generation of Jongla, introducing new social features, will be launched before summer. The Jongla 3.0 will be more data-efficient and social helping people connect with anyone, anywhere, on any device. Without giving too much away, VoIP and video calls are also on our radar in the mid-term future.

Our long-term plan is to become a ‘Platform of Things’, to go beyond messaging and become a platform that features new services. We want to keep on disrupting the market with new innovations that will make messaging possible for the next billion people around the world who will be connecting to the Internet for the first time with a personal device.

Considering no apps are opened as much as instant messaging ones, we will keep developing new features and giving Jongla users new and meaningful experiences that make their lives richer and easier. Disruption and innovation is at the heart of Jongla.

Whilst having a quick play producing Slack bots and slash commands around the UK Parliament APIs, I noticed (again) that the Members data platform has an OData endpoint.

OData is a data protocol for querying online data services via HTTP requests although it never really seemed to have caught the popular imagination, possibly because Microsoft thought it up, possibly because it seems really fiddly to use…

I had a quick look around for Python client/handler for it, and the closest I came was the pyslet package. I’ve posted a notebook showing my investigations to date here: Handling the UK Parliament Members Data Platform OData Feed, but it seems really clunky and I’m not sure I’ve got it right! (There doesn’t seem to be a lot of tutorial support out there, either?)

Here’s an example of the sort of mess I got myself in:

To make the Parliament OData service more useful needs a higher level Python wrapper, I think, that abstracts a bit further and provides some function calls that make it a tad easier (and natural) to get at the data. Or maybe I need to step back, have a read of the OData blocks, properly get my head around the pyslet OData calls, and try again!

There’s still blood on the ground in Brussels, a city I’ve spent time in with people I’ve befriended. I’d rather not look. But I must. Because this is when we make the worst mistakes. A friend sent me this observation yesterday: The optimal level of terrorist attacks is probably small, but not zero, just like the optimal level … Continue reading The price of terror →

The post The price of terror appeared first on without bullshit.

Almost every decision your company makes is based on assumptions. You assume there is demand. You assume how people will use your product. You assume your pricing lines up with the perceived value of your solution.

Lots of those assumptions are based on facts, of course, gleaned from surveys, customer interviews, competitive intelligence, and market research. But at the end of the day, every product decision is your company making a bet and, as the product manager, you’re ultimately the one placing it.

Many bets don’t pay off as expected; some are total failures or mild successes compared to what could have been when the project was first kicked off. The best practice of conducting a “postmortem” analyzes and rehashes what took place during a release cycle, letting product teams and executives apply those learnings going forward, with the expectation that next time things will go better, faster and smoother since you’re building on that experience.

But some have taken the further step of conducting a product “premortem” analysis. The technique was pioneered by Gary Klein of Applied Research Associates and is based on the principle that it’s a beneficial exercise to predict all of the realistic reasons a project might fail BEFORE you actually start working on it.

The Product Failure Thought Experiment

“A typical premortem begins after the team has been briefed on the plan. The leader starts the exercise by informing everyone that the project has failed spectacularly. Over the next few minutes those in the room independently write down every reason they can think of for the failure—especially the kinds of things they ordinarily wouldn’t mention as potential problems, for fear of being impolitic,” Klein wrote in the Harvard Business Review.

The team then takes turns reading these reasons aloud until each one is presented. The revelations are then used to try and shore up potential problems with the project ahead of time. Not only does this surface issue early on, it also gets people out of the “ship or bust” mindset and makes team members feel valued for their insights.

The goal of this exercise isn’t to be morbid or pessimistic, it is instead intended to make sure everyone involved is feeling confident about the choices and plans they’ve made and will remain vigilant to spot the warning signs of potential problems throughout the entire development, release and launch process.

So as you prepare for your next big launch or product, here are 13 questions you should be asking yourself at conception so you can avoid contemplating them at the autopsy[a]:

13 Pre-Mortem Questions

1) What if we ship late?

Figure out if the success of your product is tied to hitting a certain deadline. If so, how confident are you that you’ll hit that date with time to spare? Are you being truthful and realistic in your estimates? What are the repercussions of slipping?

2) Are we counting on a specific customer or set of customers?

If you’re selling into a specific industry, there may be a limited number of potential buyers or subscribers – there are only so many cruise lines and professional sports leagues, for example. How confident are you that they’ll buy in? If you have a flagship customer in mind but no signed contract in hand, how sure are that your sales team has the deal locked up?

3) What if the technology doesn’t work?

