2010: The year the Netbook turns into the Web-book

2010 is set to be a bumper year for Consumer Electronics. With people spending less outside the home they are focusing more inside and as just about everyone now has some monstrous TV it's the little things that count.

2009 was arguably the year of the Netbook. After Asus launched with their eeePC in 2008 a land-rush occurred last year with virtually every Notebook manufacturer providing an offering. HP's Mini and Acer's Aspire One ranges both did very well as did Asus with their eeePC.

At the end of 2009 however it became virtually impossible to get a Netbook that is truly still a Netbook. Acer, Dell, Asus and HP all fell back into their same tired old routine - bigger, faster, more capacity! And the Netbook experience suffered.

I've made this point before but the power of the Netbook is in the Network - not in how big a hard drive it has. Why do I need a 160GB hard drive when I have Terabytes of NAS and Gigabytes of cloud storage? I don't need 5 USB ports and I certainly don't need Windows.

Having said all of this the Netbook category has gone ballistic - having doubled from 16 to 33 Million units sold in 2009 - sales are worth about $USD11Bn globally (Display Search research for 2009)

My money is on the next generation - so called Web Books, Slates or Tablets. These devices are being actively invested in by a number of investors and represent a merging of several types of computing behaviour.

Architecturally, most are small form factor (10 inch or less), are either a tablet or have a folding range far outside the normal Notebook range (can be flipped over on itself entirely - so is just a screen), they are generally touch screen capable with many being multi-touch and the big one - most are not running windows (generally running flavours of Linux).

Behaviourally, the Web Book is designed to be a piece of Consumer Electronics. It's not a desktop replacement, it's not an office machine. It's a device that is a general purpose computer but built to use in the home as such it plays on the following:

• It's relatively small and definitely light.
• The processor is powerful but not an energy guzzler (Intel Atom's do brilliantly here as do ARMs)
• The display is gorgeous and has high viewing angles so multiple people can see it
• It uses wifi and may not even have Ethernet connectivity
• Solid State disks are a must but are low capacity (you don't need more than 16GB in a machine that is connected to a network) thus saving on energy
  
• battery life is a must - the longer the better thus every component is energy efficient
• Ideally the screen is touch capable and ideally multi-touch (thus eliminating the need for a keyboard)

The device is permanently connected to the network and thus the Internet. It's there to connect with people, view photos, play your tunes, watch movies and read web pages. It's not there to write documents, do full scale design or programming (though people will use it to do this in a limited, fast fashion).

I've been excited about Internet tables, Slates, Web Books - call them as you will since Nokia released the N710 and with Apple, HTC (Google), Litl and others all about to play in this space in a big way over the next few months, there will be a lot of people asking for a Web Book or Internet Slate in their Christmas Stocking next year.

Expect to see masses of innovation in this space as companies that have not been too caught up in the Netbook scene enter the fray for the first time and start showing off some new ideas. Litl does this with their awesome Easel Frame style web book and both HTC and Apple will doo some great stuff on the user experience end of things too.

2010 will definitely be the year that the Internet goes increasingly mobile both inside and outside the house but the experience of it literally becomes more tactile and less bound to the keyboard.

Prediction: 2010 will be the year Apple and Google have a cage fight

The pre- match slanging is pretty much over and the location of the fight has been chosen. 2010 is going to be the year Apple and Google finally stop dancing around and actually get in the ring. Unlike a nice clean refereed boxing match (Apple V Microsoft) this is going to be a dirty underground cage fight complete with barbed-wire wrapped gloves - expect to see a lot of blood on the floor - and fanbois rucking in the concourses.

The ground is, of course, Mobile and the massive dominance both organisations have taken in this space over the last 12 months. Mobile is still a fast growing area of communications but smartphones is where it's at. There's no question Apple ignited the world's imagination of what is possible in the mobile space and capitalising on the fact that the fashionability of a phone is important in a way that RIM and Microsoft just didn't get.

