Innovation in Software

For a couple of years now, I’ve been fascinated by the possibilities of a field known as Augmented Reality. In a nutshell, AR allows a digital device to “overlay” digital information onto the physical world. This is quite cool stuff. Watch:

So, that’s nice and everything. We can take a digital device, and through the multitude of sensory input, we can start to use it as a viewfinder. We can even start coming up with zany ways of manipulating the image we’re seeing, which people with very little expertise are starting to play with:

What’s intrigued me though, is can we find more interesting ways to interact with the device. It’s great that I can point my iPhone at a piece of paper with a special block printed on it, and a wind farm comes out, or I can point it at the environment I’m stood in and get extra information that isn’t otherwise easily found. What else can I do? Well, thanks to the same technologies developed for those applications I can suddenly create a virtual reality headset (either to augment my environment or to travel to another distant one):

Again, pretty and interesting and opens all sorts of possibilities. But how much further can we go? I have no doubt we’re just seeing the early adopter stuff here, and that with time lots more interesting applications will become available utilising these technologies. Watch that space carefully.

One of the issues raised by this technology though, is our addiction to it and the fact we become chained to the device. All of us have suffered that weird syndrome that happens when out with friends and suddenly all of you in a group are staring at small boxes of plastic and metal, interacting with virtual worlds rather than the one you’re physically in. If we start to augment reality through this technology, do we lose something about the sense of place and interaction with the real physical World? Do we start to become machines ourselves?

Thankfully, a rather interesting prospect is on the horizon. Even better, it’s open source and achievable with cheapish hardware. It might take a moment for this to “click” with you, but this will likely be the most valuable 10 minutes you’ll spend this year on understanding the future of human interfaces with technology in the next few years. Trust me. If you haven’t clicked that link, do so before going on, or if you want to skip the background and just see it in action, here’s a demo clip with cheesy music for you:

The idea that the device disappears is not all that new – we have seen devices getting smaller and denser for years with that goal in mind – but the way this has been done fascinates me. This technology once developed a little more into something more consumable eradicates the need for a high-end smartphone, multi-touch technology like the $40,000 Microsoft Surface, portable media players, the lot.

What you need: a camera, a projector, a data connection and a pair of headphones, all plugged into something that can understand all of them. Right now, the hardware looks cumbersome, but that’s just a hardware engineering problem: there are already smaller projection devices and cameras coming to market that will make this technology nearly invisible when worn.

What you can do with it: anything a camera, mp3 player, iPhone, desktop PC, laptop, mobile phone, projector, surface table, AR application, in fact anything you can do with any digital device, all in one go. And all of it with the device being near invisible.

What you use it with: ordinary pieces of paper, walls, tables, your hands, the objects and people around you. Instead of staring at pieces of plastic, suddenly you are encouraged to look up at the World.

When something interesting happens you don’t fumble around, open a shutter, focus, click, crop, tag and post. You just make a shape with your hands, and there’s your photo. When you want a flight-time update you don’t fumble, open an app, type, click, read: you just look at your boarding pass. You’re in a bookshop and you wonder if the book in your hands is any good so you fumble, type (or perhaps photo the barcode), click and read, perhaps clicking around a few stores on a small screen. With this, you just hold the book. That’s it.

You might think this is sci-fi, that nobody would ever use all of this or that the “back-end” needed would be too bulky. I would disagree. I would say it’s one of the most interesting developments in technology this decade. I will be watching for the release of the source code due soon with some interest. Pranav’s site is a good place to keep your ear to the ground.

When the UK went to war in earlier this decade, I gave serious consideration to signing up to the Army with the intention of becoming an officer.

Not because I’m a blood-thirsty man looking to kill Taleban foot soldiers or because I had aspirations of heroism, but because I had (and believe I still have) a set of skills that would be of use on a battlefield. I might – just might – have been able to help save a few lives in the British ranks. The main reason I didn’t is because I really have a problem with being shot at just because I’d been told to be shot at. I have “problems with authority”, as they say.

There is a desperate lack of improvisation, innovation and lateral thinking in most battlefield situations. There are some stunning examples of tactical and strategic thinking, but the current row over equipment is an example of how we must wait a number of years for a handful of helicopters to turn up in order to conduct basic troop movements.

I am pleased then, to point to an example of innovative thinking on the battlefield by a US soldier.

In Iraq, Sergeant 1st Class Martin Stadtler had nothing. He was stationed near Mosul, at a base that covers 24 square kilometers. Surrounding the base was a wall, and at intervals along that wall stood watchtowers. Those towers were improvised; they were large concrete water pipes, stood on their ends.