Some products rely on a technological advancement or breakthrough to get to market, while some others are based on supporting technologies from third parties. What happens if it doesn’t work as expected? Are there workarounds or alternatives?

4) What if Team Member X hits the lottery?

Slightly more pleasant than “getting hit by a bus,” but it’s the same theme. Are you overly reliant on a specific staff member to achieve success? What happens if they’re no longer available to work on this?

5) What if a supplier goes away?

How vulnerable is your supply chain and how nimble is your operation if it needs to switch things up? While this is more traditionally thought of as a “hardware” issue, the same principles apply to any vendors you rely on, from hosting providers to outsourced specialists.

6) What if we’re too expensive?

Pricing is one part art, one part science and one part gut instinct. What happens if you’re wrong and sticker shock deters customer adoption? Can you hold out for someone to pay? Can your cost structure withstand a quickie price cut? How are you testing the validity of your pricing assumptions?

7) What happens if unforeseen competition appears?

Believe it or not, you might not be the only company that’s come up with this brilliant idea, and even if you’re first to market it may not stop a copycat from quickly introducing an alternative that’s cheaper, better or just different. If your solution able to stand out from the competition or was your business case predicated on being the only game in town?

8) How would we handle a cost of goods increase?

While many products and services are seemingly in a race to the bottom, market conditions can cause unexpected price increases for certain items. Could a change in your cost structure decimate your margins or make that “freemium” offering unsustainable? Do you have deep enough pockets to take a loss or confidence you could raise prices and still gain traction?

9) Are we basing expected demand on a trend or a fad?

One glance at the discount bin a toy store or the clearance section of a fashion outlet should be a stark reminder that tastes can change quickly. How sure are you that your product doesn’t just meet the needs of a fickle few for a short time? If you’re providing a value-added service to other products how confident are you that they’ll continue to be popular with your target customers?

10) Can we scale faster than planned?

Sometimes success itself can lead to a product’s downfall, and not everyone can survive the “Fail Whale” of a 404 error. If your demand spikes sooner than expected, can you handle it? Will you need to hire more staff quickly or augment your storage capacity and processing power?

11) What if the market tanks?

Even if your company isn’t trading on the stock exchange, macroeconomic events, natural disasters and political unrest can impact everyone. When things get dicey, people cut back on spending. Would your product make the cut or be deemed expendable? Would your customers purchase fewer seat licenses or instances? Do you rely on people having disposable income and splurging?

12) What if it destroys customer data or causes other types of damage?

Regardless of whether your product is hosting someone’s personal photos or their mission critical financial data, customers are trusting you with something valuable. So what happens when your cloud randomly dissipates or you accidentally introduce a virus?

13) What if there *is* such a thing as “Bad PR”?

It could be a poorly received product name, a terribly executed advertising campaign or a technical snafu, but either way your company could be making headlines for all the wrong reasons. How solid is your reputation and can it withstand a bit of tarnish?

None of these scenarios are fun to imagine, but some might be far more likely to happen than scoring a few hundred upvotes on Product Hunt or landing an enterprise deal with an auto manufacturer.

The post 13 Questions to Ask in a Product Pre-Mortem appeared first on UserVoice Blog.

Waterfall. Agile. Scrum. In all product teams, people will debate the best format or usefulness of Product Requirements Documents (known as PRDs). As a Product Manager in agile scrum and continuous deployment environments, I have seen the essence of PRDs in different forms and names, but the basic end goal of them has stayed the same:

PRDs are used to communicate to engineers, designers, and ourselves what is going to be built, but not exactly how it should be built.

“Bad Product Managers…want light and ask for a candle when their engineers could have built a light bulb.”
-Ben Horowitz, Good Product Manager. Bad Product Manager.

Traditionally, the how is written up after the PRD as a technical/functional specification document, but in many teams, it is just worked out informally by the engineers, often with some back-and-forth with the PM (Remember: Software is a team sport. Avoid unnecessarily stepping on engineers’ toes as a Product Manager).

Size Doesn’t Matter: Customer Value Does

Whether you end up writing a full-on traditional 60-page PRD or a product spec ticket that looks more like a 140-character tweet, you still run the risk of scope creep and a bloated process. Short does not mean lean. Long documents might lead you to think “Might as well throw in just one more feature”, but short specs might make you say “let’s build whatever is quickest” instead of building what is most valuable to the user.

There are 3 things you need to understand to combat bloat and build a customer-driven PRD:

1. You cannot start writing an effective PRD until you validate the value to users with customer feedback methods.
2. You cannot maintain a living PRD that is useful to the team unless each feature decision is prioritized and backed up with customer data, experimentation, or testable reasoning.
3. You cannot test the completeness of PRD-driven development without customer feedback and analytics thought through from the beginning of the process.

