It’s Saturday morning at 6am. I’m about to leave my Boston apartment for the first of three legs from Logan International Airport to Hong Kong via New York and Tokyo. I will arrive at 10:30pm on Sunday. Against insurmountable odds it appears that both my Boston and New York flights are on-time – an anomaly if there ever was one given that we’ve had a full week of driving rain in Boston and two feet of snow in Westchester County, just 45 minutes north of New York City where my parents told me they’ve had to sleep at a friend’s place because they’ve been without power for days. Still, never to disappoint, and despite clear sunny skies, my commuter flight from Boston to New York is delayed almost two hours on account of “missing personnel.” This conjures up images of airline top brass scrambling around to replace the guy who’s responsible for loading the salty snacks on the plane (as if) when the gate agent clarifies that our secondary officer is on his way from another city. Or maybe he overslept. Fortunately, having learned my lesson just months ago when traveling to a trade event in Las Vegas (my luggage was lost, never to be recovered to this day!) I seemingly accurately surmised that the chances of my checked baggage successfully navigating three airplanes and two carriers would be slim-to-none. As such, I had packed light. My fiancee made me pack two pair of pants, which I felt to be overkill, but I have a feeling I’ll thank her later.

So if you think you can’t fit a week’s worth of clothing into 75% of a roller carrier-on, then you’d be wrong. The other 25% of my bag is filled with a menagerie of loose electronic components, busted circuit boards from my company’s products that I want to return to the factory for analysis and a dozen rare, Russian-made numeric display components called Nixie tubes which are to be part of a forthcoming American Innovative product. As I remove my shoes for the usual TSA security dance I muse about the fact that I still have to unpack my laptop but the Kindle, iPod, BlackBerry and myriad of electronic components I’ve just described do not need to be unpacked. However, TSA has the last laugh when they flag the Nixie tubes as suspicious looking and pull me and my bag aside for further investigation. I am secretly pleased that TSA seems to be doing their job and then momentarily scared as the agent swabs down my box of gadgetry for a scan. The Nixie tubes I have on me are what are known as NOS (New Old Stock). In this case, this means that these tubes were made in communist Russia some fifty years ago although they were never installed. Who knows what else they were making. Still, I breathe a sigh of relief as I pass the scan and am freed to go.

Such is the life of a gadget manufacturer and if you think all of these Kindles, Blackberries, iPods, and even Nixie tubes are made by robots in some far off factory, you’re wrong. I learned, first-hand, how difficult – and how rewarding – the art of Chinese manufacturing has become.

Where I’m going in China, I don’t go as a tourist. The industrial zone is not a pretty place. You can’t rent a car, even if you wanted to. There is no public transportation. Pick-ups and drop-offs are pre-arranged with factories. The good news is that the factories love when I visit or, for that matter, when any Westerner visits. There’s a certain hospitality that can be found doing business in China that doesn’t exist to such a great extent in the United States. They book the hotels for me, all meals are provided. They roll out the proverbial red carpet when I visit, which is nice.

The best way to source a factory in China is to go there. For every would-be product entrepreneur whose wind I just took from your sails … relax. In fact, that is not the way that I sourced the first three factories that I ever worked with and I still work with each of those facilities to this day. I am looking forward to seeing factory owners, project managers and engineers, some of whom I’ve worked with for almost seven years.

Before I tell you how I sourced those first three factories, I want to speak to the cover article of last month’s issue (Feb, 2010) of WIRED magazine about the “New Industrial Revolution”. Like many people probably reading this article, WIRED is my favorite magazine. I read it cover to cover every month and have been doing so since almost the inception of that fond rag. In that article, “Atoms Are the New Bits”, the folks at WIRED make it out like all that’s needed these days to make and sell a product is to dial up AliBaba.com, find a factory in Asia, throw a napkin sketch at them and wait for your container of packaged corporate job freedom to arrive in America. If this were true, I would not be so willing to write this article and to give you a little peak into the secret sauce that makes my company, and other companies like mine, possible today.

Ok, so the AliBaba.com part is true. Personally, I prefer a competitive directory called GlobalSources.com but it’s about the same thing. Thousands of manufacturers have listings and photos of OEM items that they specialize in. So your first step is to perform a search for similar items – or rather, items that may be made similarly. American Innovative’s first product was an invention of my design called the Neverlate 7-day Alarm clock. In short, it is a clock radio that was designed with college students in mind – and facilitates a separate alarm setting for each day of the week in order to accommodate class schedules.