Inside each tower is a pair of soldiers. They’re watching for insurgents. To communicate with the home base, they had standard-issue tactical radios. Unfortunately, these radios couldn’t reach home base — the base was too big. Soldiers had to play a game of Telephone to reach the base: one tower radios the next until they are finally in range of the home base. Obviously, this would not do.

Fortunately, SFC Stadtler knew how to use open source software. Using found hardware, like a laptop pulled from the trash, and wires pulled from collapsed buildings, he was able to establish a wireless network between the towers and the home base. He was able to install freely available voice-over-ip software on this recycled hardware, which turned the computer into a wireless telephone. The soldiers were now able to communicate with each other and the home base. At no cost.

Later on he adapted his night-vision camera equipment using software “invented by a young man in Germany who wanted to watch his cat while he was away from home”, to watch out for insurgents planting bombs beyond the perimeter of the base.

Of course, the flip-side of this is that because its low cost and using commodity hardware, the technical advantage can be lost quickly to the “other side” adapting – they can have improvised night vision systems and cheap long-range secure telecommunications, too. But that’s the nature of warfare.

It just goes to show though, there is a place for innovative software solutions in even the most dusty and difficult of situations.

In the very near future, things are going to be changing at Vagueware.

Firstly, the site currently at vagueware.com is going down. I’m going to release the code running the idea bank as open source and you’ll be able to also setup a free hosted version of your own on Vagueware’s servers. Think of it as a bit like wordpress.org & .com but for open innovation rather than blogging. This will mean you can create your own IdeaStorm for your company or product.

I think open innovation and getting customers or employees involved in product and service development is going to be big in the next few years, and I want to help people get involved. If you have Ruby on Rails skills, patches to the code base will be appreciated as well – it’s going to be MIT licensed so that it follows the “Rails way”.

That will of course need a new name, and given that it’s all about constantly evolving and changing what you do and how you do it, it’ll be named Fluxish.

There are quite a few major changes needed to get the current build ready for that release, so don’t expect it this week. The ideas on the current site won’t be lost: I’ll be creating a special little hosted fluxish install and moving all the data and users over – I won’t be destroying anything, just giving it a new home.

So what will go in the idea bank’s place at the main site? Well, the new Vagueware site will concentrate on selling my consultancy and development services. There will also be a mini-blog there about the business, freeing this blog up from posts like this where I discuss what is going on inside the business. I’ll be highlighting companies I’ve worked with in the past and occasionally posting a page up as a more detailed article about the process of development.

This blog will become much more focused on innovation and emerging trends within the digital sector. This is an area I’ve drifted away from in the last three months, and I’m keen to get it back on track.

In addition, I’m going to be blogging more elsewhere in partnership with other organisations.

I’ve agreed to start writing more for O’Reilly GMT to try and turn it into a more mature source of information for the technology scene within Europe. I’m still working out and proposing what kind of articles those will be, but obviously they’ll not be about vagueware, not about innovation in software in the sense this blog will be, but aimed at a tech-savvy audience.

Also, I’ve been asked to contribute articles to ‘Manchester is online’, formerly ‘The Mancunian Way’. It’s one of the most read Mancunian blogs, and I’m hoping to bring some insight to a slightly less geeky crowd than the usual readership I get to speak to here. This is more of an experiment right now, but I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops. It’s the first time I’ll be stepping across into blogging for Mainstream Media, and I couldn’t be more pleased that I’m doing it with the team at the Manchester Evening News.

In short then, I’ve got a lot of writing to get on with over the next few months, so please don’t be too upset if this blog gets neglected at times.

Last Sunday I trundled up to the local Apple store with company debit card in hand to grab a copy of OS X Leopard. I installed it that afternoon and have spent the last week on the road and at home living with it. I’ve now come to a conclusion:

Leopard is an excellent advertisement for switching to Ubuntu.

Seriously, it sucks. I’m not talking suckiness on a Windows Vista level, but compared to Tiger, it’s awful. Here’s some reasons.

Firstly, perhaps reasonably for a dot-zero release (but still annoyingly), it crashes and/or locks up quite often. In several years of using Panther and then Tiger, I don’t think I had to power-cycle my machine more than twice. I’ve done it five times this week. Sometimes when using an external keyboard on my Macbook Pro, the system “just forgets” it’s there and I’ll have to unplug the keyboard from USB and plug it in again, but sometimes nothing happens even then: Finder stops responding, the mouse stops moving, and then it’s time to hold down the power button for a few seconds and bring it back up.