You can find concise PRDs these days, even in lean startups, but they are always customer-driven. Take a look at Product Hunt’s stripped-down PRD. Only 7 pages of notes for their entire product. While it may not be a “formal” PRD, it does the trick – which is exactly what you need.

The Product Hunt team begins with a clear goal for the user, describes who it’s for, gives customer validation data to back it up, and provides UX mockups for design direction. We will dig into PH’s their informal PRD a bit more, but it is clear they did a lot of work before they began writing it.

Before You Begin Writing the Product Requirements Document

Customer feedback is not a one-and-done process. There are several stages of collecting feedback, like laying brick for a house. After each row of bricks, you need to add the binding and check the level.

Let’s look at 3 feedback methods to use before you begin writing a PRD:

1. Talk to your users

As a Product Manager, if you are not talking to users, you are not doing a good job. You can talk on customer forums, directly in your product, or (preferably) in person. Of course, the anecdotes of 4 or 5 users are not a statistically significant sample, but you will see patterns and can quickly highlight some obvious flaws. What this does is provide you with a list of hypotheses (testable assumptions about the value of your product), not a list of features.

2. Determine if you need each feature by measuring potential Revenue, Customer Satisfaction, ROI, & Customer Impact

Before writing a PRD or building anything, prioritize your features and validate your ideas against user-generated ideas (from forums, focus groups, etc.) in order to build a business case beyond your assumptions or simple user votes. (Hint hint – here’s one product management tool that can help you prioritize customer feedback).

3. Show customers your prototype

The best way to determine what to build without wasting engineering resources or accumulating technical debt is to test a prototype of your product features with your customers. The support costs of adding new features you don’t need are dwarfed by the costs of removing that feature later on (People don’t like change). Remember, prototyping is one of the 5 key technical skills of a product manager.

Make your prototypes to the minimum testable version that gets the customer’s job done. That way, you can identify what it is about the product that would or wouldn’t work.

Customer Feedback In Each Part of the PRD

In his article “How to Write A Good PRD”, ex-Ebay and Netscape VP of Product Marty Cagan broke the PRD down into 4 very broad sections. We will look at how Customer Feedback can be incorporated into each section:

1. Product Purpose

Who is this for? Why are we building it?

In this section, you will define the user needs, the user tasks to fill those needs, and the business case.

Provide Context Using Customer Feedback

Feedback is no more important than when communicating the case for building a product. Identify all of the feedback you collected before writing the PRD and add it here. If there are gaps in your business case, you need to go back and collect support quickly. Atlassian even recommends a PRD 1-page dashboard to keep up-to-date for all teams. For the Product Purpose, they recommend linking the user need to User Stories and actual Customer Interview notes. There is an opportunity to add snippets from user testing videos and other customer feedback or user behavior reports. If you are lucky, you have already implemented a customer feedback tool to provide this support. This will help your designers and engineers make implementation decisions with more user context. This will also help marketing, sales and customer success teams understand and explain to customers the reasoning for feature decisions later on, if they need to dig in.

Product Hunt gets right to the point in their informal PRD’s purpose section:

The PH team outlines:

1. What the product will be
2. What the product will NOT be
3. Which early tests validate customer value
4. Who the product is for
5. and Why they should build it

2. Features

What is being built to help users accomplish tasks and meet their needs?

Mockups and Prototypes are the best fidelity versions to put in here. If this is pre-design, it will be a living part of the document that you can continue testing. In this section, you will define the user needs, the user tasks to fill those needs, and the business case. Prioritizing features and discovering edge cases to communicate to design and engineering will require user feedback data.

Only Build What Is Valuable Using Customer Feedback

You will want your design and engineering teams to spend the most effort on the most valuable features and use cases of the product. If an engineer spends 4 hours optimizing load time on a page, but does not know that the most important factor is a sleek design and highly-customized experience, they may sacrifice what matters most to the user. The best way to communicate this is through prioritizing features.

Hopefully, you have already collected customer feedback data before writing your PRD, but new features will always creep in during the Product Requirements process. In his article on PRDs, Marty Cagan writes, “Remember that the PRD is a living document, and you should track all features in the PRD through product launch.” This means that you will need to use the same forums, customer interviews, user behavior analytics, and prototype usability tests to identify the priority and scope of each new feature.

Remember, you can also get drowned out with a flood of anecdotes and feature requests from customers, sales, and customer support, so you need to supplement feedback with behavior data, usability testing, and metrics that show how much a feature might move the needle.