Not surprisingly, I searched for manufacturers that made clock radios and not electric motors or stuffed bears. Seems obvious, right? Well in the case of the Neverlate it was but we’re about to release a new item that is a handheld USB device with a dot-matrix screen, which we call the PBA (Personal Baby Assistant). It’s designed to help parents of infants collect data about their newborns – sleep and eating patterns, medication administration, etc. Well who makes one of those in Asia? Hopefully no one. (Aside: If you happen to find your invention during your search for a manufacturer you may want to reassess how unique your idea is. Hopefully you’ve vetted your concept long before when you performed a detailed prior art search, but that’s a whole other article for another day). If your concept is truly new then your process is the same, but you need to be a little more creative. Recall the witch scene in the 1975 movie Monty Python and The Holy Grail. What else (besides a duck) floats? Very small rocks. What else is small and electronic, has a screen and a USB port and some buttons? An MP3 player. A fancy bike computer. A heart-rate monitor. Countless things. A factory that has some experience with these items may be a good candidate to investigate further. Find a dozen such companies and make a list. You’ve completed step one – the long list.

The next step is a little harder. You need to turn the long list into a short list and here’s how you do that. Get out your spec. You do have a spec, right? Ok, get out the napkin sketch. Now open a Word document and write down exactly how your product operates from a user perspective. What do the screens look like? How does the unit respond when buttons are pressed? What are the expectations for brightness, battery life, audio quality if you’re doing a hi-fi or talking device, textile quality and texture if you’re doing a cut-and-sew, materials safety, and so forth.

Sound difficult? It is if you’re not serious about your product. If you’ve been lying awake nights dreaming about making this widget, then you’ve already done the hard part – now put it down on paper. How about the external design? Regrettably it is outside the scope of this article to get into too much minutia on this subject but suffice to say that good visuals will both result in a final product that is closer to the vision in your mind and will lead potential manufacturing partners to take you more seriously. After all, it may be China but a napkin sketch there is perceived the same way a manufacturer would perceive a napkin sketch here. Do yourself a favor. Go to Coroflot.com and spend a few hundred dollars to have a bright freelancer or a RISD student work you up some drawings or, better yet, a basic 3D model. Whoa. You want me to spend money? Regrettably yes. And if you’re not willing to spend three hundred dollars for drawings then you should not be proceeding down the “go it alone” path. The trick is to spend smart money. Some good eye candy is excellent bang for the buck, particularly if it’s a 3D Alias model (which can directly feed the mechanical design stage someday).

Ok, spec in hand, it’s time to turn that long list into a short list. Stay tuned for the second installment, coming tomorrow.

Originally posted at Circuit Breaker

I’m not going to speculate on Woods’ injuries, the cause of the crash, or rumors of fights and affairs. I don’t care, personally. But how the information proliferated makes for interesting dissection. And the fun part is that there’s something for everybody’s agenda! Many will choose to ignore or emphasize unduly one party’s role in this drama, but the fact is that it very neatly exposes both the strengths and weaknesses of both traditional and so-called new media. I hope you’re sitting comfortably.

First, let’s establish some facts about yesterday’s little fracas. Woods crashed his car at around 2:00AM (all times are Eastern unless otherwise specified). A police report was filed at 2:25AM, and 12 hours later the information was released, probably at 2PM. The Orlando Sentinel reported the information, though it has since revised its story, and the referring links from yesterday now point to one filed early Saturday morning. The original story is nowhere to be found, but it is reasonable to presume that, being a local news outlet, it was the first to report — likely within 15 minutes of the press release being issued. BNO News tweeted at 2:24PM that he was seriously injured, which was a reasonable summary of the police report and likely all that the Sentinel reported. CNN posted a blurb 15 minutes later, at 2:39. Interestingly, Local TV news station WFTV had a team on the scene obtaining obtained from an eyewitness truly awful photos of the accident within what must have been an hour or so, since the photos show it is still night and the car was towed away shortly thereafter. (Update: my mistake. They acquired the photos later in the day.)

Thus far fact. Now, you recall the headline: real time, real discussion, real reporting — choose two. My idea, which that punchy little epigram roughly approximates, is that there is only so much a given source of information can provide, and that if it has certain attributes, it by definition cannot have certain others (with exceptions, of course). Don’t get me wrong, however: each source is valuable, but we must be careful not to assign one qualities it does not possess.

Since this is a blog ostensibly covering tech and Web 2.0, we should probably talk about Twitter first.

Twitter: real-time discussion

MG has already lionized Twitter in this affair, and rightly so. It deserves a pat on the back for doing admirably what it was made to do: propagate a meme as quickly as possible. However, his stronger assertion that Twitter is the real time web’s Walter Cronkite warrants a dissenting response, though I don’t think it is, as some suggested, an insult to the late, great journalist so much as a mischaracterization of Twitter.