Whilst we’re talking about peripherals, I grabbed myself a replacement Mighty Mouse whilst buying Leopard (note: the scroll ball clogs and breaks within months, you’ll be buying a lot of replacements for the improved productivity I accept it provides), this time a wireless version. This helped me discover that bluetooth support for mice in Leopard is rubbish. Whether’s it blued taking up 50%-60% of CPU for long stretches of time, to not being able to see the mouse at all on resume, it’s so bad it’s basically useless. I don’t think it’s reasonable load average should be > 0.7 just because I am moving my mouse around.

Then there’s the RAM issue. Sure, with each release of an OS you expect to see more RAM being gobbled up, but I swear, I’ve never seen an OS have a problem with 2Gb of RAM and six applications open, not even Windows. With Tiger I used to be able to do a lot more and have a lot more free space to move around in. Leopard swaps so hard in the same usage scenario that it reminds me of when I was using an iBook G4 with half a gig of RAM.

Let’s now move to the extra features Apple provide in Leopard.

I don’t care what people say, Safari 3.0 is not faster than Firefox – anybody who is saying so just isn’t doing any meaningful measurement. What’s more, Safari still doesn’t “get” the plugin thing, and on my system at least rendered pages like it was spitting out HTML in vomit-like chunks.

The other big upgrade, Mail, is more of a mixed bag. Whilst Mail.app version 3.0 fixes several bugs I had learned to “work around” in 2.0, it introduces a few more niggles. That’s not the big problem though. Quite frankly Mail.app 3.0 needs a stake driving through it’s cold dead heart for producing HTML e-mail that cruddy, insisting all “notes” have yellow ruled-line backgrounds and integrating with iCal as more of an after-thought than as a reasonable feature.

Spaces is worse than 3rd-party solutions I used wth Tiger in my opinion, and gobbles even more RAM – a scarce commodity as it is in Leopard-land.

I’ve not actually tried the new integrated back-up system, because I’ve heard that Time Machine breaks Leopard even more than Leopard does on its own time and you end up fighting reboot screens constantly. I’ll stick with SuperDuper and the odd s3sync

Meanwhile they’ve managed to make sure the Dock is harder to make sense of thanks to little, tiny, blue-ish orbs on a reflective background indicating app state instead of clear arrows. Whilst we’re down there, can somebody please tell me what good are Stacks given that they’re slow, only make sense in ‘grid mode’ and don’t help you find anything you don’t already roughly know the location of.

At least though, that’s a relatively sane way of finding files. Cover-flow in Finder is just slow and silly, although Finder in general is much better. I daren’t even go near Spotlight, fearing that I might accidentally send share prices in CPU fan and RAM manufacturers soaring.

Whilst we’re at it, can I just mention the integrated firewall isn’t a firewall apparently, so unless you’re comfortable with ipfw, you’re about as open as it’s possible to be.

I am not however a typical OS X user. I am a developer who approaches OS X as a Unix with a better GUI than X + your choice of window manager. Some people will be happy with Leopard, and won’t want the stability or flexibility I need. Many switching from Windows will find the random, sporadic instability perfectly normal behaviour. I do not.

For all my problems with Unix as a desktop in the past, after nearly 3 years away from that flock, Leopard has convinced me to start moving back to Open Source. This weekend I’m going to Bootcamp up and put a “proper” Unix on like FreeBSD or a GNU/Linux distro like Ubuntu. That will allow me to slowly transition my data and working environment over and keep OS X (and Windows w/parallels) available for development and testing work.

I’m sorry Apple, this time you blew it, and you blew it hard. I hoped Leopard was meant to be more than an eye-candy release, but ultimately it’s just worse than any other version of OS X. I’d recommend Panther over Leopard right now, never mind Tiger.

OK, so I’m having some fun with the title. This is Part III (the final part, you’ll be pleased to hear) of my write-up about the Open Schools Alliance even last week. Part I and Part II are worth a look if you just got here.

First up straight after the break was Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, John Pugh. This particular Honourable Member is well-known to those of us on the open source side of the digital divide: he has a habit of asking what must be for the mandarins on the receiving end really annoying questions of the government about their IT procurement policies. He has a particular interest in IT in schools as he himself started out as a teacher, but in recent years has found an ally in Private Eye for his questioning in the House around the tax credits fiasco and other IT blunders.

He made the argument that the government is progressively getting worse at procurement in that it’s not learning from its mistakes. He argued that many within government departments are unaware of what open source is, are unaware of what it can do, or what it can save. The quote for me from this session was “whilst the government have a road building programme, they don’t argue roads must be built so that they may only accomodate Fords”.

