I’ve been away on a secret mission, which must remain secret for awhile longer.
Somehow this summer my so-called career had a revival of sorts. My earnest and heartfelt book, The Decline and Fall of IBM, is doing well and will shortly appear in a number of foreign language editions coming from actual book publishers. In a week or two I’ll publish here a general IBM update that’s mainly material to bring those foreign editions up to the present. The short version is it still sucks being Big Blue.
But wait, there’s more! Suddenly I have four (four!) television projects in the works, two of them literally back from the dead. I haven’t been this busy in years.
And next week I’ll start blogging occasionally for Forbes (forbes.com).
I’m not leaving this rag and in fact everything I write for Forbes (business-y stuff) will appear here, too, precisely three days later after all the ad revenue has rubbed-off. Additional material will appear here that never makes it to Forbes, so you’ll never have to go over there if you don’t want to. I’ll be there because they invited me, because my kids all want new mobile phones, and because money talks.
I was a stalwart at Forbes ASAP back in the 1990s where I wrote many feature articles including their inaugural cover story, making this a reunion of sorts.
So look for a succession of Cringely announcements on several fronts between now and the end of the year.
While I was away on my secret mission, Paul Tyma at Refresh shipped a web version of his mobile app that compiles dossiers on people in upcoming meetings or on that girl you are staring at across the bar. This is an interesting phenomenon I think we’ll soon be seeing often.
Mobile has become so important that it seems at times like that’s where all the software development action lives. But we still have 200 million desktops in this country and until a few days ago those were deprived of Refresh-style social intelligence.
I am officially claiming here and now to be the inventor of record for the term social intelligence.
It makes perfect sense when trying to build out a market to make a desktop version, too, yet until now I generally haven’t seen it.
While a lot of this has to do with the utility of Refresh and the simple fact that people need to compile and read dossiers just as much at their desks as anyplace else, I think it’s also an early sign of a maturing mobile market. In IT, maturing markets bring with them product shakeouts, so I predict we’ll start to see a lot of me-too mobile products failing like all those photo-sharing web sites did in the early 2000s.
This begs the question of whether there’s now a mobile bubble? My view is yes, but not a big one, with new product categories still emerging and sucking-up many of the bodies cast-off in the coming bubble subsidence.
I’ll be counting on Refresh to keep track of those people for me.
Hooray, hooray. Bob is back. Looking forward to hearing about your new projects, Bob.
By the way, Bob. Who does the translations for the foreign editions of your latest book? And who verifies that the translations are correct? Does the publisher take care of those details?
Robert Heinlein thought of this back in the ’50’s in his book Double Star. In the book, politicians used it to (appear to) be knowledgeable about their constituents. He called it a “FarleyFile” I think.
Welcome back, Bob!
Yes, Heinlein described the Farley File for keeping track of important data about people you think are, or may be in the future, important to you.
Heinlein had a lot of good ideas before he turned weird. Our friend Bob has some pretty good ideas now and then (I wish I’d bought PayPal when Bob first mentioned it), and I haven’t heard he has turned all that much weirder since I first saw him in those great PBS shows all those years ago.
Keep it up, Bob.
Heinlein had good ideas all along, Elon Musk may bring the “shipstones” from FRIDAY into reality. And he wasn’t so much weird as alternately normal.
Welcome back Bob. My week just doesn’t start right without you.
I collect ScFi and Heinlein is one of my favorites but I agree with the wierd. His latest books were both wierd and rambling.
I am hoping that one of those TV projects will be a continuation of Triumph of the Nerds. Some amazing computer history to cover since 1995.
I’m not sure there’s a mobile bubble, but the mobile market has flattened, especially for tablets. Regarding software mobile devices pretty much require a strong cloud presence since they’re essentially less capable devices than what’s at your desk. So if mobile flattening = mobile bubble popped, then the cloud is the next bubble.
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I’m not sold on social intelligence. Not everyone wants to be a CIA agent in life.
>>> I am officially claiming here and now to be the inventor of record for the term social intelligence.
sorry, already 1.2 million hits on Google for “social intelligence”
WWWillem,
I assume that Bob first coined that term years ago. Now that term has become well established, as shown by the Google hits.
Re: “Assume”. Bob didn’t claim he coined the term. He claimed he claimed it. As in, “Since no one else has claimed it as theirs, I’ll be the one to claim it as mine.”
Ronc,
If the “inventor of record” doesn’t mean that he coined the term, what does it mean?.
Sorry, I glossed over those words. My assumption would be that he didn’t expect us to take those words literally, especially since he didn’t offer any evidence.
A “mobile application that compiles dossiers on people in upcoming meetings or on that girl you are staring at across the bar.”
Sounds like computer assisted stalking to me. Just what we need, another way of hacking peoples privacy – and how long before Refresh will want to sell the data to the scumbags in the advertising business?
I was thinking this, and the next conclusion that I leapt to was that this would put a lot of private investigators and background check companies out of business.
I also wonder if the spooks already have software that does this sort of thing, so a field agent wouldn’t require “M” to show up and hand off a dossier, just a downloaded file into your tablet.
