The Coming Super Netbook

A couple of weeks ago, I might have made it sound as though the netbook was going to be the next cool machine. I need to clarify.

Netbooks are growing in popularity. But they’re admittedly limited. Their screens are too small, for one thing.

What makes them a big deal is not that they represent the endpoint of electronic communications device development. Instead, they’re a starting point.

The Amazon cover story in the latest Fast Company talks about the Kindle and the potential for e-reader competition from Apple. It’s a good read (electronically or otherwise) on this increasingly hot space. But the real highlight is this wonderful infographic which suggests that what the market really wants is not an electronic device that simply allows you to read a book or magazine.

It’s a device that allows you to read books, newspapers, and magazines, search the Web, check your e-mail, access and write documents, maybe take a call.

I’m not a tech guy. I’m not entranced with computers for their own sake. But I love what online technology delivers so efficiently—things to read and learn from, plus the capability to write your own material.

The coming device I’m picturing (I doubt this is an original idea) would resemble a very thin laptop. It would be very light. Open it, and there’d be no keyboard—just two screens, facing each other.

Fire it up, and you’d have the choice of using it to read a book or magazine—laid out with facing “pages” on the two screens. News “papers” would be available in this format as well. You’d go from page to page by tapping a button (or other icon) on the screen.

Turn it sideways, and it would convert into a laptop. One screen would become a tappable keyboard. A plug-in on the side would allow you to install a regular keyboard, if you find a tap-screen keyboard too hard to get used to. Voilà! Wireless Internet access.

Despite its many capabilities, this would be a pretty stripped-down device. Much like a netbook, but with e-reader capabilities. It wouldn’t have much software loaded into it—cloud computing would take care of that. This would be primarily a media tool. The cloud could open up additional business possibilities.

Would you download newspapers and magazines via a paid subscription model? Especially if the screens—providing rich color, of course—could provide the embracing aesthetics and physicality of a “real” publication? Why not? Music and e-books are cheap, but not free, after all.

More tech-savvy readers can tell me how likely something like this is. But after seeing what’s arisen the past few years, it seems very likely that this device—or different versions of it—is on its way.

It’s what I want, anyway.

UPDATE: The Big Money argues that current e-reading technology has a long way to go to be truly useful. No doubt my imaginary device would take care of the problems mentioned here.

BTW: I tweet from time to time on (mostly) business-related topics on Twitter at @generebeck.

What Does Your Product’s Name Look Like?

Sometimes, I miss the weird names of the dot-com era.

They haven’t completely disappeared, of course, particularly in the pharma (think of George Lucas rejects like Zoloft) and infotech spaces—sciencey-sounding words like Cognitivity. (That’s an e-learning company, by the way. Based in California, natch.) Anyone else remember a Minneapolis dot-bomb called wwwrrr.com? I think it was pronounced “whirr.” Those were giddy days.

Companies still shank the naming process from time to time. But overall, the goal these days seems to be: Your company’s or product’s name shouldn’t induce sniggers or head scratching. Neither should it disappear into one of the marketplace’s many crevices.

But how can you do both?

This past week, I chatted about product naming with Aaron Keller, managing principal at Minneapolis design firm Capsule, which has done several naming projects. Some of its recent ones include RoamEO, a pet tracking device made by locally based White Bear Technologies; Storganize, a St. Louis Park storage and organization company; and HealthEast’s Cerenity senior care services.

In considering a proposed product or company name, “a lot of naming firms will look at all the typical things—the meaning, the cadence of a word, the number of syllables, international meaning,” Keller told me. But some firms, including Capsule, also “take a visual aspect of it.” The patterns of letters on the page can bring to the product additional meanings, or suggestions of meanings: “How something appears visually can have a big impact on its memorability.”

During Capsule’s brainstorming, combinations of letters get manipulated; familiar words are scrunched and stretched out. “You have to see beyond what the word is now: ‘How can I manipulate this word to serve my purposes?’” In some ways, “you’re destroying and rebuilding pieces of the English language.”

It’s why it’s not just writers who attend brainstorming sessions. “The more experience you have being a word person, the more constructs you have about what words are, and the more respect for the words,” Keller said. But in the name discovery process, he believes, “You also have to have a disrespect for words.” All that shredding and screwing around can be nearly traumatic for a wordsmith: “‘No, you can’t do that! That’s my favorite word! I love that word! Don’t do that to my word!’”

I read you. That “c” in “Cerenity” does scrape its pointy claws across the blackboard of my writer’s sensibility. But I’ll grant that for many people, its roundness could convey a wholeness that also suggests openness and embracing. And that’s on the page. The word still sounds like “serenity.” You don’t lose that.

The visual is as much a part of our culture as literacy. It’s something a lot of us journalist/writer/wordsmith types aren’t sure what to do with yet. We worry that the visual is starting to smother the verbal.

In any case, a great conversation with a guy who operates in both realms.

A page of word association during a Capsule “name-storming.”

A summary page of proposed names Capsule presented to Wearable Goods, a Minneapolis branding and merchandising firm. It ended up choosing the sharper, edgier moniker Mosquito.

Cloud Kool-Aid (I’m Drinking)

As my poor, suffering wife knows all too well, I have an obsession.

Okay, obsession may be too strong a word. But it’s something more than mere fascination.

I’m talking, of course, of shipping containers. Those big, steel boxes that trains, trucks, and massive container ships use to schlep goods all over the world. They’re the greatest things.

