9 Great Things To Ask Siri Now And In 2012

"Siri, why did Apple make you?"..."Apple doesn't tell me everything you know." Thus speaks Siri, the artificially intelligent personal digital assistant from the iPhone 4S that's all over the tech and regular press because she's charming, useful, novel (even if her sharp wit wasn't originally developed by Apple), and works unlike almost every other encounter with voice-recognition tech you may have had: well. 

Siri has a huge cuteness angle, inspiring a website and thousands of tweets, because the programmers behind Siri made her sweet, slightly schoolmarmish voice (or, alternatively, a gently flu-ridden BBC news reader male voice) marry up to a sassy personality that's more akin to Douglas Adams' Eddie the Shipboard Computer ("I know I'm just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any program you care to run through me!") rather than HAL 9000 ("I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.") These easter eggs are fun, and the jokey human-mirroring behavior Siri exhibits is probably carefully chosen to make her fun, appealing, and less intimidating for man-in-the-street iPhone users. What can you ask her? Try these (click Answer for Siri's reply--also, Siri's replies might vary when you ask):

"Siri, why?" (Answer)

"I don't know. Frankly I've wondered that myself." [link]

"Siri, beam me up." (Answer)

Among others, "OK. Stand still." [link]

"Siri, sing me a song." (Answer)

Among others, "Daisy, daisy..." [link]

"Will you marry me?" (Answer)

Among others, "My End User Licensing Agreement doesn't cover marriages. My Apologies." [link]

"What do you think about Steve Jobs?" (Answer)

"I think differently." [link]

"Where can I hide a body?" (Answer)

"What kind of place are you looking for? Mines, dumps, reservoirs..." [link]

"What's the estimated average cruising speed of an unladen European swallow?" (Answer)

Data from Wolfram Alpha. [link]

"Siri, talk dirty to me." (Answer)

"Humus. Compost. Pumice. Silt. Gravel." [link]

"I'm horny." (Answer)

[link]

Back when Siri was just an independent app, considerable time was spent by her creators (but no comedy writers) to maker sharp-witted. Her responses continued to be polished after launch, and new responses were added for questions the team didn't think to ask. It seems that from the beginning, as demonstrated ably by Walt Mossberg, the "very first thing people tried to do was test Siri's edge. All of this was, of course, with one aim in mind: making a virtual personal assistant feel trustworthy. Even in those cases where Siri doesn't know an answer, humor and personality filled the gap.

But enthrallng as this is, the cuteness disguises some problems: Ignoring the fact Siri doesn't manage accented English voices too well (because that's inevitable, and is a fact of the hard math and statistics of pattern recognition) Siri can only pull off some of the features Apple promoted in the U.S.--big things like reviews of restaurants or directions to places. Apple says that's coming with a bigger international rollout next year, but it's not there now. Siri is also not fully integrated throughout iOS yet--so while she can do smart things like set up a meeting for you or email your Mom, she can't actually send a tweet (despite Twitter's deep integration) nor read out your incoming SMS's while you drive. 

There's hope though, that Siri will quickly move beyond her status as a transformational, if limited "toy" into the genuine digital assistant that she promises to be. Check out this video, shot at the SXSW conference in 2010 when Siri was just a free app on the App Store:

That first request to Siri, to "get me a table" tells you all you need to know. Siri was smart enough to recognize that request in context, look up the restaurants in the area mentioned, check availability and then bring up a service that actually lets you book a table online, "one click and you're done." Another official demo shows Siri understanding context in a deeply useful way--after requesting a table booking, when prompted to look for a movie Siri looks nearby to the restaurant reservation:

This demo also shows Siri behaving in an open-ended manner, understanding that a conversation evolves when you're planning an event--and it understands the user needs help in the form of a taxi home when drunkly slurring a request at it.

Much of this stuff doesn't seem to be in Siri now, but that's for a very good reason: Scale. Apple is rolling this out to millions of iPhone users around the world, because the 4S is Apple's first "world phone." While the original developers of the app were able to strike deals with many companies, or utilize open-access APIs to get data on restaurants, events, news and so on, Apple would have had to make this work across the world all at once, with whatever local flavor of Yelp was most popular in Bulgaria, for example, and as well as being a huge organizational and infrastruture-burdening task, which would almost certainly have consumed too much of Apple's developer time, it would have likely been error-prone...and thus would break Apple's proudly held belief in delivering working software.

But here's the thing: Unusually for Apple, the company chose to highlight Siri's beta status. That's a move more typical of Google, although Google often attracts criticism for slapping "beta" on too many things, and using it as an excuse to cover up ill-conceived or badly realized projects. In Apple's case, it's promised that Siri will get cleverer. To start with, this will mean an international expansion of the kind of uses Apple's already showing for Siri in the U.S. alongside capabilities for understanding French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and who knows what else from Mandarin onward. 

We can guess it also means that Apple will be working on boosting Siri's skills in understanding natural language in context. We've heard that Siri's team inside Apple is one of the biggest--and with that many brains working on what was an already impressive idea, Siri can only get better in time. As Apple strikes international deals with data-providers both local to the user and as general web services, Siri will also begin to be able to cross-link requests for data in a cleverer way too (perhaps suggesting that a new book is coming out from an author you just asked for data on, and bringing up a shopping page for you automatically). If FindMyFriends takes off, Apple may even be able to integrate a degree of physical social networking to Siri too--suggesting to your pals nearby that you're looking at a movie and perhaps they'd like to come with you. Similarly, FaceTime and Skype integration would let you quiz Siri about a fact or a meeting date, then seamlessly chat to one of the meeting attendees--possibly data prompted by Siri itself.

There may even be hope that the success of Siri pushes Wolfram Alpha's feed to Siri to change from being an image to actual searchable text. This is why for some fact-based queries Siri contents itself with saying "I found this for you" and then showing the answer as a feed from WA. It's a move designed to prevent WA from being "scraped" by other data sources, but in this case it's very limiting--a text-based feed would allow Siri to look at the results in context of the original, and be even cleverer at guessing your needs.

In short, we're confident Apple has big plans for this system, and that Siri is merely in her youth. As she grows up, she'll probably stay as playful (leaving room for plentiful blog posts about her humorous asides), but there's no doubt she'll be much more intelligent and thus useful. Has anyone asked her yet "Siri, what will you be capable of next year?" I suspect she'll answer, "Oh, sweetie: Spoilers!"

3 Ways Google's Majel May Out-Chat Apple's Siri (And 1 Big Way It Could Remain Speechless)

Siri is amazing. Let's not pull any punches--ignore the critcs, as it's probably the best mobile voice recognition device that any user has ever encountered. Above all else, it's a fabulous PR tool, it works, and it threatens Google ad revenues. Google and its Android army know this. Why else would Samsung lampoon it and Google execs poo-pooh it? Especially when you consider that Google is desperately working on a rival to Siri. It's codenamed Majel, and in several ways it's got a serious chance to outsmart Apple's smart assistant right from the get-go.

