purple motes

In her interesting new book, From Iron Fist to Invisible Hand: the Uneven Path of Telecommunications Reform in China, Irene S. Wu describes competition among bureaucracies, consumer demand, and technological innovations as drivers of telecommunications reform in China.   An interesting case study is Little Smart, a low-cost, limited-mobility wireless service that rapidly gained popularity, but which will be shut down by 2011 in favor of 3G services.

Little Smart provided a vehicle for China Telecom to offer wireless service.  Little Smart was initially approved to extend China Telecom's wireline telephone service to rural areas.   However, Little Smart was first offered commercially in December, 1998, in Zhaoqing, a small city in Guangdong Province.  In 1999, Little Smart service was extended to two provincial capitals and other small cities.   By September, 2001, Little Smart was being offered in 300 cities and had about 5 million subscribers.   By early 2003, Little Smart was available in Beijing and other large Chinese cities.  The number of Little Smart subscribers reached 91 million in 2006.[1]

Efforts of mobile-service competitors and the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) to constrain Little Smart subscriber growth failed.   Mobile-service competitors China Mobile and Unicom complained vociferiously to state bodies that Little Smart was not authorized to provide the service it was providing.  MII repeatedly forbade Little Smart to expand service, but it did anyway.  MII subsequently ratified Little Smart expansions.   Little Smart succeeded in gaining state approval by first succeeding in gaining a large number of customers.

Little Smart grew rapidly as a relatively low-quality, low-cost service.  Its early nicknames indicated its low quality:

Weiwei ko (Hello-Hello Call, because users are always saying hello-hello), Shikengtong (Toilet Connection, to indicate the very low standard of service), and, in the city of Zhaoqing,
Duanzhousai (Duanzhou Disconnection) [its brand name there was Duanzhoutong (Duanzhou Connection)].[2]

Little Smart, however, was much cheaper than China Mobile and Unicom.  Its monthly fee and per minute rate were about half of these competitors' rates.  In some places Little Smart offered flat-rate, unlimited calling.  In all locations Little Smart users did not have to pay for incoming calls, as did subscribers to the other mobile services.

The challenge of shutting down Little Smart has now shifted to China Telecom and China Netcom.  China Netcom was formed in 2002 from the northern 30% of China Telecom's wireline network, plus the assets of the competing companies Netcom and Jitong.   Thus China Netcom inherited Little Smart subscribers through its descent from China Telecom.  Both China Telecom and China Netcom received 3G mobile licenses in 2008.   They have stopped investing in Little Smart and instead are focusing on building out 3G services.  But at the end of 2008, they still had a total of about 70 million Little Smart subscribers (that's equivalent to about 7% of the Chinese population ages 15-64).

The U.S. DTV transition is an example of a centralized, state-led shutdown of an old technology, over-the-air analog television broadcasting.  As of 2005, about 15 million U.S. household received only over-the-air television (about 14% of households).[3]   The U.S. government established February 17, 2009, as the date at which full-power TV stations would cease analog broadcasts. The U.S. Congress provided $1.5 billion for the transition, mostly to subsidize purchases of set-top converter boxes. The transition date was subsequently shifted to June 12, 2009, and an additional $650 million was provided for converter box coupons and related transition activities. Managing the shutdown of over-the-air analog television service has been a top priority for the main U.S. government telecommunications agencies, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Whether Little Smart service in China will be shut down with less government involvement remains to be seen. Opportunities for increasing costs for users and degrading quality of service are much better for Little Smart than for free, over-the-air television broadcasts. Even if China Telecom and China Netcom cannot raise monthly fees and per minute rates for Little Smart, they can add a variety of additional fees that effectively raise the cost of using Little Smart service.  In addition, a variety of opportunities exist for gradually degrading the quality of the service. Such actions, along with aggressive special discounts and promotions for Little Smart subscribers to shift to China Telecom/Netcom 3G service, may be sufficient to mitigate popular outrage at shutting down Little Smart.

Shutting down operations and services in a politically feasible way is as important for a well-functioning economy as is fostering the entry of new services.   Smart economic policy considers both the problems of entry and exit.

