Groceries As A Service

Alma is the grocery store I like the most. The pity is it is not close to where I live and it is almost always crowded... So I do not shop there too often. You may imagine my delight when I have recently learned they opened an Internet grocery store - the Alma24. Yesterday I went to check how it works and I am very happy... It took me less than 15 minutes to register and complete the first order. The service is very well engineered, searching and browsing the product catalog is smooth, there are obvious options of adding to cart or adding to shopping lists, converting cart to a shopping list or loading a prepared shopping list to the cart. At the end of the process you select the delivery time by picking one of the available one hour time slots. Somebody must have spent a lot of time and effort working on the user experience, as you do not have to re-confirm anything until you finalize the order.

So now, as it is very likely that I will move my grocery shopping experience to the Web, it is time do to some project planning, ie thinking a little how we - as a family - will plan our on-line shopping. I started by setting up a couple of shopping lists, separate one for each family member, and all of them pointing to my account (I always end up paying for these things anyway...). It works fine so far, as everyone can compose a list of individual desires... The only drawback is you need a PC to do that. And usually grocery desires intensify when you open a refrigerator, not when you sit in front of a computer...

This brings us to the several years old concept of intelligent, connected fridge. Yes, they have even materialized... sort of... I have already seen a couple of fridges with large LCD screens... but I am afraid the user experience is not fully integrated there yet. Correct me please if I am wrong, but I seriously doubt LG or Electrolux or Candy have integrated their fridges with our local Alma24.pl grocery store. And the user experience is the key! Example: I take out the last bottle of milk. It has a barcode, so I should be able to point it in front of a barcode reader integrated in the fridge, the fridge should connect (using my account settings) to my online grocery store. The store obviously knows the barcode means milk, and should offer a number of simple options on the touch screen: order (+quantity), try different (brand of milk) etc... We are not really that far off that vision... Before, the smart fridges were said to have RFID readers and food was required to be RFID - tagged and fridge was to be responsible for predicting I was running out of milk... we do not really need that level of sophistication... Just a simple touch screen well integrated with the backend web service of choice... The fridge manufacturers should just give us a standard, upgradeable web browsers integrated with their touch screens on the door and online grocery stores should build a standard, touch - optimized versions of their GUIs.

Until that happens I will probably devote one Nokia N800 tablet to sit in the kitchen and serve as a virtual grocery store shelf...

Infrant ReadyNAS NV+

The first, experimental Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ unit arrived just before the weekend. I say experimental, as in the longer run I plan to base a significant part of my home computer / entertainment network on these devices. I have picked the ReadyNAS for several reasons. Basically it is a storage server or even simpler a hard disk with Ethernet interface. There are many units like that on the market. The Infrant is special for several reasons, most of them seem important to me:

• It has redundancy built-in. Up to 4 SATA drives (my initial unit has just two with two empty expansion slots) in various RAID setups. Hard drives do fail. So if you think of storing a significant amount of data, the drive setup should be redundant. In my configuration the Infrant box will have 4x500GB drives, resulting in a 1,5TB capacity with redundancy (4th drive). 500GB drives seem to sin in a capacity/price sweetspot and typical home should do fine now with 1,5TB. Later when larger drives become cheaper the storage can be upgraded. BTW I plan to use the Seagate ST3500630NS drives. The "N" is important here, as opposed to the "AS" series - the N drives are designed for continous 24x7 operation and are better prepared to handle the vibrations coming from the other drives in the same cage. Worth the extra $30 they cost...
• The file system (EXT3) is fully Unicode - compliant. This is especially important when filenames contain special characters. I used to have problems with that on lower end NAS servers like the Linksys NSLU-2.
• You can run the Slimserver and other services on the Infrant box itself. Actually the current Infrants come with the Slimserver preloaded and ready to be configured. Despite some people complaining on the poor Slimserver performance, I do not see this as a problem. Well... the http interface is not lightning fast, but decent enough and the Squeezeboxes perform very well with my library of more than 7000 songs.
• You can schedule automatic backup and replication jobs among several Infrant units. This is important to me, as I intend to have two units (one in each home, serving as a local storage and a remote secondary backup to each other) replicated to each other over a VPN link. Have not tried this yest, but this setup seems what I need.

After two days of playing with the first Infrant unit I must say I am very happy with it. Small, silent, spacious, universal home network storage / streaming server with professional look and feel - recommended!

Telecom 2.0

I have just returned from the NMS Communications Connect conference taking place in Madrid, Spain. They did a very good job selecting the speakers and panelists. There were many, including Brough Turner, the CTO of NMS who confirmed my earlier musings of voice (quality) being the killer application of a next generation telephone network. Brough said - and I do agree - better voice could be more pervasive than anything else. Remember - at the moment our conversations utilize the same bandwidth they used to 100 years ago. Finally the industry starts to understand? Good, better late than never...