3. Release Criteria

User testing, user stories, and usability tests can be included with acceptance tests to ensure each feature is ready for release. A good product manager will provide the engineers with the direction needed to ensure they have built something the user values and can actually use in practice.
To determine what functionality is required and what additional testing you will need, Jerry Cao at UXPin outlines several criteria question areas to consider in his article on PRDs:

• Functionality: “What are the absolute mandatory functions and features that need to be met? Does the customer require a specific set of legacy features that have to be maintained? Is there a security component that is mandatory?”
• Usability: “Does the feature meet the user’s expectations aesthetically and is it intuitive to use? What forms of user tests, interviews, and “dogfooding” are required to ensure this is met? How fast should a user take to complete a task or user story? You need to ensure the team is thinking about usability when they are developing.”
• Reliability: “What’s the maximum acceptable failure rate? Are these failures predictable? Can the system recover from these failures?”
• Performance: “How fast must it be? What is the maximum response time, throughput, and memory consumption?”
• Supportability: “Is it testable, serviceable, installable, and configurable?”

You can only find the answer to these questions through customer feedback.

If you want to avoid a flood of customer support tickets for missed functionality or – even worse – insufficient security features, you should focus on this section and ensure your customer has what they want.

If you discover new functionality as you talk to customers, add it to your PRD. If you realize some functionality is not needed after all, then remove it. Just be sure to communicate to your team what and why it is being changed.

4. Schedule

A reasoning for a timeframe. Reasoning is better than just specific dates.

Understanding the user or customer’s needs for timing of release, the strategy of coordinating different feature releases and retirements, as well as estimation with engineering will improve this section. It should be readdressed often to ensure it is either tracking or should be changed.

Timing is strategically important, and can be a key to your product’s success or failure.

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese’s Brilliant Release Schedule – Anticipate User Feedback

For a non-tech example, Kraft made a change to the recipe formula for their core Kraft Mac & Cheese product. They knew that if they announced the change before the launch that there would be a huge backlash. They would not be able to tell the quality customer feedback from actual issues with the product.

Instead, Kraft quietly tested the changes and released the new formula without telling any consumers or changing the packaging (except the ingredients list). Part of the launch strategy was to monitor Social Media and Customer Support channels for customer complaints. Nothing happened. They then used the lack of response in funny campaign ads.

Using customer feedback also means understanding and anticipating the behavior of your customers. You can learn from your customers’ previous responses to product changes, the failure of other product launches (such as Facebook’s News Feed’s backlash), and the simple needs of your users/customers. Do those enterprise clients need these reporting features by Q3? Do your users have a chance to use your e-commerce integration before the Holiday Season? Listen to your customers and find out. Timing matters.

Putting It All Together

In the end, customer feedback can transform your PRD creation into a lean process of building, measuring, and learning. At each step in the planning, writing, updating, and release stages of your PRD process, collecting and leveraging customer feedback will turn an uncertain bet into a smooth launch. You avoid wasting time writing specs that are not tested or used, and avoid building waste in products that put you in a hole that is costly to maintain and worse to dig out of. In the end, you have a better product for your users and an empowered team in any development setting.

The post Writing a Customer Feedback-Fueled Product Requirements Document appeared first on UserVoice Blog.

Today’s federal government budget is a litmus test for the new Liberal government. They campaigned on promises of “real change” from the last regime, including a willingness to increase social spending even if it meant running deficit budgets. And, in keeping with this pledge, spending is up, and the deficit is forecast at $29.4 billion.

This is fine in the short term, but it isn’t just about how much spending will be created. The really crucial thing is what kind of spending. Since the 1990s, the Liberals across the country have been masters at implementing a slow-grinding austerity that has cut programs, given away our public services to private interests, and reduced taxes, largely for business and the rich.

More than anything else, this budget reads like new technocratic consensus. Like 1990s austerity, Canada’s Liberals are once again at the forefront of global elite policy. In an era of slowing growth and productivity, with monetary policy by central banks all but exhausted, even the OECD and IMF have called for higher deficits. The Liberals are forging the path that the global elite will try to travel to get global capitalism working again — especially for the elite. As Greg Albo remarked, with this budget the Liberals have rolled back Harper but left Chretien and Martin untouched.

As business (and increasingly households too) sit on hoards of cash, refusing to invest, the government is stepping in to help put a floor under demand. The big stories in this budget are infrastructure to get investment moving again and redesigned, targeted cash benefits to keep consumers spending. The decades-old framework — low taxes on business and the rich, targeted rather than universal social services, and government that doesn’t challenge the structural conditions that create inequality — remains in place.