True, they’re not much to look at. But in fact, it’s their simplicity that makes them so profoundly cool. These simple boxes completely transformed the transport of goods. They rebuilt and made vastly more efficient the rail and port industries. They made transporting goods, whether cross-country or across the world, mindbendingly cheap. With infotech as the mortar, shipping containers have been the building blocks of that vast and complex edifice, the global economy. Little wonder the BBC called the humble box one of the 10 greatest inventions of the last century.

With such an elegantly industrial (and tangible) item to obsess over, I never found the nebulous “new economy” Kool-Aid whipped up at the turn of the millennium to be a bewitching brew.

But I’m drinking now. The 21st century has given rise to its own shipping container equivalent: cloud computing.

Very simply—and it is simple—cloud computing allows you to operate your computer without having to load hardly any software. Spreadsheets, word processing, presentations, and many other applications reside in “the cloud”: actually, a vast (and tangible) galaxy of interconnected Internet servers. And working via the cloud means that it’s vastly easier to store, share, and access your keystrokes, wherever you are.

The more I learn about it, the more I believe that cloud computing, particularly given the rise of stripped-down laptops and netbooks (mobile devices will no doubt be able to cloud-compute, too), are going to fundamentally transform and rebuild communications, just as containers re-engineered transport.

It’s a serious movement. Wired editor and info-economist Chris Anderson is doing more and more of his computing in the cloud. The feds are looking at using it to save money and simplify information management.

There are dark linings. There are serious questions about how secure cloud-stored data is. And it’s not clear who controls that data.

Any disruptive technology will result in some established businesses being crushed. Containers destroyed many a waterfront culture (think New York and London). And you can make a good case that the globalization that containers helped deliver has destroyed more than businesses—namely, people and their living space. The cloud may have its own “winners” and “losers” (better words are needed).

Last Sunday’s must-read New York Times Magazine article on data centers (the neural nodes of the cloud) reported that Microsoft is finding that the best way to store and maintain their centers’ servers is by lodging them in—that’s right—shipping containers.

That’s almost too good to be true.

Head in the Clouds

I grew up in a Ford family; I married a Ford woman. Our 2002 Focus has been a noble steed. So GM’s bankruptcy hasn’t bothered me too much.

Ford apparently has survived because it strengthened its cash position when Alan Mulally became CEO in 2006, and because its cars are considered to be better than Chrysler’s and GM’s. (Plus it appears to be a bit more open to innovation and market-responsive than GM has been). GM also got a little too involved in the home-mortgage business, as well as playing complex games with its pricing.

Though Chrysler’s slide hasn’t provoked much weeping and wailing (except among certain pension funds), GM’s has. It’s yet another sign (as if one were needed) of the USA’s heavy-industry rust-out.

Nostalgia isn’t a solid foundation for an economy. So where do we go from here?

On the infotech side, it looks pretty bright. The buzz phrase right now is cloud computing, and despite its name, it’s actually pretty practical. In cloud computing, your computer typically has little software of its own. Instead, it uses the Internet to access an outside server with free infrastructure, like Google Documents for word processing. If you don’t need much “cool stuff” on your computer, the cloud’s pretty dang cheap, especially if you use a $300 (or less) netbook.

But what else are we good at? Well, there’s financial innovation, which is all that GM appeared to be good at in the last decade or so.

But as Michael Mandel argues in a recent BusinessWeek cover story, the United States is losing its touch for real (as opposed to “shadow”) innovation. He asserts that the American pipeline in areas such as life sciences and new industrial technologies (green, nano, and so on) is currently running at a trickle.

The netbook/cloud phenomenon, in its quiet way, represents a really remarkable technological breakthrough. But if we’re going to truly recover from the current economic malaise, we’ll need to get off the keyboard and get in touch with our inner mechanic.

UX: The Next Frontier

Why do products and packaging look the way they do?

And why do some people in the design, Web, marketing, and branding industries often talk so impenetrably? “Content management”? “Data architecture”? “Experience design”? Cool! . . . Um, what?

And I might as well admit it: Though I use the word fairly freely, I’m really not sure what “branding” is. Does it actually mean anything—anything concrete?

It appears that all these questions may actually be related.

In the past couple weeks, as I’ve spelunked deeper and deeper into the curious realm of Twitter, I have continually encountered the letters “UX”—tossed back and forth by some tweeters like a secret password to an alternate universe.

A quick surf through Wikipedia clarified things:

User experience design, most often abbreviated UX, but sometimes UE, is a term used to describe the overarching experience a person has as a result of their interactions with a particular product or service, its delivery, and related artifacts, according to their design.

OK, maybe “clarify” isn’t exactly the right word. So I went to this:

Experience design is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions, with less emphasis placed on increasing and improving functionality of the design. An emerging discipline, experience design attempts to draw from many sources including cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, haptics, hazard analysis, product design, information design, information architecture, ethnography, brand management, interaction design, service design, storytelling, heuristics, and design thinking.

Clicking through this list of terms does reveal some fascinating stuff. Haptics, for instance. This refers to the interaction of people and electronic devices via touch—like joysticks and other computer-game paraphernalia.

Still, some of this verbiage has the feel of taking some traditional marketing notions—positioning your product, making it look attractive, researching your customer’s needs—and shooting them up with several hundred PSI of obfuscation.

But to be fair: It may be that traditional product and marketing ideas are undergoing continuous mutation in this post-industrial, digital, social-media world. UX and their related fields are evolving. If “field” is the word: People in these realms seem to prefer “discipline.”

If I’m gonna find out whether there’s a there here, I’ve gotta talk with some disciples.