Google have taken that to a whole different level with Android which just "gets" what it is to be a data capable and Internet connected phone. Couple this with some fashionability and the stage is set for an almighty fight.

Looking through the AdMob report for November, it's astonishing to see how fast Android has grown in the last 2 months (doubled on traffic requests through their network) but more importantly was the launch of the Motorola Droid and the whole Droid Does campaign. The Droid is one of the fastest selling phones of all time almost hitting iPhone 3Gs sales levels (which was working from an installed base upgraded) and is now accounting for about a quarter of Android device share - only behind the G1 which has been out for 18 months - expect to see that change over December.

Now Motorola have entered the fray and with Samsung and Sony Ericsson both scheduling major launches into Q1 2010 the mobile landscape is going to get increasingly messy as the iPhone isn't the only great phone out there. Indeed I think Sony is going to do a Motorola with the Xperia X10 as it is simply stunning and is a big name in the mobile space - especially in Europe. HTC have had a great lead but 2010 will see Motorola and Sony return to some dominance here - and they can fight Apple in the Fashionability stakes.

The biggest challenge for Apple is how to combat Google on the phone itself. Outside of iTunes, Apple has little in the way of first party apps for the iPhone and whilst it has a huge developer network it is definitely alienating them through it's App Store management nightmares. Many developers are developing for both iPhone and Android devices - especially those using Web technologies for building and apps like Phone Gap to cross-package.

A lot of what makes the iPhone really useful are Google applications (native Gmail, Maps and most importantly Search!) - Apple has no way to combat this. Are they going to deny Gmail or Search like they did with Google Voice?

Apps that are available on both platforms and services that are available "in the cloud" eg Maps, Comparison Shopping etc dilutes Apple's position as it's only point of differentiation becomes fashionability and both Sony Ericsson and Motorola have competed for over a decade against Nokia by building highly fashionable phones.

I'm not sure this fight will be a death match but all the signs are there for a battle of epic proportions. Both are likely to be extremely battered by the time they come out the other side and would be wise to hold a little bit in reserve in case Nokia's Maemo platform takes off the way they are expecting it to - at that point things could get really messy.

EEEPC's power is in the network not the machine

Over here at Technology Treason we lurve ASUS' EEEPC. We liked the idea when they first came out and specifically trawled around Hong Kong computer markets to find one not long after they were launched. It's not the Apple Air or iPhone kind of aesthetic lust, we're talking about true "in sickness and in health" type love when it comes to the EEEPC.

Indeed for someone to now take this device off me it really would have to be from my cold, dead, rigamortis set fingers - and then only with a saw.

Go online and look at reviews. They fall into two camps - those who think it's great as a second machine that just happens to do a lot of funky things (see latest Linux Format June edition for a classic example) or those that just don't "get it" any wonder why the hell anyone would want a tiny-weenie machine when you can get a low spec dell for a few hundred quid now.

There is third camp however who are starting to realise that a linux based UMPC is truly a brilliant bit of kit and it's really because of the network it sits on not the thing plugged into it.

I've had mine for about 5 months and realistically I've installed about half a dozen bits of software - 10 at a push. I can do docs, review spreadsheets, skype, web browse hell even play games if I want and when hooked to a network I can do all of these things with all of the files I could possibly want.

My machine comes home and it auto connects to my home network, synchs to my media server and can play all my media files out of the box. I can check my mail and actually read it without squinting without firing up the laptop. I can connect from home to work via a VPN and mod some files for a client without leaving the sofa or the garden and be doing wht I want before the laptop has finished booting to a desktop.

At work I can use it for presentations and taking notes on projects without printing stupid amounts of documentation and hefting my laptop along with me.

It's not a replacement computer - it's a tool. A finely shaped, infinitely configurable tool. All the things I want in my phone but will never get because of the lack of keyboard,mouse and processing power and without it being much bigger.

