Brad Ideas

Double voice mail

Ok, I don't publish too many of my telecom ideas here since I am working on revolutionizing the phone call for my next business, but here's a simple one.

If you have a large carrier voice mail, such as the voice mail for a wireless company, you should notice if I call somebody and they are not simply busy, but in the act of leaving a voice mail for me. If so, you should break into their voice mail dialog and connect us.

Right now a common occurance is this. Somebody calls, you can't quite get to your phone, so it stops ringing and goes to your voice mail. But there on the phone is the caller-ID. You call them back, and you get their voice mail right away. Why? Because they are leaving you the voice mail from the failed call.

Similar thing when a call disconnects. Who has the duty of calling back. Often we both call back and we both get voice mails or busy signals. While one could develop an ethos (original caller calls back) we've never managed, so the tech could help us.

Easiest when we are both on the same carrier, but in fact this could be done in any tightly integrated carrier voice mail, though you do have to be careful about PBX lines in this case because you might be calling from or to a shared trunk.

Non-live channel surfing

Ok, it's strange because I think one of the whole points of the hard disk video recorder / PVR is that you are not supposed to watch live TV any more, not supposed to channel surf -- but I keep coming up with ideas relating to it. Maybe I have a secret desire to surf again.

As many people know, with digital recording, the no-surf rule is enforced because it's harder to do. The digital delay introduces a long channel change delay, intolerable when combined with another delay (satellite/cable box).

Here's a surfing algorithm that could give instant channel change. Surf slightly delayed TV. It works particularly well if the box has multiple tuners.

Using the spare tuner, grab short snippets of every other show that's on right now, or at least everything in the surf list/favourite channels. Just a few seconds of each. As available, update these snippets, with focus on the adjacent channels. If the program changes, you need to grab a new snippet as you must always have the current program.

When the viewer wants to surf, surf not the current live TV but the saved snippets, which will be anwhere from a few seconds to a few minutes old. You will be able to move through them instantly, like the old instant-channel change from an analog TV. You will see the program guide info as well, but the visual clues that we draw upon in surfing will still work fine.

If the user dwells on a channel for longer than the usual surf interval, you will switch the tuner to that channel. You will need to do a nice graphic transition from the surf buffer to the live TV.

Now admittedly, that will sometimes frustrate. It may be the particular scene that attracts your interest -- the bad guy is holding a gun on the good guy, about to shoot, and suddenly it disolves to something a minute later. However, the alternative, which is what we currently get, is that you get black screen for 3 seconds, and then it shows you the later (live) scene. Instead of black screen you get some sample video from an earlier time in the show. The key thing is that the viewer should be aware they are surfing old snippets.

One could also keep snippets of varying lengths from different times, depending on the surfing speed desired. Though usually you would play the longest. You could also develop "smart snippets" which tried to grab the action after coming back from the first commercial break etc. (Problem is those happen on a lot of stations at once.)

Telepathic User Interface

In writing an essay I'm working on about why hard disk video recorders are as novel as they are, I explored a concept I think is worthy of its own blog entry. This is the concept of Telepathic User Interface or TUI.

A TUI is a user interface that you use so much that it becomes unconscious. Perhaps the classic TUI is touch typewriter keyboard. I just think letters and they simply come out. I am no longer consious of the mechanism. In many cases I think sets of letters and even words and they just come out. From the mind to the computer -- telepathic.

Other examples include the car. After you drive a car for a while it becomes an extension of yourself. Learning the clutch is hard but soon you are not thinking about it at all. And the remote control on a Tivo, I write in the essay, has aspects of a TUI -- you learn how to move around a program without thinking.

A TUI is not always a natural interface or even a good interface. It's just one you use often enough to make it subconsious. It doesn't have to be intuitive -- an intuitive interface is simply one that's easy to guess the operation of.

When it comes to computer software, this helps us understand the dichotomy between the GUI/WIMP style and the command line and keyboard style which still has many devotees.

GUI interfaces are easy to learn, and easy to guess. And of course for positional inputs they are markedly superior and often the only choice. But by and large, the story of Mice and Menus took a path away from the TUI. You have to focus your eyes on the pointer in order to use a GUI, and you have to read to use a menu. It's much more difficult to use such a system unconsiously. (Mouse gesture interfaces change that a bit.)

Fans of text editors like VI and Emacs, with complex, non-intuitive keyboard interfaces love them because they have reached TUI state, at least in part. Many of the operations have become unconsious, and thus much faster and easier as far as the user is concerned.