Notes:

[1] The facts in this and the subquent paragraphs, unless otherwise noted, are from  Wu, From Iron Fist to Invisible Hand, pp. 125-132, and Jack Linchuan Qiu (2005), The Accidental Accomplishment of Little Smart: Understanding the Emergence of a Working-Class ICT, paper prepared for the ARNIC High-Level Workshop on Wireless Communication and Development, October 7-8, 2005.

[2] Qiu (2005) p. 4.

[3] For a review of the data, see Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Media Bureau Staff Report Concerning Over-the-Air Broadcast Television Viewers, MB Docket No. 04-210, Feb. 28. 2005, and FCC, Annual Assessment of the Status of Competition in the Market for the Delivery of Video Programming, Thirteenth Annual Report (released January 16, 2009) pp. 53-4.

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My Blog, I fear that thou wilt find but few
Who fitly shalt conceive thy reasoning,
Of such hard matter dost thou entertain;
Whence, if by misadventure, chance should bring
Thee to base company (as chance may do),
Quite unaware of what thou dost contain,
I prithee, comfort thy sweet self again,
My last delight! tell them they need not fear,
And bid them own that thou art beautiful.

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In a sample of 275 U.S. public library systems in 2005, the circulation of audio books recorded on cassette tape was 1.3 times the circulation of audio books recorded on CDs.[1] As late as 2005, many audio book borrowers apparently owned audio cassette players. For music albums, the last year that cassette tape sales exceeded CD sales was 1991.[2]

In 2006, the ratio of DVD rentals to video cassette rentals was 115 to 1.  At the same time, 86% of TV households had a DVD player, and 84% had a VCR.[3]

Many persons apparently keep media technology long after new technology has superseded it. That's not a good omen for the U.S. digital television (DTV) transition.

Notes:

[1] Calculated from data in Molyneux, Robert E. (2007) "Transitions: Library Circulation and Digital Formats," in The Bowker Annual 2007: Library and Book Trade Almanac, pp.402-6.

[2] See data in 2000 10-year Music Consumer Trends Chart, RIAA 2000 Consumer Profile.

[3] See U.S. Entertainment Industry: 2006 Market Statistics, pp. 27-28.

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Yesterday I bought an external 250 GB hard drive for $150 from a mass-market retail store. The device is only slightly larger than a pack of cards. Astonishing.

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According to Communications Daily (June 21), Motorola CEO Ed Zander stated in his keynote address at NXTcomm that Motorola next summer will have a mobile device that allows persons to talk and share photos at the same time. Much evidence suggests that such capability has significant value in communication.

While delivering video to mobiles is attracting more industry attention, I think that the possible upside for show-and-tell devices is bigger than for mobile video. Design and marketing will be significant challenges. On the other hand, in-stream photo sharing is closely related to highly successful mobile voice and SMS charging models. In-stream photo-sharing can easily draw upon well-established user understandings of payment for communications services. That's not the case for watching video on mobiles.

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Typing text on a keyboard and manipulating a mouse are recent, conventional muscular routines for communication. Those routines have little relation to the muscular practices of communication that humans have used throughout their evolutionary history. Moreover, those routines are much different from muscular activities many people do for enjoyment, such as walking, playing catch, running, playing tag, swimming, and curling. Making communication services more muscularly natural and muscularly enjoyable could create additional value.

In conjunction with the use of sight and clever extra-body technology, a person can write with any muscle at speeds comparable with those of current keyboard routines. The Dasher Project allows a person to write text by directing a point across dynamic, letter-coded regions. With the appropriate linking technology, any muscle, including eye gaze movements, can direct the point to write. Such technology obviously has great value to disabled persons. For persons with a wide range of muscular possibilities, such technology allows communication service providers to offer muscular routines that are natural, enjoyable, and propitious for the specific circumstances of use.

You can use your hands in ways that are much more natural and satisfying than typing on a keyboard. Jeff Han has developed a multi-point graphical interaction surface that is pleasurable even to watch. The forthcoming Apple iPhone, 8 million of which are expected to be sold in its first year on the market, incorporates some touch-screen gestures for controlling the phone.

Highly successful products suggest the value of innovation in the space of muscular movement. Dance Dance Revolution (Dancing Stage) has brought large-muscle leg movement to video games. The Wii video console controller includes motion sensors that enable, for example, sports games to incorporate sports-typical gestures. The Apple iPhone also incorporates motion sensors, as does the recently announced DoCoMo D904i.