It seemed to me though, that his real bugbear was open standards more than open source – it is the fact we’re producing systems that lock us into a vendor for a lifetime that is causing us problems.

We then moved into a panel discussion featuring John, Ian Lynch, Mark Taylor, Mike Partridge and our strawman for the day, Dr. Stephen Lucy of BECTA.

This discussion ultimately came down to panellists and the audience expressing dismay at BECTA’s attitude towards OSS, and how they were allowing for the propping up of what can be described as state aid of Microsoft. I was quite impressed by how Dr Lucy handled the situation, but was informed by another attendee later that this was characteristic of how he worked – he would attend these events and “play a dead bat” to the air of hostility. I can’t blame him, but BECTA are going to have to realise that it’s going to get worse unless they start looking at how to bring open source into the mix.

There are huge issues around OSS and IT procurement in general – probably more urgent in education than anywhere else – and it’ll be interesting to see the direction the Open Schools Alliance.

There needs to be a shift from centralised procurement to bottom-up organisation, but even with centralised projects like CLEO it has been shown OSS can provide amazing value for money. If BECTA were willing to play ball a little, who knows how much more great software we could see in classrooms over the next few years? As it is, it feels to me like a few senior players in BECTA are positioning themselves for consultancy positions in Microsoft and WebCT.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be interesting to watch, and I only hope that eventually parents and teachers see sense, and give the OSA all the support they need.

This is the second part of my write-up from the Open Schools Alliance event last Friday. Part I is here

The second session was Deborah Murrell from CLEO who talked about trying to deploy Moodle to every school in Cumbria & Lancashire. Some schools have used Moodle as their primary web-site CMS, particularly primary schools. It’s an unintended consequence of giving them something to work with, I think.

In terms of success, whilst the pedagogical case for VLEs has yet to be proved (i.e., nobody knows if they really do help learning), this experiment looks as though it’s helping kids get access to resources even when at home. The areas they need help with are mostly around MIS integration, but part of that problem is that the most dominant provider of school management software is a commercial developer who considers open source a bizarre anachronism.

CLEO is planning on working around e-Portfolios and identity management in the future, so it looks like it could be an interesting experiment for a whole range of VLE-related areas, all possible thanks to the very open nature of Moodle.

Ian Lynch of INGOTs was up next, trying to get us all interested in his new qualifications. One of my bugbears around ECDL and similar qualifications right now is that they think the World revolves around Microsoft. Ian’s work is quite intriguing, but there is still a way to go before he can really underpin the notion of “lifelong learning” around open source in my opinion – the material he has available is still aimed very much at the schools market. Still, every journey starts with a step and I’m sure this is going to go places in time.

Mike Partridge of Stockport LEA stepped up to the plate next and made us ask questions about the nature of technology in the education system. He talked about how since the 1980s technology has led and education has had to play catch-up – he’s now interested in looking at ways that pedagogical frameworks can be embodied in the technology. He talked about social learning, individual learning styles, and independent discovery of skills.

In fact, if he wasn’t from the LEA, I could have easily assumed he was basically advocating Democratic Schooling. He is from the LEA though, so I think it’s more a case of trying to find a way to let teachers and students better understand each other.

GeekUp-regular Richard Smedley from M6-IT then talked about deploying open source systems into schools to the level of one per two children.

Some of the techniques he’s using are pretty innovative, such as recycling old hardware into thin clients to reduce financial needs. The figures he cited were pretty amazing as well – a fit-out that might have needed £100,000 using commercial software and brand new hardware, he was able to complete for £6,000 leaving enough cash lying in the school’s coffers for a building extension and a new part-time teacher.

It’s figures like that which are going to have a real political impact on open source in schools, and it was the politics of the situation we turned to after lunch, which we’ll get to in Part III.

There are two kinds of innovation I want to talk about on vagueware:

• Ideas for whole new products and services that can be delivered with software
• Incremental changes to existing software products and services

I spend most of my time thinking about new products and services, the kind of thing that you can start a business off. Those ideas are generally jealously guarded by the people who think they thought of them first, but the simple truth is they have little value without execution: vagueware.com is about trying to get people executing on those ideas.

I have hundreds of ideas on my desk, on my wall, in my head, on my laptop, in notebooks, everywhere. They’re not going anywhere where they are. I do not have the time or the capital to make every single one of them happen. By placing them in the public domain over the coming months, I hope to do a couple of things:

• Somebody, somewhere will do something with them
• I will get the satisfaction that whilst not benefiting monetarily, I helped an entrepreneur and his customers

I hope that if you have an idea that you realise you’re never going to make happen, you’re going to have the courage to place it in the public domain and allow open source developers, start-ups and hobbyists in need of a way to spend their evening get started with it. They might even give you money, you never know.

