My paper today includes one of those typical business section PR placed pieces about a local company, in this case a robotics company.

I think thier product is just too delightfully amusing.

It’s a warehouse management system. You store all your junk shelving units, pretty much regular ones. These shelving units are then scattered around the warehouse. Want something? Send a robot to get it. This is when the silly magic happens. The robot doesn’t bring you the part your looking for. Instead it brings you the whole shelving unit.

The robot runs out into the warehouse, slips under the shelving unit, lifts it up, and runs back to your desk with everything on it. In there spare time the robots can rearrange the shelving so popular items move toward the front of the warehouse and unpopular items are packed densely toward the back.

While I think this idea is very amusing it has the added cuteness of being sufficently counter intuitive a that they certainly got some strong patents out of it. It’s a nice idea because all you need is a flat floor and a slight upgrade in your shelf units. The robots are very simpler than most because they work only in two dimensions.

This is typical of a kind of general trend in automation. In olde factories humans wandered the factory floors, listening, gazing, pulling levers, turning valves, etc. In 20th century automated factories sensors and actuators were wrapped around component in the factory. Which made everything a lot more expensive because electronics was sprayed all over everything. We are seeing some condensation of that electronic – or to use the over blown terminology of the industry “the intellegence.” It’s becomming possible to build factories that have reasonably dumb components in the majority, like those shelving units, but slightly clever robotics that run around the factory like the workers of old. Instead of having valves that fit the hands of labor today’s valves fit the robot’s needs; down at floor level for example.

Boy, are there some powerful network effects and platform buisness models that will play out in this industry!

The company’s named Kiva Systems and here’s the article.

Ok, just to be clear. Jakob Nielsen is a smart guy and I’d be glad to pay him big bucks to critique any significant real world web site I was responsible for.

But … he totally does not get blogs and his list of mistakes a blog designer can make are totally absolutely and completely bogus. I don’t agree with even one of them!

I get the sense that Jakob doesn’t actually read to any real blogs; he probably just visits a few of the big name blogs – which are more like zines anyway. Do people actually call them weblogs anymore?

Curious, he doesn’t have an RSS feed.

Apple’s classic market share, small but significant, has always allowed it to catch technology waves before other vendors. The Airport is a perfect example of that. The PC reference platform is a much more immovable object than Apple’s platform. This is one reason why it has been to Apple’s advantage to keep the hardware platform closed.

If a handful of vendors are struggling to get their industrial standard to catch fire can get Apple opportunity to build momenteum. While I don’t know if Apple managed to control the early supply of 802.11B components (though I suspect so) I have read that Apple managed to lockup the early supply of the tiny disks found in the iPod. I personally think thats 80% of why was able to gain such a huge lead and dominance in that market.

This tactic often backfires for Apple. All thru the 1980s and 90s Apple would regularly have a product success followed by an inablity to supply the demand they had created. That risk is built into the tactic. It can also backfire when the emerging standard fails to catch fire; the portable friendly PowerPC is an example of that.

Managing your supply chain is a contracting problem, among other things. So Apple can be seen to occationally announce that they have signed long term supply contracts with vendors for key breaking edge components, for example flat screens. Such announcements should be viewed the lens of inter-firm signalling; particularly the signals about where momenteum is building for this or that standard or component.

Of course if this tactic works perfectly then other firms wake up to discover that they can’t get components needed to compete. They get testy. Here’s a story about how other firms are looking for regulatory relief after Apple locked up most of the supply the leading edge flash memory used in the iPod nano.

There is a difference, an important one, between a this tactic’s use by a company with a small but significant market share and it’s use by a company that totally dominates a market. In the first – small but significant – case the firm is playing a high risk disruptive role that can reshape the market. In the second – large and dominate market share – the firm is consolidating and leveraging it’s control over the market. The first is healthy, the second just reenforces the existing monopoly.

I like this paragraph is Stefano’s latest posting where in he collects his thoughts after releasing a fresh verison of Piggy Bank.

Just before last weekend, during my final Piggy Bank wrap-up’s, I sent an email to the Cocoon development mailling list airing my concerns: the web is slowly but surely changing. Some call it the Web 2.0, some call it Ajax, some call it “told you!” and some call it “so what?”, but the truth of the matter is that web services are coming and their impact has very little to do with what protocols or architectural decisions you make, but the amount of people you manage to catalyze.

I like the idea that Web 2.0 really isn’t about anything other than an attempt to the mob to rendezvous around something. That makes it entirely forgivable that some of the Web 2.0 chatter isn’t particularly coherent.

While buzz can cause people to take a look it alone ain’t durable. What’s works is finding a rich pool of options for people to select and exercise. Exercising those options creates commitments, those are durable. The presence of a large pool of options and lack of clarity as to what’s going to work creates a design space for the mob to poke about inside of. In time somethings dominate the design space.

Firefox has created a big fat pool of options. And people are beginning to exercise them.

I suspect that is it only matter of time before someplace in that design space some people uncover something so cool that it begins to drive a large population people to switch browsers. We shall see.