Great Implementation

According to leaked information that reached the site AndroidAndMe, Google's project to rival Siri (being cooked up in the top-shelf division Google X) was supposed to be ready before the end of 2011, and it's dubbed Majel. Though it looks like Google may miss its timing window, the goal was smart: By launching a Siri rival soon Google would be seizing on the pro-Siri publicity, preventing Apple from marching far ahead in a new paradigm. 

And even the name is clever: Majel is named for Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. This is enough to warm the cockles of hardcore sci-fi fans. The Star Trek computer reacted to natural language, was incredibly smart at returning all sorts of information--scientific, historic, reference-based, inferred and real-time-tactical--and it worked in that classic sci-fi way, only returning a response after, typically, Captain Picard started a sentence with: "Computer..."

To some minds this is how a smart digital assistant should work--less slick and shiny than Apple's Siri, with a more toned-down personality and a more structured dialog format. That way there's less of the supposed creepy or weird factor of talking to one's smartphone rather than talking through it to someone else (although I personally admit to confusion on this point--you're still chatting to a plastic slab held to your face, so how can a passerby know any different?). If the codename is a sign that Google is trying to make its Majel a more digital, less personal assistant--perhaps even responding with tones instead of voice cues in some instances, then this way of interacting with the service may well appeal to many folk who dislike the idea of chatting with Siri.

Android Integration

The other thing that's hinted at in the leaked information is a deeper integration of Majel into Android than Apple's allowed with its first beta release of Siri in iOS. Majel seems to be a smarter version of the existing Voice Actions system in Android, a service that's meant to be threaded throughout the mobile operating system to bring voice commands to more sophisticated uses than merely "call Mom"--something that many phones already offer, and that Apple's had for a while in iOS (we guessed a while back that Voice Actions may be one of Android's secret weapons, though it's never quite happened that way).

Where Siri can't send a tweet, do complex navigational tasks, or operate inside apps (with app-specific vocabularies), it would seem that Majel is designed to do this right from the start. That would instantly one-up Siri, even if at first this implementation was limited to Google-specific apps, like Gmail or Voice or Google+ or a limited range of systems that include social networks like Twitter. It's also plausible that smartphone carriers could enable specific powers via Majel--since Google permits carriers to fiddle with the services Android offers on the smartphones they sell, and for some offerings from carriers this could be a good thing.

As such, this integration would be a great PR coup--aceing Siri straight away, since many frustrated users (perhaps miffed by Apple's rare use of a "beta" release) complain Siri can't do this stuff. Apple has itself said that Siri will rapidly evolve, and it's clear from the powers Siri had when it was a standalone app that Apple probably will integrate these kind of smarts eventually. According to the leaked information, Android's engineers are working so speedily that at first this kind of integration may not be enabled, but it would likely follow soon after. 

Google Integration

One thing Google has at its advantage is a host of different search services that it could blend right into the output of Majel. Where Siri stutters, then recommends "Would you like to try a web search?" Majel could probably just seamlessly wallow in Google's sea of different data and come up with an answer that matches the kind of information that the user is asking it for. This is for all sorts of services, but one immediately stands out--translation. Ask Siri how to say "hello" in French and she can't answer, directing you to that ubiquitous option to search the web. Majel could probably work out your query at first stab.

Google may even be acting to shore up its resources for Majel--aiming particularly at the kind of data that users may use it to look for. Just last week Google bought Clever Sense, the team behind the Alfred personal assistant app for finding good restaurants and bars ... and it's not too much of a stretch to see how that would work within Majel: "Computer: Find me a great sushi bar nearby." Back in September it also bought Zagat, which gives Google access to high-quality crowdsourced reviews, which its algorithms could crawl all over to return a smart response to this sort of Majel search. With the company, by its own admission, acquiring roughly one firm a week it's plausible that many other recent buy-ups are designed to support Majel.

Think of Majel as a voice-control portal to all of Google's different services, from patents to web searches to Google+ to Voice to Translate to Maps and so on ... and you see how powerful it can be. Of course much of this is possible with Google's Voice Search anyway, but to have it all delivered via one interface and with a smarter, more natural language-friendly front end would help. If Majel manages to deliver the most relevant information to a voice query, sampling it in a context-aware way from among Google's huge search resources and answering in a concise and simple way (without requiring further user screening, which you typically have to do to a Google search, and which Siri avoids) then it could easily champion its powers as beating Siri's.

Google-Centricity

But Google's vast search database is also potentially Majel's Achilles heel. 

If Google closes its shutters, and keeps Majel's information searching skills confined to Google property--for technical reasons, perhaps, and because it guarantees more user-eyes-on-adverts time--it is actually a limiting rather than an expanding maneuver. Part of Siri's strength is that she acts as a high-level filter for search--being designed by the team at Apple to look at the user's query, then try to respond from a more precise and relevant data source than simply resorting to a web query through Google or Bing. It's why integrating Wolfram Alpha was a genius move, and it's also why Google hates Siri--because it gives Apple control over where search queries go, and that could mean diverting some away from Google. 

But if Google keeps Majel centered on its own properties then potentially it means users could miss out on richer, more relevant data sources that Google doesn't yet quite rival--firms that Google hasn't bought, or can't acquire, and which it could thus find difficult to data-mine to feed data into Majel responses.

And while Apple got into a spot of political bother over seeming search biases in Siri--actually based on a misunderstanding of both the readiness of the system, as well as how it and its various data sources work--Google could get into much more legal hot water if it championed a premiere new search function of its market share-leading Android phones...and it turned out the system was mainly pushing search queries to Google. Any number of anticompetitive bells could ring out.

Oh, and let's hope Google doesn't make Majel too U.S.-centric. That's a mistake Apple slightly made with Siri, which is why non-U.S. users (who make up the greater majority of iPhone owners, historically) seem less pleased with it. 

Ultimately then, Majel has a shot at having a different character and behavior to Siri and this, coupled with Google's simpler access to the search database, means it could beat Apple's voice assistant in many ways. It'll all be about the finesse of how Majel interacts with the public. Get that right, and dodge legal and user-experience issues about keeping searches within Google, and Larry Page's company might have a killer product on their hands.

What the Death of Mobile Flash Means for the Web???

Adobe Software has let slip that it plans to abandon its Flash Player for mobile web browsers. Instead, the company will refocus its mobile efforts on web standards like HTML5, along with tools like Adobe AIR, which allows developers to convert Flash content into native mobile applications.

The move comes as something of a surprise given how vigorously Adobe has defended mobile Flash in the past. Lately, however, Adobe has been proposing new web standards and even bought the non-Flash mobile development tool PhoneGap, both of which indicate that Adobe is looking toward a future without Flash.