Twitter’s mode of operation is a lot like that of fire. A spark is struck elsewhere; in this case (and, let’s be honest, in many cases) it is a piece of celebrity gossip. Whether it catches and spreads, and how fast it does so depend on the conditions. This particular spark landed in a bed of tinder and flared up almost instantly. The fact that the entire story (such as it was then) could be contained in 140 characters helped, of course. Its spread was practically instantaneous.

But that’s where Twitter’s role ends. Consider that local TV news was on the scene quickly enough to take pictures of the accident site before the car was towed, though these were likely not widely reported because at the time, a statement had yet to be released. This kind of coverage is obviously impossible for a decentralized news mechanism like Twitter or Google News. Yet it is the source for a large proportion of the coverage which spreads via those mechanisms. Before a fire can spread, it must be started. And it is very rare that Twitter starts any fires.

A legitimate objection to this idea is that of citizen journalism. Hasn’t Twitter enabled Iranians to broadcast their discontent? Wouldn’t it be handy in an emergency situation, provided it was accessible? To some extent, yes. But in the first case, what reason is there to think, even taking into account how well it was applied in Iran, that Twitter is somehow immune to censorship or outright ban? It’s new, is all, and once someone in charge takes it seriously enough to decide it must be stifled, you can be sure Twitter will have no further use there. An earthquake situation provides a better opportunity for Twitter to be used by itself to report; tweets from around the city saying “gas main broken at 13th and Pine” or the like could certainly be of use to a fire department. It’s questionable, however, whether a hashtag could reliably be established in good time, whether the authorities would be able or willing to sort through the noise, and whether such content as could be found would be capable of being transmitted to those who need it. Still, I’m happy to admit its possible utility in such a situation.

The question, really, is whether one has valuable information to report. If so, then for a moment, one becomes a reporter. And that information is welcome, if it can get where it needs to be. But the truth is that the bulk of users rarely have content to contribute; their role is promotion and discussion. Compare this to a journalist, who makes it his business to either be present at or go immediately to wherever news occurring, then broadcast it via established methods and outlets. More on them later.

Lastly, it’s troubling that what news is spread depends on the population at large. This is more of a personal objection. I have commented that Twitter is the perfect vessel which which to sate the public’s appetite for sensational minutiae. What spreads on Twitter is what’s popular, not what’s important. The last few years have been calamitous for mainstream news integrity for several reasons, but among them is the increasing emphasis on color stories and special interest news, which Twitter seems tailor-made to propagate.

This is also the reason why Twitter is not Walter Cronkite. Cronkite may have worked in real time, and he may have reported unconfirmed information, but the reason he was trusted to do so was because he was the exact opposite of Twitter. His personal discretion and experience made him a trusted individual. Wisdom is not arrived at by consensus, nor the truth, no matter if ten people weigh in or a thousand. No synthesis of opinion or automated sifting of information is a replacement for a discerning, informed, and familiar human being.

Broadcast media: real time reporting

The mainstream (i.e. broadcast) media is supposed to be formed of such human beings. This is, of course, not the case. However, that does not mean the model is broken. The companies comprising it — that’s another matter. The current deplorable state of mainstream news is more, if I may venture a guess, due to a continued financial investment in an obsolete ratings and advertising structure than any real decay of principle. Or rather, the only principle that is really decayed is the networks’ independence from private money. The BBC presents a partial solution in a state-sponsored network, but private bankrolling is simply replaced by public, but that’s not an ideal solution to say the least. I don’t have a better proposal, but I’m happy to point the finger, and our mainstream journalists aren’t doing a hell of a lot of journalism.

That said, the mainstream media were the first on the scene at Woods’ house, and the fact is they will always be the first on the scene. What would Google News or Twitter aggregate if there was no journalist there in the first place? Citizen reporting can only go so far; the idea of a completely decentralized press is hopelessly naive. Access to the public’s information is increasingly important, but there will always be someone, many people in fact, whose job it is to work at something that, if it’s not a local news station, will look a hell of a lot like one.

What will be the source for firsthand news if we don’t have a journalist class? Local news teams, mainstream media at their most mainstream, are the only ones with the experience, the resources, and the staff to cover anything of magnitude. Doubt that? Don’t confuse the death of traditional media distribution with the death of traditional media. The former is happening; the latter is an illusion.

What the mainstream and local media lack is scope and perspective. Imagine a thousand little rooms, each with its own goings-on and a person broadcasting live from each one. They see what’s around them and report it, but their scope is limited. Their first responsibility is to their “room,” their community — hence their journalistic myopia. They know they can’t cover everything in the world, but they don’t have to. Because the world relies upon them when something like this Woods incident occurs in their vicinity. It’s centralized decentralization.