The thing is I'm a techie, if I'm talking a walk down the street phone and wallet are it. If I'm going somewhere then it's satchel with camera, book, PSP and now EEEPC in place of a laptop.

ASUS have released details recently of a new version designed to hit off the people who think the other is too small. I don't know myself. Small is beautiful and in this case perfectly formed.

Easy product or class rating system

So you've got a lovely little ratings system going on your site. All of a sudden though you get slashdotted, dugg or just your marketing starts working and you have thousands of users all rating your products / services / systems / posts / videos etc and your pages start to creak.

"It's the shared web space you're on," say your techies, "it can't handle the users" and duly bounce you to a better hosting environment at triple the cost along with the migration charges.

From time to time I come across this problem when I've either picked up code from someone else or else a techie asks me how to optimise a page that's running really slowly. In this particular instance it was caused by a ratings system in the style of Amazon or YouTube - basically a user is displayed a product and then people rate it as to whether it's any good. The real problem came when they had a list of products, each of which had it's individual ratings displayed.

The cause of this very slow page however had nothing to do with shared hosting or otherwise or direct server load - it was all down to some naive coding executing what my old CS lecturer would call an O(n)² process.

What the coder had done was get a list of products, then for each product gone back to the database and got a list of all the rankings ever made and then averaged them out. Nice and simple but frightfully inefficient and that which caused the problem I've highlighted.

This isn't the first time I've seen this and I've been asked how to build them numerous times as well so here's a well optimised method of doing it in general terms.

Consider first that calculating the average when you insert into the database is going to be computationally less expensive than calculating it every time you perform a select when a user hits the page. This sounds obvious but it's stunning how often it's overlooked.

Make two extra fields for your product table, one called average and the other called user_count or something. On your insert of the rating into the ratings table, run a trigger or else add some code that will update the product table with the updated count and a new average calculated from the ratings info.

Now when you select the product data you pull down the average and user count as part of that select and they are just simple static fields, thus adding no more computational load than the original select or view does already.

This gives you a nice little rating system that's not heavy in terms of processor load. However we can improve things once step further if you aren't interested in the data.

The option I'm providing below is good if you are just after a running average and don't care about the individual ratings being kept. I did a project recently where we weren't worried about keeping individual ratings data because the site wasn't going to be up for very long and it didn't add anything to our system to have it.

This option uses a running weighted average in order to just update the data in the product table without requiring a ratings table at all.

Some useful background maths though:

If I have a set {3, 4, 4} and take it's average I need to add the numbers and divide by the number of entries. Thus this set's average is (3+4+4)/3 = 3.67

Now suppose I've precalculated this average as I've suggested above and stored it without the individual ratings, I now want to add another rating, 2 to the set.

Intuition says to do something like this: (2 + 3.67)/2 = 2.83 which is actually wrong. Looking at the set {3, 4, 4, 2} we can guestimate that the average is going to be somewhere more between 3 and 4 than it is 2 and 3 as we've calculated above.

Thankfully a technique from statistics gives us an option here which is to use a weighted average instead. This is useful for adding sets together that have different numbers of elements within them but maintain the averages by skewing the data using proportional averages (or a weighted average).

The general formula for this is:

Avg_w = (Avg₁ * (n₁ / (n₁+n₂))) + (Avg₂ * (n₂/ (n₁+n₂)))

Where:

Avg₁ is the average of the first set
Avg₂ is the average of the second set
n₁ is the number of elements in the first set
n₂ is the number of elements in the second set

In our example this simplifies even further because our second set is actuall only one item. So let's work this through:

Avg_w = (3.67 * (3/(3+1))) + (2 * (1/(3+1)))

= (3.67 * 3/4) + (2 * 1/4)

= 2.75 + 0.5

= 3.25

Which is the answer we're after for our average.

As we know all the base line average data in the product table and we know the value of the rating we're tracking, it's a very simple function to update this instead of doing another insert into a ratings table and we just keep on doing it for every rating that has been added.