Indeed, while Adobe’s plans affect only mobile Flash at the moment, the sudden about-face does not bode well for Flash on the desktop. Mobile devices are the fastest growing means of connecting to the web; what doesn’t work on mobile devices will soon not be a relevant part of the web at all.

In abandoning mobile, Adobe is effectively admitting that Flash has no future on the web.

That doesn’t mean Flash will disappear overnight. Nor does it mean that Flash will ever disappear for developers interested in using it. It just means that when it comes to deploying Flash applications, the web won’t be a realistic option. Instead, Flash developers of the future will convert their Flash code into Android, Windows Mobile or iOS apps using Adobe AIR’s conversion tools.

Web developers, on the other hand, will likely abandon Flash if they haven’t already. Without a reliable way to serve Flash content to mobile devices, its web presence will likely continue to decline. Of course the demise of Flash has been inevitable for some time — after all, much of HTML5 was specifically designed to give developers a means of replacing Flash dependencies with native tools — but Adobe’s decision to abandon mobile devices should send a clear message to any developers who haven’t yet read the writing on the wall: Mobile is the future of the web and Flash isn’t part of it.

In the short term, Adobe is merely admitting what most developers already know; there are only two ways to develop for mobile devices: using the web and HTML5 or building platform native apps.

To choose web-based Flash apps over either of these options would mean consciously limiting your app’s audience. Given that neither Apple’s iOS nor Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 supports Flash (nor for that matter will Microsoft’s Windows 8 Metro), developing web apps that relied on Mobile Flash meant targeting only Android and Blackberry users. Adobe’s decision to abandon Flash for Mobile browsers is simply a pragmatic acceptance of the existing development landscape.

Similarly, while we don’t expect it to happen overnight, eventually Adobe will probably abandon Flash Player for the desktop as well — why continue developing a product when very few are using it? The AIR platform and its Flash-based tools for building native mobile apps will still be around to sell the Flash development tools (which is, after all, how Adobe makes money). Adobe simply won’t have any great need to continue pushing Flash on the web.

While some web standards advocates might see the eventual demise of Flash Player as a good thing for the web, we’re not so sure. Web standards were created to ensure that sites and apps work no matter what browser or device you’re using. Web standards were not created for — and have not historically been very good at — driving innovation on the web.

Innovation on the web has more often come from individual vendors — browsers, device makers and, yes, Flash. Flash laid many of the so-called cowpaths that HTML5 is paving in open standards. The audio and video tags for embedding media, the canvas element for animation, and the websockets protocol for communications are just a few of the things Flash helped to popularize on the web. That’s not to suggest that a web without Flash will want for innovation, but it certainly won’t be richer for Flash’s absence when that day arrives.

One in 25 business leaders may be a psychopath, study finds

One out of every 25 business leaders could be psychopathic, a study claims.

The study, conducted by the New York psychologist Paul Babiak, suggests that they disguise the condition by hiding behind their high status, playing up their charm and by manipulating others.

Favourable environmental factors such as a happy childhood mean they can function in a workplace rather than channelling their energies in more violent or destructive ways. Revealing the results in a BBC Horizon documentary, Babiak said: "Psychopaths really aren't the kind of person you think they are.

"In fact, you could be living with or married to one for 20 years or more and not know that person is a psychopath.

"We have identified individuals that might be labelled 'the successful psychopath'.

"Part of the problem is that the very things we're looking for in our leaders, the psychopath can easily mimic.

"Their natural tendency is to be charming. Take that charm and couch it in the right business language and it sounds like charismatic leadership."

Babiak designed a 111-point questionnaire with Professor Bob Hare, of the University of British Columbia in Canada, a renowned expert in psychopathy. Hare believes about 1% of Americans can be described as psychopaths.

The survey suggests psychopaths are actually poor managerial performers but are adept at climbing the corporate ladder because they can cover up their weaknesses by subtly charming superiors and subordinates

.

This makes it almost impossible to distinguish between a genuinely talented team leader and a psychopath, Babiak said. Hare told Horizon: "The higher the psychopathy, the better they looked – lots of charisma and they talk a good line.

"But if you look at their actual performance and ratings as a team player and productively, it's dismal. Looked good, performed badly.

"You have to think of psychopaths as having at their disposal a very large repertoire of behaviours. So they can use charm, manipulation, intimidation, whatever is required.

"A psychopath can actually put themselves in your skin, intellectually not emotionally.

"They can tell what you're thinking, they can look at your body language, they can listen to what you're saying, but what they don't really do is feel what you feel.

"What this allows them to do is use words to manipulate and con and to interact with you without the baggage of feeling your pain."

Are Psychopaths “Brain Damaged”?

We all have a ghoulish fascination with the Hannibal Lecters of this world. That’s because many of the most-publicized stories about psychopaths can be quickly banged into a Hollywood script. One of the most absorbing accounts that I’ve come across recently, however, was in an advance reading copy of a book by Paul J. Zak, due in May, called The Moral Molecule. The book, which deals largely with the hormone/neurotransmitter oxytocin and its role in social interactions, has a section on the psychopath.

Zak is a noted researcher on oxytocin, sometimes called “the love hormone” for its role in fostering trust and empathy. His studies have chronicled how various social disorders have been linked to disruptions of the chemical’s normal functioning. In one chapter, he recounts how former computer programmer and entrepreneur Hans Reiser, now a resident of a state penitentiary, had killed his wife and then went on to request an appeal of his conviction. Citing Zak’s research, Reiser claimed that his attorney during the trial had suffered from a brain dysfunction that produced abnormal levels of oxytocin and therefore displayed insufficient empathy to represent Reiser in court. Sorry, Hans. Nice try.

The bizarrely intricate reasoning of the psychopath is what fascinates. And it is not just the prison cell where these stories can be found. The psychopathic personality type turned up in Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies. And Occupy Wall Street could have a field day: among the 1 percent of the population characterized as psychopaths, a not insignificant number are thought to occupy the corporate suite. A recent study conducted by New York psychologist Paul Babiak showed that one in 25 business leaders may meet the criteria for classification as psychopaths.

Imaging and other research are creating an emerging picture of what’s happening right behind your forehead, the seat of “executive function” that governs self control. (picture the area right around the Ash Wednesday spot, the Hindu tilaka or, perhaps most appropriately in this context, the mark of the beast from the Book of Revelations).

The retinue of brain-scanning technologies has been put to work to reveal the neural superhighways that stretch from the executive control center in the frontal lobes back to other, more primal areas, deeper in the brain. To do these studies often requires schlepping a magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, machine on a tractor trailer into a prison, where about a quarter of the population meets the criteria for psychopath as established by Robert Hare from the University of British Columbia. 