I used to put selected quotes at the bottom of my emails, a practice that broke down when I was forced to give up Emacs as my mail program. The fun part of that was collecting a pool of quotes to pull from. Here’s one of them:

“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” — Weizenbaum 76

That’s from Weizenbaum’s paper on Eliza.

I just received a phishing attempt via Skype chat; very primitive. Not as crude as this example though. Reminded me of Eliza. I bet we will see much more sophisticated automation for IM phishing.

Ebay’s acquisition of Skype and the resulting challenge of merging the user accounts creates a moment of high drama in the phishing passion play. Particularly when you recall that Paypal is part of eBay.

My wife noted that one thing we can be confident will come out of the tragedy in New Orleans is PHD thesis. We have enjoyed enumerating all the different departments (math, engineering, sociology, ecology, history, music, etc. etc.) that will be granting these.

One that I look forward to reading is the book or doctoral thesis on the dynamics of the rumors spreading. The stories about violence in the shelters in New Orleans have turned out thankfully much overblown.

Apparently people are actually quite constructive in these situations, but have a tendency to assume the worst about the behavior of ‘those other people.”

I gather that the textbook pattern for a rumor runs along these lines:

• An exceptional event occurs outside the usual frameworks; so it’s hard to assimilate
• Details that don’t fit the available framework are discarded or minimized.
• Details that fit the available framework are highlighted, or invited.
• The story, now reduced to rumor, can be assimilated.

But these scenarios don’t seem to fit that model. These seem more like given extreme anxiety a demand emerges for some idea of exactly how bad things are going to get. Rumors evolve to fill that demand; and apparently those that increase the anxiety thrive. But maybe not. Every narrative I read about Katrina includes lots of rumors. Many of these rumors, maybe even the majority, are positive – though false. E.g.: the bus is coming today, or supplies are available over at the school.

Three recent postings raising concerns about the health of the blog pinging ecosystem: one, two, three.

I’ve written a lot about this and done some work, but I’m sanguine about where we are headed.

I’m reasonably optimistic that we will end up with a robust and reasonably equitable feedmesh. I’m less optimistic that some design goals for that will be met. I’m concerned about privacy issues for blog readers. I’m concerned about the terms that small players will be forced to accept when they hook up to the mesh. I’m disappointed that the large players have not found it in their interests to establish a robust governance that assures predictable architecture for ping exchange “marketplace” going forward.

I don’t think there is a crisis. I don’t think there is a conspiracy. I do think that some of the parties aren’t taking actions that they could take in increase the level of trust.

The link below is a 12 megabyte animated GIF showing a forecast of Rita’s storm surge. Loading it tends to make powerful machines and web browsers complain. You probably need a gig of memory. It is totally amazing. If you decide to take the risk of loading it make browser window large first.

   http://www.cozy.org.nyud.net:8090/ben/r24_bpt.gif

I have no idea how accurate that forecast is. Maybe somebody clever can convert it into a smaller movie format.

I believe that this is the output of the model discussed here, where there are some nice smaller examples of it’s output. The FTP site I found that animated GIF on was amazingly slow and quite obscure. Maybe somebody knows of a more official dependable source.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid. Which I enjoyed. So I have a portfolio of childhood memories of special places. When I went to college I was particularly looking forward to visiting an soda fountain in an old haunt. From my childhood home, in second grade, we would walk three blocks. Crossing two major streets, pass the fear inducing polio nursing home, down a small side street to the pharmacy and get ice cream sodas at a dark wood counter. I returned my freshman year in college, it wasn’t there.

In a different city in seventh grade a medium length bike ride away was a tiny two lane bowling alley in a residental neighborhood over a bar. If you were rich you could use a phone on the wall to order a hamburger. They would send it up on a dumb waiter. I wonder if it’s still there?

I had a job that involved a trip a week to NYC and it took me a long time to find the hotel that I wanted to return to. The one I finally ended up in was small, run down, with a piano bar that the locals would come into for a drink. When you checked in they would give you a room, but you often needed to go back down and ask for a different room since they were all in very different states of decay. The hotel had once had a dance hall, bar, etc. on the roof and if you rode the elevator to the top you could wander around it’s remains. The city all about you.

I had a job that involved a trip a month to Silicon Valley. The hotel that finally won my loyalty was Dinah’s Garden Inn. Somebody at VON made me sad today, Dinah’s has apparently closed. It’s going to be torn down.

Who ever owned Dinah’s laid in the most amazing gardens. Between the buildings there were ponds, and little waterfalls. The plantings were amazing, complex, mature, and very appropriately fragrant. They had also accumulated a huge amount of garden art from the South Pacific; including a large elephant that they would cover to protect from the rain.

Dinah’s also featured theme rooms; though I’ve never stayed in one. Somebody had a lot of fun. The railroad barron room includes a train set.

The good news is that apparently my informant was mistaken. I suspect that the ratty motel down the block is the one that’s closed. It was nothing but ground cover. Dinah’s on the other hand should be declared a Shinto shrine, or something.