Computationally this is a very inexpensive process and whilst I'm more than happy to be shown otherwise I think this is about as good as it gets in terms of optimisation.

The key thing is we've now reduced an O(n)² operation to O(n) which is a drastic improvement as n tends towards infinity.

Phorm over function?

Phorm is, and will continue to be for some time I think a hugely divisive issue online. BBC have another story today about it, this time having spoken to the various security companies like F-Secure, McAffee etc about whether they will flag a message to the user about whether Phorm has been enabled or not.

Phorm management have come out saying "it's only a cookie", the same as many other sites use to provide tracking (such as Google Analytics), interactivity (such as shopping carts or ID maintenance on numerous retail sites), or a small amount of memory (configuration information for the BBC home page for example).

The difference, though, is that the information is being used differently because data is being shared.

This is what got the Information Commissioners Office's back up because sharing data between companies without users opting in is a breach of the Data Protection Act - "But not if it's anonymous data" say the legal eagles from Phorm - and technically they are correct. This is a case of adopting the letter of the law rather than the spirit of it.

Tim Berners-Lee came out saying he would move ISP if he found out they were using Phorm and whilst I admire his line I fear the vast majority of consumers won't care or rather just won't be bothered to switch - just see how many people actually switch bank or utilitiy companies.

For me this is a case of the slow erosion of privacy at the hands of our ISPs. In a massively competitive market where margins are being squeezed ever tighter, the sale of their user data to Phorm must have seemed like the proverbial golden goose.

It won't take long for someone to cotton onto the flip side of this and market aggressively on the privacy front. Talk Talk made huge inroads as an ISP on the back of their "The Internet should be free" campaign with regard to price (being bundled as it was with other services). Who will be the first to play the "Internet should be private" card and sign up to a deal not using Phorm or other tracking software?

In my cynical world view, I think the security firms have realised this and it is 99% of the reason for why they are looking at it all as the anti-spy, -mal and -virus software is worth billions.

In real terms Phorm isn't actually that clever a piece of technology - most of what has been achieved is in the brokering of deals between ISPs and content owners and then a bit of clever gluing in the middle.

In the end Phorm will either be a great white elephant and just slip off the radar the way many technologies and companies have done or else it may actually be a spur to drive privacy legislation forward in line with our digital behaviour - how long it will take to do this however is the question as government is typically a long way behind technology in terms of law-making.

Can Yahoo really get things so wrong?

Update - The guys at Yahoo came to our rescue after tracing through the "network" somewhat to find someone that knows someone at Yahoo to help us out. Unfortunately their techies couldn't explain why we'd been bloack listed either but we are now officially on their whitelist so big thanks to the guys for helping us out.

Yahoo are one of the original dotcoms. They've been around for a long time so they should know their business. Imagine my surprise when one of my clients starts complaining that their confirmation emails to yahoo email accounts are permanently being binned as is everything else they send - including personal communications.

Like most mail providers, free or otherwise, Yahoo have a spam policy that will look at an inbound email and then drop it in your inbox or spam folder depending on how it is classified.

As with most techies I have about a dozen email addresses at various providers in order to test exactly these sorts of issues. Especially given that the goalposts are changing all the time.

Sure enough even a personally addressed confirmation email was killed as it came into my yahoo account. "Ah ha," said I, "they've been blacklisted". So off one goes and checks the various blacklisting sites and there's nothing there. Hmmm.

It transpires that yahoo have just taken it on themselves to block that domain. Weirdly though, a personally addressed mail to me from the client with only the word "test" in the subject line is still considered Spam yet an email from some random address that doesn't reply, containing several instances each of the words "penis", "cock", "viagra" and "cialis" made it through to my inbox completely unscathed. At this point the phrase about arses and elbows definitely comes to mind.

Trying to get Yahoo to do anything about this issue is similarly problematic as there are no feedback channels to deal with this problem at all.

So overall we've just had to advise people to not use Yahoo or to check their junk mail periodically and read the mail there.