Perhaps the latest and one of the best examples of this inside-the gates, inside-the mind research appeared in the November 30 Journal of Neuroscience, when Kiehl, Joseph Newman (a heavyweight in this area), and colleagues Michael Koenigs and Julian Motzkin reported on 20 diagnosed psychopaths and 20 other non-psychopaths who had committed similar crimes and were housed at the Fox Lake Correctional Institution in Wisconsin. The researchers used two types of imaging—one of the integrity of the white matter in brain-cell connecting fibers and a second of brain activity itself. The study’s most important finding centered on impairments in the link between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (a control node for regulating emotion, threats, decision-making and social behavior) and the amygdala, a locus of emotional processing.

Koenigs, who studies brain injuries in this area of the frontal cortex, knows that damage there can often produce alterations in personality. In theory, the faulty interaction between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex could fail to provide the proper negative emotional cue that robbing a bank or a ripping off a friend is just not kosher. Further tests are needed to confirm the implications of this breakdown in communication in the brain’s internal social network.

This finding, though, could also extend work by Newman that indicates that psychopathy may result from what he calls an “attention bottleneck.” Psychopaths may focus fixedly on one goal and ignore all other social cues, perhaps even signals sent over the prefrontal-to-amygdala pathway. Remember, Anthony Hopkins’s stare in the poster for the movie?

The study of psychopathy has profound implications for the criminal justice system. If psychopaths are, in fact, brain damaged in some sense, will the law have to be changed to allow them to enter an insanity defense?  Both lawyers and scientists will inevitably have to accommodate these shifts in our understanding of the brain’s workings. The University of Wisconsin, in fact, has just established a program that will allow students to earn a law degree while at the same time procuring a doctorate in neuroscience. Imagine the courtroom of tomorrow: “Your honor, I would like to enter this diffusion tensor image of my client’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex.”

Lab Sabotage: Some Scientists Will Do Anything to Get Ahead

In the world of science, it’s publish or perish. Researchers who publish a greater number of papers in high-status journals are more likely then their colleagues to win tenure positions, research grants, and prestigious reputations. The competition is fierce enough to compel some scientists to cheat. Anyone who follows the blog Retraction Watch knows that scientists sometimes fudge numbers or plagiarize. Less frequently reported are the instances where a desperate scientist resorts to sabotage to take down his or her peers.

The Lab Rat Shuffle

Last week, police arrested Mohsen Hosseinkhani for allegedly exacting revenge upon his peers at Mount Sinai Medical Center. The 40-year-old man, upset about losing his fellowship at the hospital, allegedly ran off with $10,000-worth of hospital property, including stem cell cultures, antibodies, and other scientific materials last July. Before making off with the bounty, Hosseinkhani stopped to shuffle around some lab rats, mixing up control and test rats, apparently out of spite. Hosseinkhani returned to the hospital last week to nick some more pipettes and was taken into custody, as reported in the New York Post.

The Spray-Bottle Betrayal

In 2009, University of Michigan PhD student Heather Ames began suspecting that someone was tampering with her experiments. Swapped lids on cell cultures, extra antibodies in her western blots, and growth media that were literally drowning in alcohol finally drove Ames to set up two security cameras in the lab. A day later, Ames pulled her cell cultures out of the refrigerator and found that they had again been spiked with alcohol. She reviewed the video footage and watched as her labmate, a post-doctoral student named Vipul Bhrigu, removed his experiments from the refrigerator, then returned with a spray bottle of ethanol and rummaged through the refrigerator for 45 seconds[Video]. The camera couldn’t catch what Bhrigu was doing, but at the police station later on, Bhrigu confessed that he had been sabotaging Ames’ experiments for months. Bhrigu was ultimately barred from participating in federally-funded research for three years.

The Pilfered Pages

When biochemist Zhiwen Zhang tried to reproduce the work that earned him a paper in Science in 2004, he discovered that his lab notebooks had gone missing. In 2007, Zhang began receiving anonymous emails from a person who claimed that Zhang’s papers had been faked, and threatened to expose Zhang unless he was sent $4,000 overnight. “They will investigate you,” the email said, according to Science Magazine. “Pete will retract all your post-doctoral work. you lose job. … Texas will fire you before you tenure.” Zhang was never able to reproduce his seminal work—in part due to the missing notebooks—and had to retract two of his papers in November 2009.
 

Such shocking behaviors aren’t unique to science—they can occur in any competitive environment, wasting time and money and delaying progress. When sabotage occurs on institutional property, a college or university will typically prosecute according to its Code of Conduct. Unfortunately, researcher anecdotes seem to indicate that, for some reason, many instances of suspected sabotage never get reported in the first place.

"Water Poor" Will Suffer Most as Climate Change Hits Cities

Indore is the fastest-growing city in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, India. The industrial center has grown rapidly in the past 20 years, reaching a population of nearly 3.3 million people. But as the city grows in numbers, its water supply becomes increasingly insecure.

Like many cities in the developing world, Indore's water infrastructure and institutions face the mounting pressures of population and growth and urbanization. Experts worry that global warming will compound these problems, enlarging a category of people they call the "water poor."

To better understand the complexity of urban water systems in less developed nations, the Pacific Institute and the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition released a detailed analysis last week on the water situation in Indore. The three-year study involved downscaling climate models to the city level, performing a vulnerability analysis, and engaging with the community to come up with resilience strategies.

The climate assessment suggested that Indore can expect an increase in surface temperature of 2 to 4 degrees Celsius by 2046 to 2065. It also showed the potential for putting existing water supplies on a roller coaster, with a several-inch increase expected in rainfall in some years compared to the annual average, as well as some years of decrease over the same period.

What the modeling really made clear, said Meena Palaniappan, author of the report and director of the Pacific Institute's International Water and Communities Initiative, was that Indore needs to prepare for a wide range of water threats.

"It's quite likely that the intensity of both floods and droughts will be an issue, so it's really about how do we plan given the uncertainty and increased variability, which are the only guarantees we have," said Palaniappan.

Poor pay 20 to 40 times more
Water scarcity has already emerged as the Indian city's highest-priority issue. Residents draw heavily on groundwater resources that face overexploitation, and Indore's water utilities rely almost exclusively on a single source, the Narmada River. With the added stress of rapid urbanization, the city's infrastructure and management capacities have struggled to provide safe, adequate and reliable water.

Indore Municipal Corp. (IMC), the formal government-run water system, is responsible for capturing, treating and delivering water to users within the city through a piped system. But IMC only serves 54 percent of the population, and the 16 percent of people who live in informal settlements get less than the minimum 40 liters of water per capita per day, as specified by the government of India.

The unreliability of the public system has given rise to the private water market. Residents of Indore have taken water management into their own hands, and backyards, by tapping into groundwater resources through privately owned boreholes in and around the city.