Print and other delayed media: reporting and discussion

What’s left is the news you read the next day in the newspaper — or, really, the next hour on CNN.com or BBC News. These, the most traditional forms of media of all (essentially newsprint or a virtualized version thereof), provide comparatively complete, one-stop reporting and analysis of the event in question. I don’t mean to suggest that the AP, New York Times, or other article outlets are infallible, far from it. But they provide the perspective and context that Twitter (or your favorite social news aggregator) and broadcast news usually lack — and from individuals that have an interest in accurate reporting. Of course, this comes at a cost of timeliness, which may or may not be critical.

Obviously newspapers are having a lot of trouble, and the herd is being thinned, but delayed media (my term), whether distributed as inky tree pulp or otherwise, will continue to have a place in the party. The skills of newspapermen are still required, whether you like it or not, and will be for a long time to come.

Think of the recent story in which President Obama bowed to the Japanese Emperor when visiting that country. Twitter could alert instantly you to the fact that this event occurred, but little more, and only if you’re glued to it. Mainstream media will be the source for the story and video, but is capable of only basic commentary. Delayed media would give you the event, the reactions, the context, and anything more required to make a complete story — but not for at least a few hours.

Which of these methods you use depends on your profession, location, age, and a hundred other factors. Whether such trade-offs as each offers are welcome to you is a personal decision — but it’s unwise to write off a category altogether (as I catch myself doing with Twitter). To use one and not another may forgo or convey an advantage in some situations, but none embodies every aspect of news — content, promptness, and analysis.

Nor will any of the three worlds of information distribution go down without their essence being absorbed, Mega Man-like, into the being of the others. Will Twitter wither without the substantial content of delayed media? Not likely. Will delayed media croak if it doesn’t learn some lessons from Twitter? A little more likely, but that lesson is being learned. Will mainstream and broadcast media go extinct? Not for decades, though they will certainly have some adaptation to do.

The myth of medium

The truth is that there is no old media. And no new media. There is only the present media, its aspect as confused and shifting as any compound creature from legend. I have to quote Hawthorne here:

According to the best accounts which I have been able to obtain, this Chimaera was nearly, if not quite, the ugliest and most poisonous creature, and the strangest and unaccountablest, and the hardest to fight with, and the most difficult to run away from, that ever came out of the earth’s inside. It had a tail like a boa-constrictor; its body was like I do not care what; and it had three separate heads, one of which was a lion’s, the second a goat’s, and the third an abominably great snake’s. And a hot blast of fire came flaming out of each of its three mouths! Being an earthly monster, I doubt whether it had any wings; but, wings or no, it ran like a goat and a lion, and wriggled along like a serpent, and thus contrived to make about as much speed as all the three together.

That sounds about right! Now, if you can stomach the unbearable pretension of likening of the complex media world to a monster (be grateful I didn’t quote Lovecraft), you can see that it is unlikely that one head will just up and consume the other, though they may quarrel and gnaw on one another frequently. One significant difference: while the creature Hawthorne described combines the speed of all three, the present media finds itself limited by its own strengths. There is no popular discussion that does not cause sensationalism, for instance, and there is no expert inspection that does not cause delay. The nature of the beast, however, does change over time, and you may safely lay your bets on Twitter (social media in general, really — any “real time discussion”) being an important (but limited) part of it.

Finally: blogs are the real wild card here. The issue is that they qualify for each category but aren’t fundamentally limited to any — which makes them both versatile and unreliable. This blog, for example, has pieces that fall under every category: tweet-like posts about some Apple rumor, rehashes of press releases, and interminable editorials like the one you’re just about to finish. Yes, the credibility (and readability) of the blogosphere is still questioned, puzzlingly enough, but who knows — the Chimaera may grow a fourth head yet.

[Note: For anyone confused: I chose the three outlets shown in the top diagram as visible representatives, and am not necessarily talking specifically about each one; you'll notice that there are shots from MSNBC, Fox News, and the newsroom photograph is of the Daily Telegraph.]

Tenants of the Fisher Plaza data center carry servers out of the building Friday morning. The building houses the Bing Travel servers, among others.