The math

A lot of coverage and attention will be focused on one number: $29.4 billion. That’s the size of the projected deficit for the coming year. To put that in context, here a few more numbers. That $29.4 billion sounds big but it is about 1.5 per cent of Canada’s GDP. That’s less than half of Stephen Harper’s first post-crisis deficit, which clocked in at 3.5 per cent of GDP, and about the same as Harper’s third budget.

Here’s another number from this budget: federal spending on programs, on our social safety net, is set to rise to just 14.6 per cent of GDP one year from now, marginally higher than today. This is, however, a mere blip in the long downward trajectory since the late 1970s, when program spending was around 20 per cent. The projections in this budget do not signal a turnaround: program spending is to remain flat and fall back down to 2015 levels by 2020. All the rhetoric about rebuilding the middle class doesn’t translate into rebuilding our common social supports. The question is what will be cut in the future to make up for the boost in spending today.

Finally, a significant chunk of the deficit spending is simply due to better accounting. The Conservatives played fast and loose with the numbers and Harper performed some fiscal magic tricks to create surpluses for his final budget. The Liberals are projecting to spend more than the Conservatives but they are also projecting far lower revenues, especially in the first few years. This explains part of the headline-grabbing deficits.

No bad without some good

Of course, with the attempt to boost demand, there is some welcome spending in the budget. Increased money for parents with children will help counteract child poverty. And spending targeted at First Nations is significantly higher than under Harper, although still far short of what is necessary to start to right colonial wrongs. Cindy Blackstock, Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, told CBC that the announced spending on First Nations children is “far less than what’s required to achieve equity.”

The budget also includes some good news for unemployed workers in areas hit by the resource downturn, who will get five extra weeks of EI benefits. But the fact remains that most of the unemployed are not eligible for employment insurance, which remains essentially a slush fund for the federal government to pad holes caused by revenues that are too low.

Finally, there are of course big announcements on infrastructure, though not as big as could have been expected. The key here, however, is to watch how the money will be spent. The past decades have seen Liberals perfect the transformation of public goods into sources of profit. This has included privatization, both outright and by stealth, creating private fiefdoms in the social safety net, causing all of us to pay more. Expect more of this trend. This, in fact, is a major reason why so many Bay Street economists were calling for a budget deficit.

Searching for real change

After over two decades of slow-moving austerity, the deficit is a fine short-term fix. It’s relatively painless to borrow when interest rates in Canada and around the world are near zero. And this borrowing is necessary, since the government’s ability to generate revenues through taxes has been greatly reduced.

But if we find ourselves agreeing with the Bay Street economists, we should at least ask why. And we should be pushing for a very different vision, one based on expanding and transforming public services, radically greening the economy and taxing more, especially the rich, to get an economy that truly works for all.

Open Badges seem so simple, don’t they?

But wait – don’t make assumptions – ask questions! They’ve got stuff inside. Data. Authenticated data.
But the big news? – you can take them with you because they’re built on an open standard. They can be connected together to form a learning pathway. The data structure inside the badge can even be extended for a particular purpose.

Curious? There’s loads more information (and pictures) here: OB101

The post Open Badges (P.S. there’s data inside…) appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

The Unbox Caravan offered a space for us to reflect on the ethics of what we make. Many of us were interested in the Internet of Things as an emerging field where questions about privacy, security, openness and more will be teased out. For this reason, we wanted to discuss the ethics of making the Internet of Things.

As a reference, we began by examining existing manifestos and ethical guidelines. These documents included the Mozilla Manifesto, the Four Software Freedoms, the IoT Design Manifesto and the Three Laws of Robotics.

We discussed whether the values outlined in these documents are relevant for IoT: what has changed since they were written, what is missing and what is still compelling. We were also interested in how these texts interact with each other. For example, the Four Software Freedoms define what Free Software is, and this term is later incorporated in the Mozilla Manifesto as an important contributor to the Internet as a public resource.

Instead of creating a new manifesto, we decided that a useful next step would be to synthesize the values we think are essential to the Internet of Things and to then create tools that help people who use and produce technology make informed decisions about products and services. In this way, we can directly put our values into action.

One way we anticipate this project taking shape is as an Internet of Things Scorecard. Inspired by nutritional facts on food packaging and projects like Greenpeace’s Click Green Scorecard, our project would rate IoT products along several key indicators such as privacy, security and openness.

We anticipate many uses for this scorecard. One would be as a research tool in Mozilla’s annual State of the Web report, where we could track changes in the IoT landscape over time. We would also be interested in speaking with consumer rights groups to apply the scorecard further and in using it as a guideline when beginning and assessing our own projects.