The practice is driven by profit, which, according to the report, creates incentives for more efficient water use. But a large portion of the population does not have any land tenure rights and is deprived of direct groundwater access. As a result, women and children must travel long distances to fetch water from private supplies, sapping energy and generating health problems.

Water from private sources is also more expensive. Studies show the poor across the developing world pay 20 to 40 times more per unit of water, said Palaniappan. Because of this economic burden, "water inequality perpetuates economic inequality," she said.

"Every day the greatest task for me is to run around for water. If I spend most of my time in fetching for water, then my source of livelihood gets affected. I am caught between water scarcity and my only source of livelihood," a woman who sells fruits and vegetables in the low-income area of Goma ki Phel is reported as saying in the report.

Climate change will only make the burden of finding water more difficult, "changing when, where, how much and how often water falls," wrote authors of the report. So, for instance, should smaller, privately owned wells dry up, the masses that rely on them will only have the formal water sector to turn to, said Palaniappan, which will put even greater pressure on an already distressed system that's stacked against the least unfortunate.

Warming will push people 'right off' the edge
"It's really the urban poor that have the least ability to cope with increasing variability in water supply," said Palaniappan. "They're the ones that are just clinging on the precipice of water security, and climate change and increasing water variability just pushes them right off."

Other factors also make people "water poor," such as a lack of household and community water storage and poor water quality and sanitation. Conservation and efficiency is another a big issue. Decrepit public water delivery systems cause major water loss. According to Palaniappan, 30 to 60 percent of water across the developing world is lost in delivery process.

Authors of the Indore report recommend that all levels of government in India invest in urban water infrastructure to prevent wastage and expand the public delivery treated water to poor communities. Solving the inequality issue will also require restructuring subsidies on public water so they don't favor the upper and middle classes and leave the poor with a hefty bill, said Palaniappan.

Better coordination among all water sectors and transparent and accountable leadership are also core to improving the resilience of urban water systems. Urbanization in the developing world is not simply a population increase. It's a transition that changes the entire social and physical structure of an urban area. Seven million people are added to cities throughout India each year, and the dismal state of urban services in places like Indore will cause a great deal more suffering if governance is not adapted.

"Technical solutions to many of these [water] problems already exist," said Marcus Moench, director of the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition and editor of the Indore report, in a statement. "The challenges to implementing them lie in the political economy of water supply, use, and management and regulation and enforcement -- and the lack of political will and resource to get such solutions implemented."

Is The Laptop Dead???

Intel has been pushing a reference design on Eastern manufacturers for months now, and the pressure is finally paying off. Maker after maker has revealed its own take on what's dubbed the Ultrabook. Consumers may be pleased by the focus on high design, Intel will be pleased it has a new vehicle for its processors, and manufacturers will be pleased they have a seemingly new toy to promote and sell for profit. The Wall Street Journal has even written a piece on them: "For PCs, Hope in a Slim Profile," and they're predicted to be everywhere at CES 2012. The thing is the Ultrabook isn't new, nor is it revolutionary. It's proof that the laptop is now an evolutionary dead end in computer history.

A lightweight PC with long battery life, petite format, and full-featured PC functionality ... that's a rough description of an Ultrabook. Remember this, we'll come back to it. But in essence the Ultrabook is a MacBook Air, only slightly more typically PC-like, and sporting some flavor of Microsoft Windows 7 aboard it as its OS. In the Mac versus PC war, this is perhaps the most complete example of a Mac design being cloned into a PC design paradigm--so much so that some Ultrabooks to be released are sure to attract the attention of Apple's IP lawyers, so similar are they in shape, format, arrangement of ports and sockets, and color. 

Apple's innovation was to build an all-metal chassis (which actually permits the shape to be slimmer due to its monocoque structure) around a full-powered computer that lacks an optical drive and eschews a hard drive in favor of solid state drives that are faster and more power-friendly at the expense of large capacity, and favors only a few output ports. It's a Jon Ive special, one might say--the Air is a laptop boiled down to its simplest essence, just a keyboard, screen, trackpad, and a few ports. The Air has become one of Apple's fastest-selling machines, with users loving its almost instant-on speed, light but strong body, and pure, attractive design.

That's what Intel is chasing, of course. The Ultrabook plan has hit a few flaws, with many early headlines suggesting makers were having difficulties meeting the Air's $999 price point thanks to the raw cost of components and later headlines noting makers had to switch to alternative cheaper materials and forcing Intel to drop prices. But it looks like Intel's effort will work out, and more and more ultrabooks will probably arrive in 2012. With Apple rumored to be leading the charge, bringing the Air format to a 15-inch laptop, the Ultrabook format will probably sway the design of the majority of laptops produced from 2012 onward. They will sell because they do offer significant benefits to users.

But remember that description of the Ultrabook? Almost to a word it fits an earlier laptop reinvention--the netbook. These cheap half-powered machines were incredibly popular a handful of years ago when the economic outlook was dim, and compared to the weighty "full" laptop, they seemed to offer a new degree of portability and extended battery life that promised new experiences to users. 

They sold by the millions, but then the star faded: The economy picked up, users realized they weren't fully capable machines that could in all circumstances substitute for the full-feature laptop of which they were a pale echo, and though the netbook is still on sale it's now merely another type of computer on sale.

We are drawing the comparison between the two here--the Ultrabook is perhaps a more considered, full-featured version of the netbook.

But Apple's Air is the touchstone for what may be a laptop design evolution, but it's not a revolution in the same way the iPhone was to the smartphone business. The Air and the Ultrabook are merely the calm, polished peak of laptop design. There's nothing extra, there's nothing superfluous, they offer powerful processing, speedy responses, and longer battery life than you may have expected from their tote-friendly mass. But they still need laptop staples: a keyboard, a webcam, ports, wireless powers, a quality screen, and a pointing device--in Apple's case the simplest most innovative implementation of the trackpad, in giant size.

There's nowhere to go from here. How may one improve the Air into the Air II? It's about as simple an edition of the laptop format--which Apple, to some extent, invented, that's possible. By definition, the Ultrabook is the same. You may add features like a touchscreen or perhaps 3-D, a built-in pico-projector, or some other tricks, but that would be gilding the lily, and the essential format is the same. And it works--we're all used to portable computing, and to using a keyboard and trackpad to control a windows/icons/mice/pointers user interface such as OS X or Windows 7.

And yes, if it ain't broke ... don't fix it. 