I'm still hoping for a mobile camera-phone that better communicates "Look at this!"

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A great way to study the ancient Greek trireme is to build one. Frank Welsh, a trireme enthusiast and funder, John Morrison, an ancient historian, and John Coates, a former British naval architect, established in 1982 the Trireme Trust with the following objectives:

1. To resolve a long-standing controversy about the design of this historically important type of ship
2. To discover its true performance at sea
3. To enable the realities of sea power at that time to be understood
4. To draw attention to the maritime and technical skills which were the keys to the cultural achievements and lasting influence of ancient Athens.

The Trireme Trust and Greek shipbuilders worked together to build an ancient Greek trireme. In 1987, the full-scale, fully functionally trireme Olympias was ready to be commissioned into the Greek navy and taken out for its first sea trials around the island of Poros.

I was part of the crew that rowed the Olympias in its first sea trial in the summer of 1987. The crew was collected mainly from British universities. We stayed for a couple of weeks in the Greek naval officers school on Poros. Being on the crew of an ancient Greek warship undoubtedly included great hardships and suffering. But by 1987, that job made for a very good time.

The trireme has 170 rowers arranged in three tiers: thranites (top tier), zygians (middle), and thalamians (bottom). I was a thalamian. Because the seats were fixed wooden benches, the effort of rowing was shifted towards the arms and back compared to boats with slides (rolling seats). From where I sat I couldn't see the water nor feel any breezes coming across the boat. The rowing section leaders and master would shout out instructions, and I could see and feel the rhythm of rowers both in front of me and above me.

Being down in the boat has advantages and disadvantages. It was hot. I drank a lot of water and sweated it out. Arranging fresh water supplies must have been a major challenge. Being a thalamian wouldn't be a good position for being rammed by another trireme. But it would be a great position in winter, or in battle with projectiles flying.

The boat itself is an engineering marvel. John Coates, the architect, would climb around the boat, fixing various broken parts, and talking with rowers. You can find more pictures of the boat here. That the Greeks could build hundreds of these boats 2500 years ago is amazing. That the Greeks and the Brits could together rebuild one based on scraps of archaeological and textual evidence is astonishing. I remember Mr. Coates saying that the design constraints implied much of the design.

We rowed the boat through a variety of test maneuvers. One was was to accelerate to full speed and hold that speed for a short period. Another was to reverse direction quickly and turn sharply. Given that no one had any experience, and given the difficulties of coordinating 170 rowers, the boat performed amazingly well.

A recent study has analyzed the power output of trireme crews. The study found:

rowers of ancient Athens – around 500BC – would had to have been highly elite athletes, even by modern day standards.

Says Dr Rossiter: “Ancient Athens had up to 200 triremes at any one time, and with 170 rowers in each ship, the rowers were clearly not a small elite. Yet this large group, it seems, would match up well with the best of modern athletes. Either ancient Athenians had a more efficient way of rowing the trireme or they would have to be an extremely fit group. Our data raise the interesting notion that these ancient athletes were genetically better adapted to endurance exercise than we are today.”[1]

This is an interesting finding. The historical record seems diverse enough and clear enough to rule out performance exaggeration or misreporting, an issue that always should be considered carefully. Perhaps some subtle difference in ship design made a huge difference in performance. That seems highly unlikely.

Were the ancient Greeks genetically better adapted to endurance exercise than persons around the world today? Note that "persons around the world" is the relevant comparator, because the market for athletic performance today is globalized. No negative selection for endurance seems plausible for all human beings around the globe over the past 2500 years. Genetic differences, it seems to me, isn't a plausible explanation.

Trireme crew performance is puzzling. I personally believe in the potential of modern athletes.

Update: The trireme crew's t-shirt shows the different oar shapes for the rowers at different levels in the boat.

* * *

[1] Quote from Leeds University Press Release. These findings are also reported in Stephanie Pain, "When men were gods," New Scientist, Feb. 10, 2007, pp. 46-7. That article provides a few additional details. It notes that ancient writers consistently indicate that triremes crews could row at 13-15 kilometers per hour for 16 hours or long. Modern measurements indicate that 30% of the crew's power output is lost. But even with 100% power efficiency, the crew could not achieve ancient performance. The New Scientist article is not scholarly documentation of the study. Such documentation apparently is not yet available.