— Michelle Thorne (@thornet), Bobby Richter (@secretrobotron), Michael Henretty (@mikehenrty), David Ascher (@davidascher), and Vladan Joler (@thecreatureslab)

Cross-posted on Mozilla’s Leadership Network blog

Tomorrow’s Internet is going to be everywhere. Connectivity will be embedded in your transportation, your home, your places of learning and work, your clothing and probably even in your skin. It is estimated that by 2020, 41 billion devices will be online, driven by an Internet of Things (IoT) market worth $7.1 trillion.

The Internet is a global, public resource that should be open and accessible to all. As the Internet evolves, it must remain a public resource. It will also offer opportunity for creativity and innovation beyond the screens of our computers and phones.

The rules aren’t yet written. We believe strongly that everyone should be able to read, write and participate in their connected environments on their terms. What is needed to ensure the future Internet is open and accessible to all?

With a proud history of protecting and contributing to the Internet, Mozilla invites you to engage in these questions with us.

Exploring the Internet of Things

To explore these questions through action, the Mozilla Foundation is cultivating a professional learning community who can shape the Internet of Things with Mozilla’s values in the decade to come.

In 2016, we will convene leading thinkers, designers, researchers and makers to collaborate on provocative prototypes that make these core values–such as privacy, open practices and participation–accessible and feasible for the Internet of Things.

Our principles:

• Learning by making. We don’t know yet how to influence IoT. Mozilla is exploring its role in this new space. The best way we can figure that out is by trying and learning from these efforts alongside inspired collaborators.
• Participatory and inclusive. We’re only going to make truly innovative things by inviting a diverse set of people to be part of the process. We have to include new voices and foster creativity at the edges. This means a deep commitment to open practices and participatory design and having humility about our role.
• Strength in networks. We can’t do this alone, and many others are already active in this space. We’re stronger when we take action together with allies. We will augment Mozilla’s existing leadership network, while engaging new kinds of leaders and practitioners to know more and do more with the Internet of Things.

This is a new field for Mozilla and the world. The norms and best practices of IoT are not yet established. Nevertheless, as Mozilla, we have strongly articulated beliefs about the Internet. The tenets of the Mozilla Manifesto and efforts like the Web Literacy Map and Mozilla’s policy and advocacy initiatives will provide a foundation for where we should go as the Internet finds its way more intricately into our physical lives.

Our Activities

• Provocative prototypes. Create tangible expressions of how things could be, should be and shouldn’t be for IoT. The prototypes will provide the “collaborative substrate” that supports community leaders in learning and making together, while putting our values into action. The prototypes will be grounded in user research and user testing.
• Convenings. Gather smart, interdisciplinary practitioners to prototype and innovate with open values. Building prototypes is better, faster, and more impactful when people are together. We want to invite new partners to take action with us–designers, technologists, activists, educators and more–as well as collaborate with Mozillians such as the Connected Devices team, Participation team, and others in the Mozilla Leadership Network.
• Cultivation. Foster partnerships and funding opportunities to grow and sustain the initiative. Insights can be shared that inform future Mozilla efforts. We will leverage and contribute to the larger Mozilla network and document processes in the open so others can learn from and participate in them.

Importantly, our explorations of IoT will advance Mozilla’s 2020 strategic plan by taking action in the key topic areas of privacy, inclusion and web literacy.

What’s next

In the first half of 2016, we’re going to set a thematic focus and test our process. The first topic we will focus on is around privacy in IoT, namely: “User Control of Personal Data in the Connected Home.”

It’s clear that our thinking and experimentation have to be grounded in reality. We need to affect the lives of people and situations they face. So, to better understand what this topic means and to guide participants to make meaningful prototypes, we’ll try out the following process:

• Conduct research. Driven by human-centered design principles, our efforts will be grounded in data from user research. We plan to learn from people who live in different parts of the globe, to reflect their different perspectives about user control of personal data in the connected home. We’ll conduct field research, interview experts and read existing reports. Diverse voices will be at the center of anything we design.
• Produce design briefs. Our research insights will be woven into design briefs that guide what prototypes we make. the production of prototypes. We’ll pose specific problems that can be explored via prototypes. The design briefs will be open for anyone to respond to, as well as provide the framework for in-person events.
• Convene to build prototypes. Based on the design briefs, we’ll meet to create physical prototypes. We’ll focus on using open practices, design thinking and participatory research to improve how we make things.
• Exhibit and engage public. Once we have some things to show, we will place our work out in the open. We will welcome diverging opinions and feedback as people interact with our prototypes.
• Test and document. As we exhibit, we will gather feedback, record stories, and provide inspiration for iteration.
• Evaluate. Afterward, we will carefully scrutinize our findings, ensuring that we still cover the values and problems that we set out for initially as well as debrief on the whole process.
• Iterate and repeat. Continue to try and refine this approach until we have something impactful.