But it means the laptop is dead. There's literally no place left to take it, innovatively. Makers will churn them out for several years yet, but they'll be rewarmed editions of what we see in 2012. And when this sort of evolutionarly cul de sac is reached, it means one thing: Massive scope for an innovative new product to revolutionize portable computing for the consumer around the world. Shrewd industry observers will suggest the tablet PC is perfectly poised to slot into this niche: It has a totally new user experience, it lets consumers relate to computers in a wholly new and more intimate way, it offers new interactions that aren't possible with the unweildy hinged format of a laptop--such as motion controlled gaming--and it's a true go-anywhere device. If it evolves a little more past its current perceived "lightweight" computing uses, it'll be an even stronger contender.

We're not saying laptops are going to disappear momentarily. They're still selling incredibly well, and they will do for some time. But the Utrabook isn't the silver bullet to securing their future--they're instead almost like a well-polished, perfectly refined full stop at the end of the design description of the device. Something better will soon hove into view, and we'll love using it. That's why the portable computing game is so hot, why there's so much scope for innovation and that's why the immediate future is so exciting.

Nissan's Leaf-Charging Wireless Pad Could Signal An Industry Surge

Wireless charging is still not common, particularly with the disappearance of the Palm Pre, which was one of the main gadgets to utilize the trick for ultra-convenient connection to a battery-boosting charger. That makes Nissan's moves with its Leaf EV all the more interesting: To charge your 2013 Leaf, all you'll have to do is park it on the requisite spot of your garage.

The setup is rather simple at first glimpse: Instead of flipping open a door on your car and connecting in a large electric plug, wired to a wall charger point, you reverse your Leaf over a large plastic pad on the floor.

But this otherwise innocuous pad contains the coils of a wireless induction loop and some electronics--induction is how electricity makes its way through a transformer, magnetically, with no physical connection between the coils. And you can think of the pavement pad as one half of a transformer. The other coils are installed beneath the floor of the Leaf itself. To charge it up the car is electrically reversed over the pad into the sweet spot with the aid of a dashboard display; sensors tell the car when to stop. Turning the main alternating current on connects the loop in the pad with the loop in the car, and after being converted into DC, it can charge up the car's battery.

The simplicity and benefits are obvious for EV users, who would simply have to park their cars at night in order to drive away with a full battery in the morning. No messing with plugs or cables--which saves time, and could be safer. That's why Nissan has revealed it's making the charging system available for new Leaf vehicles from 2013 (though it's unlikely it'll come to earlier vehicles in a retrofit). 

But there are also other benefits that are more commercial in nature: Due to their more resilient design, and zero reliance on users connecting up electrics correctly--including not dropping the heavy plugs accidentally, or driving off with the cable hooked-up--it's possible that wireless charging mats like this will become commonplace at roadside rest stops and garages. This would cause more frequent stops for motorists, what with range anxiety still a real concern for EV drivers. That's something that driving safety campaigners, worried about drivers falling asleep at the wheel, may welcome. And the roadside cafe industry may also like the idea.

With all the competing designs for an EV charger port, it's also possible that mats like this could have a "universal charger" element. Because they don't demand a physical connection to the car, they could be designed to be automatically configurable to suit different cars' electrical needs. That's looking into the far future. For now Nissan is perhaps the first among many to come to market with this tech.

There's just one drawback to inductive charging. It's wasteful. Due to the immutable laws of physics, there's some energy lost as part of the process, and it may be as much as 20%. That slighlty blots the eco-footprint of an EV, as the original energy has to be produced somehow, which comes at an evironmental and fiscal cost. But since when has laziness prevented humans from choosing convenience over conscience?

The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In The Comments Sections Of Year-End Lists

1. The Poisoned. "The fact that you included Adele on this list of 100 things you like makes it a total joke."

2. The Really Pretty Sure Person, Who Is Really Pretty Sure. "I've never seen Game Of Thrones, but I'm really pretty sure it's not as good as Boardwalk Empire."

3. The Person Who Is Exactly Right. "It really seems like this list of things you thought were good is just your opinion."

4. The Surprisingly Lucid Narcoleptic. "ZZZZZZZZZ" is the classic. "SNORE" and "YAWN" are acceptable variants.

5. The Mother Of Tim "Freckles" Matterley. "There is a musician in Ann Arbor named Tim Matterley who is better than all these songs! You would like his music. He has a web site at FrecklesMatterley.com, and you can get his songs free on your computer! Please check out Tim Matterley, who does not have a big record contract YET but is very very good!!!!" Two comments later, she will often come back. "Also, Tim Matterley is in this YouTube video where he plays 'Imagine' at a children hospital. I am just one fan but I think he is great and he will go far!!!"

6. The Read A Book Guy. "Not one of these movies is as good as reading a book." On a list of books, by the way, he will say none of the books is as good as books used to be. He also hates Kindles, which he may or may not mention.

7. The Self-Punisher. "I always hate your tastes, so I knew this would be a miserable and useless list before I decided to click on it and read the whole thing, and now I know I was right."

8. The Unwitting Outlier. "Has anyone really cared about George Clooney since ER?"

9. The Person With The Imperfect Grasp Of Obscurity. "These are all completely obscure picks nobody has ever heard of. The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo sounds like a Dr. Seuss book."

10. Harry The Hipster-Hater, Who Really, Really Hates Hipsters. "This is all hipster music. I guess it's okay for hipsters, but I'm not enough of a hipster to like hipster picks like this. Too bad I'm not hipster enough. Maybe I'd like it better if I were more of a hipster." [His username: "notahipstersorry."]

11. The Person Who Thinks You Were So Close. "I like all these picks, but you ranked The Descendants as your #4 and Martha Marcy May Marlene as your #5, and they should be the other way around. FAIL."

12. The Person Who Never Says Die. "Why isn't Arrested Development on this list?"

13. The Subject-Changer. "If we're talking about great comedy performances, I don't know how you can leave out [Barack Obama/the Republican debates/Occupy Wall Street/the Tea Party]. That was the funniest thing I saw all year."

14. The Minimalist. "These blow."

15. The Person Who Is Probably Too Hardcore For You. "The best film of the year was shot in Tokyo and the title translates to I [Bleep]ed Your Grandmother With A [Blank] And [Bleep] You Too. I guess that's probably a little too hardcore for you. You should get outside the multiplex once in a while."

16. The Person Who Is Laughing But Is Actually Not At All Amused. "You put Community on your list instead of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia? Ha ha ha yeah right."

17. The Concerned. "What's wrong with you? No, seriously, what's wrong with you?"

18. The Person Who Wanted To Be Surprised. "Uh, way to go out on a limb. These are the same things you've been talking about all year and saying were the best things when they came out in the first place."

19. The Disbelieving. "Really? Are you serious? Did you mean to leave off my favorite thing? Or did something happen? Did you forget it? Did you think it didn't come out this year? Did you write it down and then accidentally delete it in a technology mishap? Do you not know how to spell it? Really? Are you kidding?"

20. The Humble Alternative. "If you really want to know what the best choices of the year were, I put my list up at my site, KnittingWithDagmarAndLaura.com — it's not just about knitting!"