Community services, Facebook included, and user generated content in general, were the hot topic as well, when the participants finally seem to agree with the Telecosm law of separation of content from conduit. I could hear "we need more content innovation" and while "consumers are smart, not dumb as most of the carriers used to think", the "locked-in users turn into active customer dis-loyalty"... Hey, finally seems like something is on the move...

But absolutely the best presentation of the entire event was delivered by Lee S Dryburgh of ss7.net. He seemed to be the only one understanding the coming changes, the Telecom 2.0. Lee made a couple of interesting observations. Like our life metadata being continuously streamed onto the Internet, taking forms of music preferences (Last.FM), location updates (dopplr.com) or product desires (Amazon wish lists). He also noted the telecoms cannot compete with billions of others in terms of service innovation, strengthening even more the urge of content / conduit separation and how it affects the business models.

Driving around the city earlier today in the November snow I kept on digesting Lee's talk envisioning several further development towards the ultimate vision of Telecom 2.0. Here are the points:

• We will drop the current point - to - point "exclusive conversations" mode. Currently by dialing a number we actually open an exclusive "session" with the other party. This is the throwback of the Bell's technology of two endpoints joined by wire. This is not what we do having face to face (or recently even Internet) conversations... Usually we are in a room with several people or enter a room... and our conversations are not exclusive sessions... we talk to people, but hear the others and can be easily interrupted to resume the thread later on... There is absolutely no reason this will be anything different over the wire (or wireless)... With the advances of the Telecom 2.0 we will have the freedom to be in a virtual room and join other rooms and conduct more life-like non-exclusive conversations.
• Taking above into account, presence and filtering will play the key role. Following the instant messaging model before joining someone for conversation we will have his/ her status available. And what is even more important: our presence statuses will be set separately to different friends and members of the family. It is obvious: while at work, I should generally be available to my coworkers and business partners, seen as busy to the friends, and after hours this will be the opposite.
• And the final form of communications will be sharing your senses with others. Writing letters long time ago we tried to describe what we saw and heard. And this message stripped of all its wealth and compressed into a few words on paper took many days to reach the other party. Then we could describe things around us real time via voice telephone call. Then we started sharing pictures and videos. More and more real time. More and more rich information. Ultimately when I call you, you will be able to see through my own eyes and hear through my own ears...
  

Nikon S51C Connected Camera

Last week when I wrote about the Momento Connected Photo Frame, I said in the last paragraph "What we really need now are cameras able to upload photos to Picasa with a press of a button.". Wishes do come true (more on that later...). Here comes the Nikon Coolpix S51C, a compact point and shoot camera, with built-in WiFi. According to Nikon's press release, the S51C can upload images to Flickr. Really exciting!

My Momento frame, ordered a week ago, is still somewhere in transit, I hope to get it tomorrow... And after reading the Nikon's specs on the S51C, I was almost ready to buy one. What a nice couple they would be: snap a photo with the camera, press a button and off it goes instantly to Flickr, where it is immediately pulled from by several photo frames scattered around my family. Imagine myself being in Australia, taking a picture of Ayers Rock and my Mom having it displayed automatically on her photo frame in a matter of seconds. No computers in between. No delays. No hassles. Point - shoot - upload - view.

Unfortunately the above scenario is still too good to be true. The client device manufacturers still have to mess with the web services. Couldn't they just keep their gadgets open and standards - compliant? The Momento frame, while it reads RSS feeds and can be attached to photo sharing sites like Picasa and Flickr, still needs a subscription to the manufacturer's Momento Live service to manage the feeds. Same with the Nikon. Yes, theoretically it can transmit the images to Flickr, but first they are uploaded to the Nikon's mypicturetown.com site. Later you have to use your computer to get to that site and press the "Flickr" button to move the pictures to the Flickr service. Nikon has been so close to the real solution... But they did it all wrong eventually. What is the reason for posting pictures directly from a camera to the Web, when you have to use a computer to finish the process? What is more, both Nikon and i-Mate (the Momento manufacturer) see us subscribing to their crappy services, while we already have either Picasa or Flickr accounts... So much unnecessary clutter...

On the other hand both Momento frame and the Nikon S51C are the harbingers of things to come. I still believe in a few months we will be able to buy a connected photo camera (WiFi and possibly 3G equipped) that uploads stuff directly to a photo site of choice. Nikon and others will realize the awkward way they give us to share the content actually restricts the sales, not boosting them at all (something they must have been envisioning creating the S51C). I still believe in a few months we will be able to buy a connected photo frame that does not require any proprietary subscription and comes preconfigured to connect to the leading photo sharing sites. The law of separation of content from conduit is still in force. Those who understand and obey it will create the winning products and services of the future.