With this implementation strategy and the principles that guide it, we hope to leave 2016 with a solid understanding of how to research and contribute to IoT—demonstrated by some powerful prototypes—and a diverse network of IoT thinkers and practitioners to provide a foundation for growth and leadership in the future.

How to Get Involved

• Tell us about what resonates (or doesn’t) about this approach, and give us feedback on the methodology.
• Let us know about any related projects you’re working on and suggestions on how we might work together.
• Help us develop design briefs that ask important questions about the Internet of Things as it relates to Mozilla’s values.
• Share your experience in IoT, privacy, or design research as part of our expert interview series.

Contact us by email at iot @ mozillafoundation . org or in our Github issue tracker. Say hi on IRC and Twitter by pinging Michelle Thorne (@thornet) and Jon Rogers (@ileddigital).

Two significant transit lectures for Vancouver!

Vancouver in Transit: Fast-forward from 1890 to 2016
Thursday, March 24, 2016
7:30 at Museum of Vancouver
FREE!

Henry Ewert tells the story of the sophisticated, state-of-the-art transit that began in 1890, only four years after the city’s incorporation and three years after the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Up to and after 1913 when the full street railway and interurban system was in place, industrial and residential areas grew up around these transit routes. However, the system declined because of a combination of vehicular traffic’s need for greater road space, the Great Depression, etc. After WWII, making room for more cars, the system was replaced with a much weaker version of what had been in place. Recently, however, the city has seen the merit of the thoughtful original plan and has revisited it as a template for a modern transit system.

Evening Lecture: How Streetcars and Real Estate Shaped Vancouver
Tuesday, April 5, 2016
7:30pm at Hycroft Manor, 1498 McRae Ave
Register Here $15 or $9 with valid student ID

Historian and Author, John Atkin, will examine how today’s Vancouver is very much a product of a streetcar system begun in 1889 that would open up vast areas for development. Real estate promoters wished, politicians cajoled and residents petitioned for new rail lines to service their corner of the city. Vancouver developed (and sometimes didn’t) along and around the routes of the BC Electric railway’s tracks.
 

Click here for the Berliners Archives

Here's a single Geekbench run with stats on iPad Pro 9.7" pic.twitter.com/vwqlKtsIUm

— Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) March 22, 2016

Matthew Panzarino ran some Geekbench tests on a 9.7-inch iPad Pro, which shows 2 GB of RAM as well as a slightly underclocked CPU compared to the bigger iPad Pro, which has 4 GB of RAM.

2 GB of RAM was one of the first things I heard about the new device yesterday, and part of the reason why I'm going to stick with the 12.9-inch Pro. In addition to a more comfortable iOS experience, I like knowing that I'm using the most powerful iPad hardware currently available (I don't count the camera as essential to what I need to do on an iPad).

Speaking of technical differences between the 9.7-inch iPad Pro and the 12.9-inch model, here's Jeff Carlson on USB 3 transfer speeds:

If we were talking about laptops or desktops, this would be a bigger deal, because there are more occasions when you transfer data over USB. Looking at broader iPad usage, really not a lot of data passes through the Lightning connector other than if you sync to a computer using iTunes. Most people don’t need it.

But for photographers who want to transfer photos for review or editing from a camera to the iPad, this is almost crippling.

When I reviewed the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, I made a short comparison video showing import speeds using the old SD card adapter and the new USB 3-capable one. Transferring 1.5 GB of image files took 30 seconds via USB 3 and 2 minutes 20 seconds via USB 2. That’s the actual data transfer; just moving image thumbnails so I could preview the photos before importing took 23 seconds via USB 3 and 1 minute 16 seconds via USB 2.

He also mentions fast charging with the 29W USB-C Adapter. As soon as I took a break from our coverage yesterday, that's the first thing I bought from the Apple Store.

Matthew Panzarino, after explaining how the embedded Apple SIM in the new iPad Pro works:

That might not sound like great news, but there is one very bright spot for anyone who wants to switch carriers later. All iPad Pro 9.7″ devices have a SIM slot right on the exterior and you can put another carrier’s SIM in that slot even if the iPad Pro itself has been locked to AT&T. In other words, the internal SIM may be locked, but you can “switch” carriers by using another physical SIM that you buy.