Then there’s the second kind of idea – the incremental idea. The idea where you see a product or service out on the web or on your machine and you think “that’s great, but if it did…”

I’ve started cataloguing ideas I’ve had for vagueware and tagging them ‘vagueware’ – you can add ideas for vagueware too, and tag them so I see them – and as votes move up and down I’ll see what’s popular and what isn’t. I’ll use the tool itself to decide what to work on next within the tool. Yay for recursion!

I hope other developers use the site to do the same. By putting up ideas on the site for your own product and asking customers to go along and vote, you can get an assessment of what is going to fly and what isn’t.

Every page is editable, wiki-style, so your customers can improve your idea. Every idea has comments so you can have a little conversation around an individual idea.

By looking at a list of ideas in vote order, you can decide what is going to make customers happiest. By putting it on a 3rd-party site like vagueware, you get exposure to a whole bunch of people interested in people like you – innovative developers – who might not have heard of you anywhere else.

Or maybe you can just put an idea up and tag it with a publisher or product name in the hope that somebody at HQ will see it one day and act on it.

Service Level Agreements are a must-have for Enterprise clients and it has surprised me that so few web companies have used them as a route to making money: if you don’t need an SLA, take the app for free. If you do want an SLA (because say your entire email operation is running on our web service, say), then you need to pony up some cash. It’s worked in open source, so I think it’s a no-brainer for an industry that is service-orientated at its core.

Good news then that Amazon S3 has today announced an SLA which means if they drop below 99.9% uptime per month you can have some cash back. You get even more money back if they drop below 99% uptime. They also agree to give you 60 days notice if they want to get rid of you for any reason – but don’t have to give that reason.

It’s a step in the right direction, but they could make even more money by offering even better SLAs if customers are prepared to spend more money to get them. That money would be capital Amazon would be free to invest in infrastructure which not only enhances S3, but Amazon’s core systems and business.

Brian MCallister argues quite convincingly that “Popularity, in technology, is shit. Seriously.”

He has a point. When we aim to make something popular we are doing so for reasons of ego, and therefore attempt to compromise what it is we’re trying to achieve. We can’t do complex and useful to niché audience if we’re worried about being popular.

One version of this internal corruption of objectives is sometimes known as the “What would your mother think?” test in development. Would your (presumably technically illiterate, possibly senile) mother make of the gizmo you’ve just made? If the answer is “she wouldn’t understand it” then the trend is to simplify and to make things better.

But your Mum probably doesn’t care about your widget. What’s more useful is whether the people who are going to use it can. And that’s why, so the argument goes, that commons-based peer collaboration might be a better design practice than what we currently do.

It’s also why I think the future of innovation in software is going to be governed by companies making money whilst putting the source code out into the open. They quietly execute, iterating out improvements, making things better with each step, and then eventually the larger market catches on. The market catches on quicker if the source code is out there, resulting in better revenue streams.

Alas, we’re still in an age where the “intellectual property” myth still permeates our society, and trying to produce popular software seems more important than producing useful software. Sometimes it’s like the last decade was a dream…

Johnathan Schwarz announced something yesterday that at first sounds quite dull until you read through his justification and where he’s heading with it.

Basically they take the UltraSPARC T2 blueprints, the core design files and test suites and then they release the whole lot under GPL online

It’s a gutsy move in that it completely breaks the model of what you’re meant to do with R&D expenditure in the computer industry. He already has experience of this with OpenSolaris of course, but to do this with hardware is unprecedented.

The impressive figures he quotes in his justification for opening up UltraSPARC also pricks my ears:

You’ll recall we followed this path with our software business – decoupling Solaris from its exclusive focus on Sun hardware. That experience validated the obvious: the market for Sun’s innovation is always larger outside of Sun, than inside. When we opened ourselves to the market, our business grew faster (Software grew 13%, year over year, faster than Sun overall). Now we’re following that path with our microelectronics business.

Let’s make this clear: he opened up Solaris open source, allowed it to run in more places, and the business grew 13% year on year.

It seems counter-intuitive: give something of value away, watch the value of your business grow. But that’s how software works as a commodity. License keys have no value, user base has value. Keeping a little team of ‘rockstar developers’ in-house to develop code has no value – having thousands of developers passing ideas through you does have value.

How you monetise that needs to change based on the area you’re sat within, but the argument that open source is not a valid business model increasingly seems to be looking to be a myth. Arguing the only way to make money is to charge for everything you do ignores the fact you can probably make a lot more by allowing other people to do it for you, on similar terms.