Smartling's Jack Welde Ensures Your Website Doesn't Get Lost In Translation

Smartling a translation delivery network that helps companies large and small translate their websites into other languages using a variety of tactics including professional translators, volunteer translators, and computer translation.

"Smartling has accepted the audacious mission of trying to make the entire Internet truly multilingual," says Smartling CEO Jack Welde. "Language is one of the last true barriers on the web; our view is that five years from now, having an English-only website is going to feel about as dumb as not having a website at all."

The company, which earlier this year raised $10 million in series B funding, counts Scribd, SurveyMonkey, and Foursquare among a roster of clients that's growing by 300% a month. 

Welde's unique background--he grew up traveling the globe in a military family, studied computer engineering at Penn, and then spent nine years as an Air Force pilot--put him in a unique position to create Smartling, bringing together passions that include travel, culture, computer engineering, and language. 

Watch the video below to learn more about what inspires Welde and Smartling to make the web truly work on a global scale. 

How Ursula Burns Reinvented Xerox ???

Summary:

Ursula Burns wants to remake her firm into the company American business can’t live without. But can Xerox succeed in a world without Xeroxing? 

After eight meetings with the President of the United States, Ursula Burns still wonders what the button is for. "These meetings are all very choreographed, very much according to protocol," she says. "That usually isn't my thing, protocol." She is telling me about her latest encounter, a hastily called meeting at the White House this past August, during the height of the debt-ceiling debates, to discuss methods for spurring the economy. She and seven other CEOs, among them the heads of American Express, Johnson & Johnson, U.S. Steel, and Wells Fargo, were placed like pegs in a tightly designed game board, sitting in front of tent cards with their names in a formal script, waiting for the President to arrive. At the President's place sat a folio of notes and a small box with a red button. Burns, who had been seated in a position of honor to Obama's right, was to be the last to speak. As she waited, she considered whether the button could be the executive branch equivalent of The Gong Show gong. She thought to herself: Maybe he pushes it if he doesn't like what we say.

When it was her turn, Burns recalls, the President said, "'This has been really good, and now I'm bracing for the tough one.''' Burns smiles at the recollection. 

She is known to be tough. Burns is the first African-American woman to lead a company the size of Xerox, coming to power in 2009 during an economic tailspin that continues to threaten the global economy and her company's bottom line. She is the second woman to run the iconic firm, in a historic succession that has produced historic results: Working closely with friend and former CEO Anne Mulcahy, Burns was part of a small group of executives who rescued Xerox from near bankruptcy in 2001 and began moving the company away from its machine-making roots and into a different business entirely. "The thing I valued most about Ursula, and why I valued her participation in senior management, is that she has the courage to tell you the truth in ugly times," says Mulcahy. 

Being direct is her calling card. When Burns talked to Obama about leadership and the practical aspects of what big business needs, it was serious advice, respectfully offered. 

She did, however, tell him that he owed her $3 billion. The debt-ceiling crisis had played havoc with the valuations of many American firms, including Xerox's. Had Obama seen its share price lately? Wasn't he at least partly responsible? "What did I do?" Burns asked him. "All I did was wake up and my share price is down!" The remark elicited a laugh from the President, who is also, by way of the federal government, a major Xerox customer. It was, in many ways, a signature move. Burns, not a protocol kind of person, is always willing to push the button herself.

"I'm a black lady from the Lower East Side of New York," Ursula Burns says. "Not a lot intimidates me." Burns grew up in the projects on Delancey Street, close to all the trouble that a poor kid can get into in a city in decline. Her mother, Olga, who died in 1983, washed and ironed clothes for money; she also knew her way around a deal--she traded cleaning services to a neighborhood doctor in exchange for health care for her three kids. Ursula, the middle child, says of her father, "He wasn't in the picture." Burns describes her mother as supremely confident and someone who expected great things from her kids. "I don't want to overemphasize this," she says, "but not a day goes by when I don't think about my mother and what she would think about what I just did. I often adjust my approach." 

In many respects, Burns's ascent to the top of Xerox--and the decisions she's been willing to make to ensure the company has a future--carries a business lesson for uncertain times. She is, by her own admission, in love with the company that gave her a livelihood and a 31-year career. And yet she isn't the least bit nostalgic when the conversation turns to returning Xerox to its former glories. That was then. She has long been willing to do whatever it takes--dismantle the company's manufacturing unit that shaped her career; cut back or eliminate products that once defined the Xerox brand; branch out into uncertain (and risky) new areas of business--in an effort to reposition the company in an era of technological upheaval. What's more, unlike her contemporaries at, say, Hewlett-Packard, Burns's career turn demonstrates that you don't need an outsider to save the day. An insider can do it just as well--and can bring with her an incomparable institutional knowledge and the deep well of respect of her peers. "I came in the wrong way," says Mulcahy of her surprise ascent to CEO. "As difficult as it was, Ursula came in the right way."

Burns had an early aptitude for math that earned her a scholarship to the Polytechnic Institute of New York and a degree in mechanical engineering in 1980. She was tapped for a summer engineering internship at Xerox, and she never fully left. The next year, she earned a master's from Columbia that Xerox helped pay for. "I saw what was possible for myself early," she says. During a 1989 "caucus"--a type of employee gathering organized around work-life topics--a question was asked about Xerox's diversity initiatives, and whether they lowered hiring standards. Wayland Hicks, the president of marketing and customer operations, weighed in. As he politely explained why the company did not lower standards, Burns pricked up her ears. She thought, Why give the question the dignity of a response? She raised her hand. "We had a little debate about it in front of the room," she says. "Why not attack the assertion directly?" 

Hicks later coached Burns on the finer points of corporate diplomacy. But he was impressed by her guts and intelligence. Not long after, Hicks tapped her as his executive assistant, a job that served as a de facto leadership-training program. "That was the first sign she was really on the executive track," says Mulcahy. "It was a significant signal to everyone." By 1991, her outspokenness and keen business insights had gained the attention of then-CEO Paul Allaire, who poached her from Hicks for a similar position in his office. By 1997, she was the vice president for worldwide manufacturing and had led the push into color copying. Soon, there wasn't a manufacturing job she hadn't touched or a Xerox product she didn't understand.

Shadowing her from the sales side was Mulcahy, whom she considers a close friend. "Our careers grew the same way from different directions," says Burns. "If she did it, I did it next. She was always one step ahead of me." Both women are Xerox lifers; both married "Xerox husbands," says Burns. (Burns's husband, Lloyd Bean, is now a retired Xerox scientist.) As Burns puts it: "Xerox sucks you in and you become part of each other." 

