New technology products often take us by surprise. In 1992, for example, we couldn’t possibly have dreamed of how the Internet would transform the world by 1997, only 5 years later. The best innovations are things “you never knew you wanted but cannot live without” kind, inventions that come out of nowhere. YouTube, for example. Or TiVo.

But certain other technology products are so obvious that when they finally emerge many people shrug and wonder “what took it so long?” We knew they were coming, but year after year they never actually materialized.

When they do materialize, we are overjoyed. After years of waiting, for example, we are finally getting MP3 players into cel phones.We are using wireless networks and bluetooth more and more, but we knew we wanted this stuff years ago. The technology consumer will often heap glowing praise on these kinds of new technologies as they emerge, calling them innovative and groundbreaking, when in fact the functionality of the products is merely filling a hole that everyone knew was there.

The Apple iPhone is a perfect example: while the UI is indeed remarkable, almost nothing about it is technologically innovative or new. If you asked me (or just about any of my friends) to describe the perfect cel phone feature set, it would look a lot like an iPhone. In fact, as the owner of a Windows PocketPC phone for nearly 5 years, nothing about the iPhone’s tech specs surprised me. The UI, again, is great and very innovative, but the hardware itself and the basic concept of the device is wholly old news. MORE…

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Soylent Green?

The new formula for software success? People. H&R Block’s new slogan, “You got people”, coincides with their apparent transformation into a hybrid of their old business as a tax preparation service company and their new business as a tax preparation software company. They’re positioning themselves within the software market as a different kind of software maker: they don’t just offer programs like their flagship TaxCut package — their software is backed up by people whom you can actually talk to when you need more help filing your taxes.

Of course plenty of big companies offer great person-to-person customer service, but this H&R Block example strikes me as the first time a shrinkwrapped software product has been explicitly connected with flesh-and-blood people as part of a holistic service offering — or at least as part of a marketing slogan!

We are slowly seeing this with other people-centric technological services. Social networks and other user-generated content services like YouTube are one thing, but we’re also seeing technology companies themselves offering people to their customers, from Google’s experimental (and apparently now defunct) Answers service to 37signals‘ unusually direct dialogues with their customers via their blog and product support boards.

This model has long existed for enterprise software, where for many of the big vendors consulting is as big a revenue generator as licensing fees. And it has existed forever in the shareware and independent or small software developer scene, where the customer-to-employee (or -developer) ratio is small enough that the developer often has both the time and the inclination to provide support. But are we seeing the emergence of the hybrid software/service model for mainstream consumer and small-business software and web services? Could be interesting.

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A strange part of the US real-estate boom is the housing construction boom. Across America, brand-new housing developments are sprouting up like kudzu vines, tearing down forests and farmland to build new housing as fast as possible. Behind this are many factors: immigration, ongoing white flight from the cities, the growth of suburban sprawl, the emergence of technology boom towns, and other geographic and economic factors.

The dominant architectural style of this new growth has an overt “country” look, a kind of caricature of 19th century quaint Americana: gabled roofs, whitewashed siding, twisting rolling streets with absurdly Anglophilic names like “Greyswallow Terrace” and “Cedarpost Square” (names obviously generated by a computer program, as they have absolutely no relevance to the actual landscape or history of their location), plenty of grassland (although, generally, a sad lack of trees). They stretch across the landscape as far as the eye can see, and the consistency of their style strongly evokes the conformity of the 1950’s Levittown housing model.

Sometimes they are single-family standalone dwellings (”McMansions“, the fatter and more ostentatious cousin of what I’m talking about here), sometimes they are multiple-unit buildings with a single-family façade. Occasionally these “homes” (they never call them “houses”, always “homes”) will have a slightly-urban “townhouse” feel, with splotches of red brick and perfunctory sidewalks, but even these units will generally be topped off with the requisite white siding and pointed roofs.

The general style seems, I think, to be a hybrid of the country estate and the urban housing project, marrying the illusion of landed aristocratic luxury with the logistical efficiency of cookie-cutter subsidized apartment life.

