Crude Technologies

When it comes to offshoring, if unclear expectations, miscommunication, and poor cultural fit send a simple conversation about a deadline sideways...

... what about really big stuff like:

• Requirements
• Deliverables
• Quality control testing
• Development standards
• Documentation

The implications are literally staggering.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say the fact that every outsourced project hasn’t failed is something of a miracle.  It’s a testament to having the right people who naturally and instinctually bridge these gaps through extra communication.

So what’s so hard about outsourcing?  It’s hard because of the cultural baggage we bring to the table on both sides, and neither side necessarily realizes it because of assumed interactions.  We need to be more aware of the cultural assumptions going in to projects like this, or we’re doomed to repeat them ad absurdum.

Managing this gulf in cultural expectations is a daily commitment. Shared backgrounds, frequent visits in both directions, and a culture of innovation go a long way to cross-pollinate the ideas vital to keeping more projects on track with local and offshore expectations.

We've been working with offshore developers for over a decade, and have definitely experienced many of the concerns Dave raises. But thanks to Eastern Europe's education standards and some of the most qualified, dedicated, and hardworking computer science professionals in the world, finding a local company to help you bridge the gap brings end results that are worth the effort.

I made 108 predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines (TASM), which, incidentally, I wrote in 1996 to 1997. It takes a year to publish, so the book came out at the end of 1998...

To summarize, of these 108 predictions, 89 were entirely correct by the end of 2009. An additional 13 were what I would call “essentially correct” (for a total of 102 out of 108).

The specificity of my predictions in TASM was by decades. There were predictions for 2009, 2019, 2029, and 2099. The 2009 predictions were providing a vision of what the world would be like around the end of the first decade of the new millennium. My critics were not saying “Kurzweil’s predictions for 2009 are ridiculous, they will not come true until 2010 or 2011.” Rather, they were saying that my predictions were off by decades or centuries or would never happen. So if predictions made around 1996 for 2009 come true a year or a couple of years after 2009, given that the specificity was by decade, and the critics were saying that they were wrong by decades or centuries, then I would consider them to constitute an essentially accurate vision of what the world would be like around now.

Kurzweil's book "The Singularity is Near" is a fascinating read, suggesting humanity is on the cusp of a new stage in evolving technology, particularly in genetics, computers, and nano machines, to the point we could potentially upgrade ourselves. The implications are staggering.

Thanks to that, Kurzweil is sometimes dismissed as a kook, or worse. Critics seek to disprove his future theories by debunking predictions he's made in the past.

Given a little latitude, plus or minus a couple years for predictions made in terms of decades, Kurzweil's predictions have a much better track record than, say, those of Joan Quigley, Nancy Reagan's astrologer.

What does his track record mean for his predictions about the 2050s? At the very least, it's time to read his book.

PS. Isn't the new Jawbone ICON a personal computer embedded in an earring or body ornament that looks like jewelry, networked using a body-scale local area network? See: http://us.jawbone.com/productsPageIcon.aspx

Touchscreen accuracy of the iPhone is much better than that of Verizon's Droid or Google Nexus One. When you're trying to tap a link, chances are you're going to be successful on the iPhone, and not on Android phones.

iPhones showed straight lines in tests with both light and medium finger pressure, while the Android phones showed zig-zag wavy lines across the screen.

"On inferior touchscreens, it's basically impossible to draw straight lines. Instead, the lines look jagged or zig-zag, no matter how slowly you go, because the sensor size is too big, the touch-sampling rate is too low, and/or the algorithms that convert gestures into images are too non-linear to faithfully represent user inputs. This is important because quick keyboard use and light flicks on the screen really push the limits of the touch panel's ability to sense."

Once again, comparing phones "feature for feature" doesn't tell the whole story.

Apple's uncompromising commitment to usability drives their engineering choices in ways that might not be obvious to engineers or even consumers seeing an ad, but are painfully obvious after you've experienced how the thing should work.

According to analysis seen by The Times, increasingly popular video-on-demand (VOD) is challenging the business model of commercial television.

A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the accountant and business adviser, suggests that consumers’ growing appetite for VOD could lead to broadcasters losing a further £280 million from annual advertising revenues if they continue to focus their efforts on cost-cutting and fail to cash in on the boom.

PwC suggests VOD services needs to sell ads at 3x the CPM (cost-per-thousand) of television to break even. Coincidentally, The Simpsons pulls in $20 per thousand on TV and $60 per thousand on Hulu.

Back in June, Bloomberg reported CBS's David Poltrack saying, “The reason people are paying such a high premium for these ads on the Internet is they do have a captive audience,” Poltrack said. “You know you have eyes on the screen.”

After all, the point of video on the Internet isn't to replace TV. It's to have a two way, and measurable, dialog with each viewer.