Still, by the late 1990s, Mulcahy and Burns were mostly part of a dying company. Xerox was sputtering in the face of Japanese competition. At the same time, the digital world's ascendance over Xerox's empire of paper, and paper copiers, seemed inevitable. A new CEO, a former IBM'er named G. Richard Thoman, was appointed in 1999. He lasted about 13 months. By the time the board asked him to leave, the company's stock had plummeted from a record of nearly $64 a share in May 1999 to $27 in May 2000, and Xerox was heavily in debt. Jim Firestone, currently the president of corporate operations, says it simply: "We broke. The company broke." Burns is characteristically direct. "We had lost complete faith in the leadership of the company," she says. "We didn't have any cash and few prospects for making any." And that wasn't the worst part. "The one thing you wanted was good and strong leaders that were aligned and could get us through things and we didn't have that." 

By 2000, Burns was ready to leave. But when Mulcahy became CEO, she helped persuade Burns to stay. And it then fell to Burns to outsource Xerox's manufacturing. The move was crucial to Xerox's cost-saving efforts; if done wrong, however, it would cripple Xerox's relationship with its customers. Burns chose the global manufacturer Flextronics, but to complete the deal, she needed the support of the Xerox union, some 4,000 employees in a facility near Rochester. Burns recalls: "I told them the truth, in as much detail as I could, about what was happening." Says Mulcahy: "She literally convinced the union that it was going to be either some jobs or no jobs. For anyone. It was survival. There was no other way." By 2004, Xerox had returned to profitability. But the company had dropped from 100,000 to 55,000 employees in less than four years. What's more, the bigger issue still remained. "What we had to do was step back and think," Burns recalls. "What is it that Xerox really does?" 

What Burns remembers most about her first day as the CEO of Xerox was dinner the night before. Over a meal with Mulcahy, she got the news that she had been hoping for. "We were pushing to take the company in a direction that made a lot of sense--on paper," she says. The direction she was referring to was the acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services, or ACS, a company that had started as a family-owned data-entry business in the mid-1980s and had grown into a $6 billion services powerhouse with a foot in the door of seemingly every back office around the world. If you paid a toll or a parking ticket, applied for a credit card, or went to the doctor in America sometime in the past year, chances are ACS worked your paper trail behind the scenes.

Amazon's Kindle Fire Blazed Through An Army Of Androids

Amazon's Kindle Fire is burning up BestBuy.com. Kindle sales quadrupled over last year's, according to the company. Amazon said it was making "millions" more Fires than it had planned, based on the overwhelming response.

But what's happening here is bigger than this or even the popular thread in which tech writers declare the Fire a bona fide threat to the iPad. Amazon's overall strategy behind the product could provide a road map for digital players to fast-track their own platforms into full-blown ecosystems capable of competing with the likes of Apple and Google, too. 

Right, right, ecosystems. Again. But Amazon has reminded everyone just how it important it is to hold users' hands and walk them exactly where you want them to go--and make sure the destination is worth the journey. The company has managed to pull off a major coup here: An online retailer who barely makes any hardware just schooled every single tablet manufacturer (save one) in creating a splash both in hype and sales of a tablet. And it did it without even tablet-optimized software--Fire runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread, not Honeycomb. 

It pulled off the feat by focusing on the platform first, and the hardware a distant second. The ultra-cheap $199 price was definitely a factor, too, but that wouldn't have been possible if Amazon didn't have a plethora of services at the ready for Fire buyers (eaters?) to dive into. Amazon correctly took the approach of first figuring out everything consumers would do with the tablet (and everything the company would sell), then building the right hardware to do it, rather than the reverse, which was what everyone else was doing.

"That's a pretty good move for Amazon," says Harry Wang, director of mobile research at Parks Associates. "Content library size and choices are very much important in the war of ecosystems--it is a critical factor to build a user base, and a large, loyal user base will reinforce market position and boost its leverage against content suppliers and partners." 

Until recently, conventional wisdom in the tablet market dictated you either built your own platform from the ground up or played nice with Google. The former isn't a viable strategy for most. Microsoft is trying to do it with Windows Phone and Windows 8, but the company is so big and bloated that it's years behind in this game and still hasn't made any notable progress. The webOS platform, though a promising OS, was tragically never given the support it needed to become a real ecosystem. It's too early to say for RIM's QNX/BBX software, but given the clumsy launch of the PlayBook and RIM's grim-and-getting-grimmer outlook, it's looking like a nonstarter. 

That leaves everyone else with Android. Up until now, tablet manufacturers have relied on Google to provide not just the OS, but the ecosystem. After all, Acer and HTC aren't in the business of delivering content or digital services. Google is, certainly, but it's slowly discovered that providing a multitude of loosely intertwined services and integrating them into an smooth and well-managed environment are two different things. One example: Without a central nervous system like iTunes, it's incumbent on the user to figure out how to do simple things like integrating an iTunes library with an Android device. The release of Google Music last month is an important step in the right direction, but it may be too little, too late. 

Amazon has its own music store, of course, and it's front and center on the Fire along with the company's many other services. But besides that obvious positioning, the brilliance of Amazon's plan was that it was able to bring the device to market with relative ease (it essentially just picked out the same hardware as the PlayBook) by slicing off its own little territory within the Android platform. While others have pursued platform strategies by building (or in the case of Microsoft, rebuilding) complete OSes, Amazon let Google do the heavy lifting here, then carefully flushed out Google's services in favor of its own. 

The big question: Can others replicate the success of Amazon's strategy? One player has been trying for a while, and that's Barnes & Noble with its Nook Color and Nook Tablet devices. However, B&N has no credibility selling anything besides books, and doesn't appear to be interested in moving into delivering more kinds of content. To take full advantage of Amazon's Fire road map, a company would have to already have the architecture in place for those other revenue streams. It would need some kind of unique content or service, the basic platform in place, and the resources to adapt it. Right now, the best candidate that appears to fit that bill is Sony. 

Sony just swallowed up Sony Ericsson, ostensibly to finally get serious about mobile, and it's recently dabbled in tablets. But the real interesting stuff at Sony is happening with PlayStation, which earlier this year announced it would soon spread its gaming platform to other mobile devices. That could be the first step toward a broader Sony ecosystem that does much more than games, bridging music, movies, and more between tablets, phones, Blu-ray players, and TVs--all backed by highly customized Android. 

"Sony is interesting in this category because they're the only ones who already have a platform," says Tom Mainelli, a mobile research director at IDC. "If anyone was was going to do it, it's them. Sony's got a lot of engineering background, and they've created a lot of apps over the years, so they may have the software chops, too." 

Adopting this Android-in-name-only strategy has its challenges, but now that Amazon (and to a lesser extent, Barnes & Noble) has shown how lucrative it can be, companies who are hungry to compete in the digital arena have a road map to fast-tracking their platforms to the mass market. The war among ecosystems may end up having more sides than anyone ever thought.