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Imagine sitting inside a car on a blistering hot day, with the windows rolled up, without air conditioning, waiting 20 minutes for the car’s security system to reboot after you placed a call to roadside assistance. That’s a bad distribution of control logic.

A human confronting exceptional circumstances is likely to be better able to evaluate relevant information than a computer can.

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Developing good social networking technology requires thinking about distributing computing between humans and computers. Way back in 2002, a human-computer interface designer discussed some problems with the then-trendy idea of context-aware computing:

I suggest rather than trying to take humans out of the control loop, we keep them in the loop. Computational systems are good at gathering and aggregating data; humans are good at recognizing contexts and determining what is appropriate. Let each do what each is good at.
[Erickson (2002) p. 103]

Recognizing and respecting comparative advantage between humans and computers is also a good design principle for social networking technology.

Social networking technology that depends on a computer having better (human) social intelligence than a human challenges the designs of both. Consider a social networking application for a mobile phone called a Jerk-O-Meter. It measures the user’s voice activity and voice stress. Using these data, the application evaluates the user’s communicative performance and delivers these messages:

“Stop being a Jerk!”
“You could do better”
“Now we’re getting somewhere”
“Wow you’re a smooth talker”
[Madan & Pentland (2006), p. 6]

Another application, called Wingman3G, measures speaking time, voice rate, and vocal stress. It evaluates this data using a model of successful dating communication and produces real-time messages such as:

“Maybe you could speak a little slower?”
“You’re getting there, maybe you could relax a little?”
[Madan & Pentland (2006), p. 7]

Human brains evolved under selection for social intelligence. Digital computers did not. Human social intelligence can easily encompass that of computers and reduce their social value to the social value of recognized manners and conventions.

Compared to humans, digital systems are relatively good at routine collecting, processing, and distributing information. Information such as on-line/off-line status, communication initiation, communication addressing, communication duration, as well as word rate and stress indicators, might be valuable to humans using social networking technologies. An interesting recent paper discusses the design of shared visualizations of such information ("social proxies"). It offers six claims for good design of social proxies:

1) "Everyone sees the same thing; no user customization"
2) "Portray actions, not interpretation"
3) "Social proxies should allow deception"
4) "Support micro/macro readings"
5) "Ambiguity is useful: suggest rather than inform"
6) "Use a third-person point of view"
[see Erickson (2006), pp. 13-4, which describes these claims in more detail]

Claims 1) and 6) suggest designing social proxies to be like objects in our one, real world. Claims 2)-5) point to the comparative advantage of human social intelligence in human social interactions.

References

Erickson, Thomas (2002), "Some Problems with the Notion of Context-Aware Computing," Communications of the ACM, v. 45 no. 2 (Feb.) pp 102-4.

Erickson, Thomas (2006), "‘Social’ Systems: Designing Digital Systems that Support Social Intelligence" (pdf file).

Madan, Anmol and Alex "Sandy" Pentland (2006), VibeFones: Socially Aware Mobile Phones (pdf file).

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Device design is a significant problem for a show-and-tell communicator. Designing a “phone” that integrates talking and showing would be a useful project for a design school class.

Re-describing features is less costly than redesigning devices. Speaker phones are used for long, boring meetings. But a social mode is just what teenagers need. That’s right kids, just press that button and you and the friend that’s permanently attached to your hip can both talk at the same time with another friend and see and share pictures on your phone at the same time, too.

Put your phone on social mode and you all can talk and see! Who cares if you talk a little louder and adults around you can hear you? That’s their problem. Plus, they’re stupid so they won’t understand what you’re talking about anyway. Privacy? That’s for uptight geezers!

A show-and-tell social mode probably would be a lot more valuable to most mobile phone users than being able to use your Nokia N73 to take and upload photos to Flickr. Martin and his daughter could use it when communicating with Nana. The 78% of Swedish broadband customers who want to use a webcam on Christmas Eve probably would like to be able to do a “group call.” And they would probably rather not have to do it crowding around their desktop computer, wherever that’s located.

Communication devices need to move on from the design of phones. Recognizing that not all interpersonal communication is one-to-one would be a propitious place to start.

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