I was wondering how this worked. Good to know.

“Belgium’s predicament mirrors Europe’s. Official Europe has worked hard to move past nationalism, so that there is no German or French Dream. But there’s no European Dream, either, not yet. So new migrants have no spirit to tap into, as they do in the United States.”

-

Jochen Bittner, Can the European Center Hold?

David Nolen @swannodette
2016 - the year artisanal JavaScript micro-modules embedded in incomprehensible dependency graphs were liberated from NPM, Inc.

Dan Davies @dsquareddigest
Plan to defeat ISIS: 1. Defeat ISIS 2. Defeat 2 post-ISIS terror groups 3. Defeat 4 new groups arising from (2) ... n. Defeat 2^n-1 groups

Darius Kazemi @tinysubversions
My only comment on the whole npm renaming debacle: the real bad guy here is whatever entity created this foul universe in which we reside.

Pebble is laying off 25 percent of its total staff this week (about 40 employees).

CEO Eric Migicovsky confirmed the news to Tech Insider. The company has since issued a statement, “We have a vision where wearables will take us in five to 10 years, and this is setting us up for success.”

Pebble was the first company to successfully raise $10 million on Kickstarter when it launched its first crowdfunding project in 2012. The company initially hoped to raise $100,000, but the cross-platform promise of its watch instantly hit a chord with early adopters. Eventually, the company raised $10,266,845 from nearly 70,000 backers. Pebble came back to Kickstarter with the Pebble Time, which set another record with $20,338,986 raised by 78,471 backers.

Pebble has a Canadian connection: its founder, Eric Migicovsky, not only was born in Vancouver, he also graduated from the University of Waterloo systems design engineering program. Migicovsky first founded Allerta, which created a watch for Blackberry devices, and then went on to start Pebble, which in 2013 raised over $26 million in funding from various investors, including Charles River Ventures. The company also has an office in Waterloo, Ontario. We’ve contacted the company to find out if its Waterloo office has been affected by the layoffs.

Migicovsky also confirmed that Pebble has raised an additional $26 million in the last eight months. However, “we’ve definitely been careful this year as we plan our products. “We got this money, but money [among VCs in Silicon Valley] is pretty tight these days,” Migicovsky said.

In an interesting move, it looks like Google has plans to release one of its own keyboards on iOS, complete with gesture-based typing, GIF searches and more.

The keyboard has reportedly been in development for the last few months, and features built-in search functionality, as well as gesture-based funcionality, allowing users to slide their finger between letters to let Google guess what word they’re typing. According to The Verge, taping the keyboard’s Google logo also activates a standard web search, similar to Google’s stock Android keyboard.

Google’s upcoming iOS keyboard also reportedly features specific buttons for sending images, as well as GIF searches. Visually, it also looks considerably different from the company’s standard Android keyboard.

Apple launched third-party keyboard support with the release of iOS 8, resulting in a number of well-known apps such as Flesky and SwiftKey making their way to the platform.

On Monday, just hours after Apple’s iPhone SE reveal, the U.S. Department of Justice moved to postpone its looming trial with the tech giant. In a surprising turn of events, court documents filed by the DoJ revealed an unnamed third party had potentially provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation with a way to access data stored on the iPhone 5c used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the perpetrators of the San Bernardino shooting, without the help of Apple.

A new report published by Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth claims CelleBrite, a tech firm that specializes in providing software for extracting data from mobile devices to governments, militaries and intelligence agencies, is the unnamed third party mentioned in the DoJ’s court filling. Citing unnamed sources with the encryption industry, the publication says the FBI won’t need Apple’s help to access the iPhone in question should CelleBrite prove successful in extracting the data found on the smartphone’s solid-state drive.

Both CelleBrite and the FBI have yet to confirm they’re working together to break open the phone. However, should Cellebrite prove successful, it likely means this particular battle between the FBI and Apple will come to quick close — at least for the time being.

That said, the question remains — why did the FBI not approach a firm like CelleBrite, or another federal agency like the National Security Agency, as soon it acquired the iPhone 5c used by the shooter in the San Bernardino attack? One strong possibility is that the U.S. government wanted to create a precedent where it could force other tech companies, not just Apple, to create backdoors to their products and services. However, both changing public opinion a recent court loss may have forced the FBI to reconsider its options.

In a similar case to the one California, a New York judge ruled the FBI could not use the All Writs Act to legally force Apple to help the agency break into an iPhone. This is the same law the FBI had called upon in its case against Apple in San Bernardino.