“This begs the question of whether there’s now a mobile bubble?”
I would have thought you’d know better.
“Begs the question” doesn’t mean what you obviously think it means.
Yes, it matters. To me if not to anyone else.
Your writings are still on my menu bar; one of the survivors.
But this last one is creepy.
Regds, W
I read about this last year as an appropriate (if icky) app for Google Glass. In particular the business meeting scenario or even just for starting a conversation with a stranger. Seems innocuous enough until you think about it for a (very short) while. As to “begging he question” I’m willing to give you a pass for forgetting to consult Aristotle, this time. Best of luck with your new endeavors, great news in the print department. Kevin G
Language evolves: In modern vernacular usage, “to beg the question” is sometimes also used to mean “to raise the question” (as in “This begs the question of whether…”) or “to dodge the question”. This usage is condemned by some as mistaken. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question . Bob may be using the “modern vernacular”.
Dear bob, I know it’s a hopeless and thankless task to sweep the tide of degenerate language from the stables of the Internet, but please, please don’t contribute to the now-global misuse of “begs the question”. To me, it smacks of newspeak: remove the term for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question and people won’t notice it when politicians, companies and the press engage in deception. And if they do notice, they won’t have a concise way to describe it.
Which brings up an interesting question: What could we say instead? Ah, right.
Wile_E_Coyote mentioned Fairley Files. That came from FDR’s aid Jim Failey who recorded on a 3 X 5 card interesting information on each person FDR met so years later FDR would revue the cards of people he is meeting to include in personal chats, you know how it goes,
So when can we take a picture of that girl and get a bio
Bob,
“This begs the question of whether there’s now a mobile bubble?”
How does this sentence fulfill the actual meaning of “begs the question?”
http://begthequestion.info/
Regards,
John Kucera
Really really happy for you. For many reasons.
not least of which is I’m going to enjoy all the projects !
Refresh is a good concept, but it fails in execution. After searching about 100 people and only finding information on 2, I gave up on the app. I get more information from doing a Google search.
The term “Social Intelligence” has been around in psychology forever. To claim to invent it now, you have to disntiguish it somehow as being related to the ability to get information from social media and other new Information Age sources, in my opinion….
OK, so why is a group of grown men obsessing about the phrase “…begs the question…”! I’m sure Bob wants to hear real responses that pertain to the subject at hand., so I’ll start…
First of all, there is no mobile bubble, because we are at the cusp of the iWatch and like ‘wrist-based’ computing devices. There will be other mobile devices showing up in the coming years that will be on your belt, in your clothes or with you as you are mobile. That will spark a whole new generation of apps that address a broader spectrum of lifestyle applications. Ultimately, mobile will feed whatever computing server required. They will interact with all the other devices that control the house of the future. So really, mobile is in it’s infancy and isn’t going away anytime soon. Is there overlap in apps, sure, because Apple created the infrastructure for every Tom, Dick and Harry to create mobile apps. …including an app to track specific info about an individual.
Your serious question deserves a serious answer. Read my comment above; it contains the information you seek.
Glad to hear that the book is successfull… being an ex-ibmer, it was a great read and confirmed many views I had of the company. Looking forward for these tv shows.
Why oh why limit that app to the US appstore? Bob, could you have a word with him and get him to release it on the Spain store as well? Thanks.
If there’s a mobile bubble, it’s because the amount of tech in mass market phones –including the Galaxy and iPhone– has reached a point of diminishing returns. Once you get to a primary sales point being whether the phone has rounded edges or multiple colored cases, the phone has reached the basic commodity stage.
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The same thing could be said of tablets: once you reach 1080 resolution on a tablet with enough horsepower to watch videos and do two things at once, you’ve reached the commodity level.
Bob said Refresh “compiles dossiers”, but after trying the web app briefly, it looks like they are just logging in to social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, and presenting the same info to you that you could have gotten directly. Before they let you use the service, they insist you give them full access to all the info you have placed on either Facebook or LinkedIn about yourself. I got more information from a Google search than Refresh, since Refresh acted like the person didn’t exist. It couldn’t even find someone with the same last name! Google found many people with the same first and last name, including the correct one.
Refresh – Sounds like a Magnussen App. – ala Sherlock!
Refresh sounds a bit utopian. I work on occasion as a private detective locating lost people so I use several online databases. Sorry to say but 95% of the data is either misleading, so old as to be useless or just plain wrong. Things have to be triple checked for accuracy and that is horrendously time-consuming. The online data is NEVER refreshed, merely added to, which makes for a heck of a lot of crap to wade through before reaching something that still needs confirmation from another source. And that other source is usually another morass of muck. If not for my deep-seated desire to be Stuart Bailey, I would have thrown up my hands long ago. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the point of the app.
> I am officially claiming here and now to be the inventor of record for the term social intelligence.
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> This begs the question of whether
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Very funny, but get Channing back to mowing the lawn instead of writing your columns.
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Like we cannot tell the difference, and you can palm this off on us. Pfui, sir.