Command line interfaces are never completely TUI, but they take advantage of the TUI nature of touch-typing. Because touch typing maps words from brain to screen, complex commands can have a fair bit of TUI to them.

It is a rare technology that can earn a TUI. You need to be using it a great deal, and regularly. Video games also develop TUIs because of their devotion. And while it doesn't seem to matter how intuitive the interface is, since many users will never attain the TUI state with a program, that's no excuse for trying to be more intuitive and easy to handle.

On the other hand, programs that don't provide keyboard shortcuts and other muscle-memory schemes for doing things will never develop a TUI, no matter how heavily used they are. Who changes a font in the Excel spreadsheet without being conscious of all the steps they are taking?

About the Brondell Swash toilet

You'll recall an earlier post about the Silicon Valley 100 and getting stuff for free. I promised I had something to say about toilets anyway, so I will describe my experience with the Swash I was given as well as the Daelim Cleanlet which I bought a few years ago.

If you've gone to Japan, you have probably seen these fancy high-tech toilet seats, which try for a bit of bidet function in a seat. Their prime function is to have a heated water reservoir and a little wand that comes out to squirt water at what the Daelim manual calls the "personal area" and the "feminine area." They also tend to heat the seat, and make it descend slowly so it doesn't make a noise when you put it down. Both of these also have the optional feature of fan to blow heated air to dry your personal or feminine area.

I've got these two units, and I have tried various others in Japan. None of them can really compete with the water flow and cleaning ability of a real bidet, but most people don't have the space in their bathrooms for one of those. I was going to suggest the slogan "Every asshole needs one" but I don't think they are likely to use it.

These bidet-seats are about the only high-tech toilet invention to get a decent market, which is surprising because if you ask the patent office, toilet inventions are among the most common patent applications. I guess people spend a lot of time on toilets with nothing else to think about.

Another eBay feedback improver

Earlier, I wrote some proposals for improving ebay style feedback, including not having feedback revealed until both have left it. That has some flaws, but the main reason eBay is unlikely to do this is that eBay likes feedback to be positive, they want to convince buyers it is safe to shop there.

So here's an alternate idea to prevent revenge feedback. Revenge feedback is only vaguely in eBay's interests, in that the fear of it keeps feedback positive, but the existence of it adds to the negatives.

To solve this, attempt to detect revenge feedback and print statistics on it. What would be detected is negative feedback left by a seller on a buyer after the buyer has left negative feedback, but not if the buyer left this feedback immediately.

In theory the buyer has just one duty -- to pay promptly. Indeed, since eBay owns PayPal they could also just report about buyers whether they paid promptly with PP and that should be all you need to know. Sellers might want to tag a "troublesome buyer" who has a lot of complaints after getting the item but I think that's in an entirely different class of feedback anyway.

So really, a seller should leave feedback once the buyer has paid, and negative feedback only if the buyer pays slowly, pays falsely or doesn't contact the seller.

Under my system above, if the seller waits to give feedback, in particular waits until after the buyer gives feedback, she's taking a risk that her own negative feedback will get counted in the revenge count. And a high revenge count will scare away sellers, deservedly.

More simply, the system could also just count how often the feedback came in the expected order (Seller's first, then Buyer's) and how often the other way around. This would stronly encourage sellers to feedback first. You would see when bidding that a seller always or rarely feedbacks on payment, and again, stay away from those who don't.

Now admittedly, with the fear of revenge feedback gone, buyers would be more honest, and reputations would drop a bit. eBay might still want to avoid this, but with luck it would not be a big change.

Superbowl CPMs take a giant jump

I notice from this chart in advertising age (which requires an annoying complex if free registration form) that there's been a giant jump in the CPM (cost per thousand viewers) of a 30 second Superbowl ad. From 1968 to 1998 it hovered close to $10 in constant dollars -- or about a penny per impression.

Then there's a big jump (thanks in part to Fox and the dot-com boom) and now it's up to $25. But they're still paying, even though the $10 figure is more common for regular TV.

As I have noted elsewhere, part of the revolt against TV advertising is that it's a terrible deal for the viewer. They get a penny (2.5 cents in the superbowl) to show you an ad. So if you watch a full hour of ads (ie. almost 4 hours of TV) you get in return $1.20 worth of programming (wholesale price.) $1.20/hour is an illegally low wage. Even with superbowl ads it's still below minimum wage but we watch them because they are more entertaining.

This increase I think comes from several factors. First of all these ads have a cachet -- the fact that you advertised in the superbowl expands your reputation more than an ordinary ad does.