(Credit: TechFlash )

Update at 3:30 p.m. PDT July 4: Power was restored to Fisher Plaza early Saturday morning with back-up generators, and many sites …

As with any change that involves the social networking giant, the announcement has created a big debate online. Some users have been requesting the service for a while now, whereas some users are stringently against it. Here’s a quick overview of some of the positive and negative impacts the move may cause: Positive – The creation of usernames should improve shareability, which has got to be a good thing in terms of a social media. Instead of having to search for an individual’s actual name via Google or Facebook directly, users can now search by username – which has proved popular on other platforms like Twitter and MySpace. It will also be much easier to give your Facebook details to new people you meet. You could even have it printed on a business card if you are really cool/sad. It will also make it easier to link all of your social networking tools together – providing you use the same username for every platform you are registered with. Negative – As with any change to Facebook, concerns are going to be raised about privacy and security. Protest groups have, not surprisingly, already been set up. There are also major worries that people won’t be able to get their desired user names. Facebook has over 200million members, remember. That’s a lot of people competing to get usernames. There’s bound to be issues with username squatting as well, as there are with domain names currently. The move also leads to comparisons with MySpace – a service that many people stopped using as the popularity of Facebook began to take hold. It could be argued that usernames are a bit of a backward step. Either way, expect Facebook to freeze up at 5.01am on Saturday as the race begins. I’ll be awarding a gold star to anyone who manages to register ‘markzuckerberg’ as their username. Read the full FAQs here.

Neither Sprint nor Palm is discussing specific sales figures, but Tim Donahue, vice president of business marketing for Sprint, said that the launch exceeded the company’s expectations.

(Credit: CNET )

“We experienced our best one day of sales and single weekend sales for any phone we’ve launched in our history,” he said. “We sold out of the device over the weekend in most of our store locations. And it happened at a much faster rate than we had planned on. “

While the crowds that showed up on Saturday morning to buy the Pre at Sprint stores and other retail locations where the phone was offered were small in number compared to the crowds that have gathered for the past two iPhone launches, analysts are calling the launch of the Pre a success. A J.P. Morgan report estimated that more than 50,000 phones were sold in the first two days the phone was available. The Wall Street Journal cited analysts who said that between 50,000 and 100,000 Pres had been sold.

Now Sprint and Palm must wait to see if the momentum will continue.

…

Originally posted at News – Wireless

The Sprint store in the Flatiron building on Manhattan’s Fifth Ave. received nearly 200 Palm Pres for the launch.

(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET)

Unlike the huge crowds of people that formed long lines and camped out in front of Apple and AT&T stores days in advance of the iPhone’s launch, crowds for the Palm Pre were much smaller and tended to arrive in the morning just before stores opened.

Neither Sprint nor Palm have released official figures about how many devices they hoped to sell on the Pre’s first day. But Sprint representatives had been trying to downplay expectations for iPhone-like crowds ahead of the launch. Sprint spokesman Mark Elliott told The New York Times earlier this week that the company not only didn’t expect long lines for the Pre at its 1,100 stores, but that it didn’t want them.

And it looks like the company got its wish. Salespeople at Sprint stores in New York City said a handful of people gathered outside their locations early Saturday morning. But most lines didn’t even come close to the madness experienced on iPhone launch days.

Crowds tended to be bigger at Best Buy stores, which were offering the device for the $199 price without the $100 mail-in rebate. Customers buying a Pre from Sprint, the exclusive carrier of the device, pay $299 at the time of purchase and can get $100 back with a mail-in rebate. According to Rich Pesce, a Sprint spokesman, most new phones offered through the carrier have the mail-in rebate offer.

Many Best Buy locations sold out of the Pre almost immediately. …

Originally posted at News – Wireless

It’s a Saturday morning. You’re making Silver Dollar Hots for the family. The doorbell rings. It’s the mailman. He’s brought a CubeGuard.

That’s right: on the traditional day before or the actual day of rest, the mailman is here to bring you something to remind you of work. But what a gadget it is! It’s basically one of those crowd control tapes with a spring loaded reel to wind it back up after use. However, this tape has a calming scene – a mountain range or a happy face – with a message (”Do not disturb” or, in my case, “John is blogging. Do not disturb.”

That’s right: it’s crowd control tape for your cubicle. Read on for more info and a giveaway.

The CubeGuard has magnets on either side as well as high-test Velcro fasteners for folks without a metal door frame. The standard kit costs $19.99 for the standard kit and ten dollars more for a custom model.

Do they make sense? Sure. In a world full of distractions these things are kind of cute and a nice way to ensure that dude who no one likes at work who always asks what’s up after work and who always ends up finding out that you’re all going to Red Robin doesn’t poke his head around your cube door. Besides, we all need a little fun in our lives.

That said, CubeGuard is giving us 10 $19.99 coupons to give away. I’ll give them away to 10 commenters at random. Good luck and sorry to bring up work on a Saturday. I’ll close the contest at noon on Tuesday.