The future of personal computing Part One

I was reading a story in a local magazine the other day, I forced myself because I’m interested, but at first glance it was not very insightful in my humble opinion. I get so tied up trying to make the future happen that sometimes I don’t sit back and think about it in more depth and I should.

There has been a lot of talk about the Semantic Web and about sharing data on the web with lots of applications and people, lots of talk about collaborating with other people and for sure that is happening. I use Friendfeed, I’m active on Facebook, sometimes Flickr, Buzznet, LinkedIn and loads more. Twitter is the only one I really use on my Blackberry, which doesn’t suit many of the social networking applications very well.

The problem I have with putting information on web sites such as Gmail and others is can I rely on it being there forever? I love the idea of being able to access everything anywhere anytime and A3 (cubed) is one of my mantras, but ignoring security I still have fears over losing access to my data, like when recently Mucaah.com, a web site in the Netherlands where I was building a fan base disappeared overnight.

But anyway, looking to the future, the big next thing for me is LBS or Location Based Services and on any device, any time. It is about interacting with your environment and your social network in real places in real time. Sure a lot of people including myself spend a lot of time at desktops, but I plan to do much more of my computing, especially social computing at a mobile level.

I have owned a myriad of devices and still have many of them including Palm’s, A Casio Zoomer, Symbol’s, iPaq’s, iMate as well as other Smartphones from a variety of brands. I worked hard to help bring these products into mainstream and not just as clever phones but as tools to enhance the way people react in this world. To that end in the beginning of this century I wrote Unleashing the Road Warrior, Master Your Palm and master Your Pocket PC. All of these were about maximising the potential of these devices and the communications to help you work and play smarter rather than harder, another personal mantra. I don’t mean you shouldn’t play hard, but that it shouldn’t be hard work.

Hopefully my next one, whether it’s a new Blackberry, iPhone, Xperia or something else, will have a GPS chip in it and a variety of applications that will enable my mobile world. I have some major activities in mind to help develop this area of computing and turn it into a reality.

So looking a few years into the future, what is my vision? I could write a book, but like my last ones they date very quickly, so this blog will have to do. The biggest impact of these technologies will be social, after all people do business with people, they have relationships with people and those relationships and networks have far more power when they are spatially enabled.

Over the last few years applications like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Buzznet, Flickr, Twitter and more have been the most popular development in computing or social computing at least and people are loving it, but whilst many of these applications are now able to be used in a mobile environment (for example I use Twitter on my phone), the don’t have a spatial component yet.

So lets have a brief look into the near future. In one of my previous blogs I described a typical day for me on the Internet. Now lets have a bit of a look at what that same day might look like in 2013.

I wake up to the sound of my current favourite song which is being played on my iPhone V6 which is in the dock of my alarm clock. Note this is the latest model, but they have been around since 2008. I get up and go into the bathroom, taking my iPhone with me and put it into my bathroom dock which has water resistant wiring so that it doesn’t corrode from the steam of my hot shower.

While I was asleep my iPhone connected to iTunes, not through Vodafone who are still greedy in their data prices but wirelessly to my wireless router which connects to my fibre-optic internet connection with its guaranteed minimum 100Mbps connection and updated all my favourite podcasts in a matter of 30 seconds.

It automatically starts playing the podcasts in order of preference while I shower and I catch up with the latest in tech news from Channelflip and Geekbrief.

As I have breakfast I plug my iPhone into the projector pod and catch up with the latest personalised news which is displayed on the dining room wall and catch up with the things I am interested in.

I’m going to stop here for now, because it’s obvious that this is going to be longer than I intended and if I don’t post it now it will never finish or will become a book. So RSS or bookmark this blog if this is of interest to you:)

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

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Seth Godin et al

When I was at Song Summit Sydney organised by APRA a few days ago many speakers made suggestions of books to read as well as blogs and other sources of data. One speaker suggested that all song writers who want to market themselves should read Seth Godins Blog.

Now I’ve been a subscriber of his for quite a long time, but don’t read every one of his blogs, I suspect that he doesn’t read any of mine, but anyway, today I decided that I should check out his recent postings to see what was new and found a sage bit of advice, which is “Write like a bloger”. This is great advice and I can attest to it’s value.

Many people love to pontificate and show off their literary prowess by using the longest and most obtuse language and jargon they can think of and it makes their writing boring. Over the years I have written as a freelance journalist and magazine columnist, mostly about technology and of course there was also my book Unleashing the Road Warrior. I always wrote in a conversational manner and I frequently got positive feedback including pone calls, emails and letters to editors in the publications I wrote for. The result of my writing style was:

1. People felt like I was talking to them and many people feel like they know me even if we haven’t met, with the consequence that when I spoke at conferences and seminars people would come up and talk to me because I was acessible.
2. People understood what I was talking about and were able to find the information they needed.
3. I got a lot of business out of it as well as opportunities to speak and present at events all over the world.

I am still in the technology world, although the majority of my writing these days is about my other passion, which is songwriting and I hope eventually to do this full time. All I need is my first number one hit:) In songwriting the same thing is true. Your writing needs to be accessible to your target market. If you are writing for a teenage audience, your language needs to fit the way they think and talk, but it does of course also have to be authetic.

When I wrote my song ‘Another Stretch in Iraq‘ I wrote it for Americans who had served or were serving and I spent 6 months researching the topic. Yes, I used some phrases that weren’t exactly as you speak them and I used some metaphor, but we do that in speech anyway don’t we, I don’t think I’ve opened a can of worms here. I picked up some jargon like MRE, which is short for Made Ready To Eat or is otherwise known as rations. A lot of people won’t get that, but the they aren’t my target audience for the song. The proof was in the pudding.

When I played this song to a live audience in the USA last year the reaction was amazing. One guy co-incidentally known a Mack came to the stage after I played the song with tears in his eyes. He said he had served in Desert Storm and his son was on furlough in Hawai and about to head back to Iraq for another stretch. He said that listening to the lyrics took him right back to the front, so to speak. Even though I had never been there, I had done my homework and made it real, I wrote’ in Seth Godin’s terms, “like a blogger”, and when people listened to the song, it was almost as if they were talking to themselves.

The important thing which I think Jimmy Webb said in his presentation at S3 was to know your market and to write to it. A great song is one that people listen to and totally relate to. They should feel like they own the song, as if it was written for them, or in fact almost as if they wrote it themselves. Then they are in fact relating to themselves.

The thing is that you are the most important person in the world, although my wife says that she has to be the most important person in my world, but if I don’t exist in the first place then she can’t be important to me. Let me put that another way. If we had a party on the weekend and I came to see you with a pile of photos that were taken at the party. Now unless you were incredibly attracted to someone there, which photos will you spend the most time looking at ? (now I don’t want to get involved with genderalisations here (yes I know that word doesn’t exist, but this is my blog right?) but which photos are you going to spend the most time looking at? your own of course).

So my goal as a songwriter, which was ultimately the purpose of this blog is to write commercial songs, i.e. hit songs and part of my method in doing that, in writing like a blogger, is that the person who sings along with the radio or performance feels like the song is theirs, that it is about them, that they own the experience that the song is about.

By the way, if you happen to know an artist or A&R person looking for a new song, please point them in my direction:)

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)