But mostly, because these ads have a reputation for being above average and less repetitive, many go out of their way to see them rather than go out of their way to avoid them. And that certainly seems to be worth the premium. It is another pointer to the prediction I made earlier this week that we might eventually see TV shows that demand better quality from their advertisers.

That pays off because if all the ads on a show are filtered for how useful or entertaining they are, it improves the odds the viewer will watch all of them. Google surprised everybody by demanding that its adwords customers do good ads that get clicked on. The idea of a publisher refusing an advertisers money was shocking (though it makes perfect sense here, because they are charging per click, and if you aren't getting clicks, they aren't getting good revenue from their space -- effectively enforcing a CPM while calling it pay per click.)

I keep waiting for adcritic to return using bittorrent.

No more trackbacks

I've disabled the trackback feature that allows other blogs to tell this blog they have pointed to it. It's being abused by spammers. Unlike comments, which can have a little turing test on them, trackback needs to be automatic to work, so it's a lot harder to protect against spam except through complex blacklists etc.

I'll see people who link to me in my weekly referer logs. I wrote a nice script that keeps track of all referers, and figures out which ones are new, and which ones suddenly brought in a lot of traffic, and I have it generating a summary once a week. I should release it some day...

Use for old digital cameras

Many people have old, low resolution digital cameras lying around from the previous generation. Here's a good use to put them to, particularly if you have a housekeeper.

When somebody needs to put something away, and they don't know where you like it to go and have to figure out where, have them pull out the old digital camera and take a picture of the item and a picture of where it was put.

Then every so often you can pull out the images into an online folder, ideally with a thumbnail browser.

Even though the camera is probably low res, like a megapixel, you probably want to set it to an even lower res to get a ton of photos on it.

As your memory fades in later life, you might even find this handy to do for yourself. You could just organize your stuff so everything is in an obvious place, or just take photos of all your things where they are. Good for insurance purposes, too. It won't work for the car keys or glasses, but it might work for some stuff.

Tales of the HDTV Superbowl Commercials Party

For the third year in a row, I held a "superbowl commercials" party. In this case, we used MythTV to record the game in HDTV for a while, then sat down to fast forward through the football and slow down to watch the commercials.

I've written a page about the Superbowl Commercials Party here, including fun stories from the party and a bit about the MythTV software that did the recording and playback on two different floors in HDTV.

Also included is a discussion of how the equipment I used will become illegal in just a few months, and what we're doing to try and stop that. It's an interesting lesson in how regulation can stop innovation and what's really happening in the future of TV.

To bell the cat

Here's a simple though not too exciting idea. Make bells for cat collars in different pitches. Thus you can always know which cat is coming just by sound.

Closed caption history on demand

One thing I've noticed when you get a TV broadcast that has 5-channel sound, it that you get the voices on the center channel. Particularly with things like voice-overs, sportscasters etc. If you can mute the center channel, you can watch a game, for example, with no commentators.

But sometimes you do want to hear what they said, if there is something on the field you don't understand. If you have a PVR, you can rewind and turn on the center channel audio (though rarely is there a good UI to do this) but here's another idea.

If the center channel is muted, offer a button that shrinks the display and puts up the last minute or two of history of the closed captions. Of course if there are already bars on the screen use those to display this. You can read quickly (let one of the scrolling controls let you move around) and figure out what was going on, faster than you could through replaying.

Database Dangers: The easy evidence is what they follow

You may have run into the story of a fireman charged with burning down his own home. They charged him because his Safeway Club card records showed he had purchased the type of firestarter that was used in the arson on his house.

Sounds like a good case? Problem is somebody else confessed to the arson. He's now a free man.

People often wonder why privacy advocates get up in arms about things like the Safeway database. I mean, how can it harm you, especially if you're not doing anything suspicious?

The problem is that police are attracted to the evidence that is easy to find. But when databases become more and more comprehensive, the chance that they will contain something interesting grows.

In an old-time investigation, finding receipts for the firestarters would be a major clue, and mind convict somebody. That's because searches of what you bought weren't so easy. If you bought the very tool used in the crime, and it was prominent enough that they found it, it looked bad for you.

But the cops aren't aware they are falling into one of the traps of bad science. When you have a lot of data, you can always find something that matches what you are looking for. When you find it, your intuition tells you "this is too strange to be coincidence." But in fact math tells us that it is. That's why you must never start with the conclusion and dig around in a big pool of data looking for evidence of your conclusion. Good scientists have known not to do this for years. Cops haven't.