Unfailingly, this housing trend always reminds me of the movie Back to the Future Part II. MORE…

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On Election Day (Tuesday!), please bring a camera with you to your polling place and take some pictures of American democracy in action. Then submit your photos to the ingenious Polling Place Photo Project, which will document every one of America’s election locations through good old fashioned web-based citizen journalism.

I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of the kinds of fascinating, inspiring, and troubling things this project will potentially reveal about America’s crazy democratic process, both the good and the bad: the rogues gallery of different kinds of voting methods and machines, the long confusing lines, the aggressive party electioneers, the intimidating highway patrolmen, the hard-to-find locations… and the dedicated voters waiting as long as it takes to vote, the helpful volunteers managing the process — maybe we’ll even see some well-designed signage. Not to mention the pride in seeing the faces of American voters doing what is admittedly an inconvenient but ultimately rewarding civic obligation. I really look forward to seeing the results of this project.

To learn more, please visit the project’s official site, which has lots of helpful information about how to legally photograph your polling place and how to submit your images to the project’s web site.

Oh, and while you’re hanging around your polling place taking photographs, you should vote. Probably for a Democrat. Unless you live in Vermont’s Windham-2, in which case you should vote Progressive. Thank you!

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I generally consider myself a capable writer, at least in the technical sense. In particular, I think I have a pretty good understanding of how to punctuate properly in written English.

But there are some areas where the language’s “standards” are in continual dispute, some areas where I think the standards are just plain logically wrong, and some where a few minor technical modifications to the rules might be helpful.

In fact, those of us who work in the computer industry might be able to exert some subtle positive influence on English grammar to make it clearer and more logical. You see, I suspect that many people who program computers have a unique grasp of grammatical logic. Not just HTML/CSS developers who are intimately familiar with structuring text in semantically-logical ways, but computer programmers of all types who work with logical structures whose meaning must be airtight.

[Note that I’m not saying that we need to “clean up” English a la some kind of Orwellian newspeak. I’m just offering some minor shifts of thinking to reflect our current technological competencies.] MORE…

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Stills from Nuovi Comizi d’Amore (New Love Meetings) by Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi.

Two Italian filmmakers, Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi, have completed a feature-length movie shot entirely with a mobile phone. It’s an interview-centered documentary, which seems the ideal form for a mobile phone movie. Here’s what they have to say about the work:

Project’s philosophy: this project arises from one of our main belief: today who does not make a film It is because he has nothing to say. The new technologies (mltiDV and HO camcorders) give back to everybody the chance to regain their creativity to communicate trough images. We have chosen the easiest and less intrusive mean: the mobile phone. We privileged natural light and only in rare cases we illuminated with a made in china flashlight. The two of us made the entjre shooting and editing. The sound was taken by the same mobile phone without any additional microphone and later optimized in postproduction.

What a fantastic and liberating idea. I particularly love the (bolded) confrontational and manifesto-like accusation that because technology has put filmmaking in every westerner’s pocket, those of us who aren’t making movies are pretty much worthless. It’s Futurism without the fascism.

I imagine such micro-filmmakers would carry around some minimal additional equipment like extra batteries and a flashlight in order to make the production just a tiny little bit more professional without losing the spontaneous quality of the final result.

Using a mobile phone would seem at first to be a cheap novelty: why not simply bring a very small video camera? Even most digital still cameras can shoot video, and almost certainly at a better quality than a phone can. But I think the mobile phone aspect is important, since the informality of it defuses the gravity, such as it is, that people feel when they are “on camera”.

With web-based distribution (such as YouTube or Google Video, or even the iTunes Store) being the best-case scenario for most filmmakers these days, a low-resolution, highly-compressed image quality isn’t a signficant drawback to watchability, either. It’s only when the filmmaker aspires to wider distribution either via television or cinematic release that higher-quality footage becomes a concern.

The thing most amateur videographers mess up, however, is the sound: if the sound is bad — either because it is too low or drowned out by other ambient sounds, then the footage is often rendered useless. The sounds from a small mobile-phone microphone are pretty terrible. Do they make mobile phones with plug-ins for microphones that work with the video recorder, that is do any phones have jacks that can accommodate high quality mics?

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