I’m a fan of the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” campaign, but this time Apple I think is skating on thin ice with its words. At least that’s how I look at it. You be the judge.

In a new education-oriented commercial, the Apple ad called “Pep Rally” makes the claim that the Mac is “the number one notebook on college campuses.”

My first impression of this was that on average if I visit a college campus I’ll see more than half of the students with Macs. Sounded good to me. Macs are quite popular from what I’ve seen. However, when I started thinking about this I started doubting what I was hearing. I played it over and over again to see if I was misunderstanding something. You see, I have no doubt that Macs are growing in sales, however, I doubt these numbers.

So I started Googling around and the best “numbers” I can find are from here for this year.

And from this link it appears that stats are showing that Apple has now become the number one seller of computers in higher education. That is, they are now outpacing Dell’s 30% market share by becoming the number one supplier of computers to students with their new 31% market share. 31% of the market is great, however, that leaves 69% of the market to PCs and other OSes. Setting aside 5% for Linux and the rest, that means that PCs have approximately 64% of the student market.

Now maybe the numbers are different for notebooks or maybe they’re talking about Switzerland’. Maybe. But I doubt that greater than 50% of the students–as the commercial suggests–are using or purchasing Mac notebooks.

Of course, there’s another explanation here: That saying that you’re “number one” doesn’t really mean anything. It just means someone thinks that Mac notebooks are number one. This sounds mighty shady to me though.

Maybe I’m off base here. Anyone know if Macs are truly number one in usage on college campuses today?

File this under the Ignorable-Post category: I’m glad I’m not going to be attending TechEd 2008–(it’s out of my price range)–because if I were I’d be spending too much time and effort trying to figure out how to take along the multi-touch system we’re building.

Tablet PCs are so much more portable. I’m spoiled.

Will Intel’s version of the MIDs follow the wacky pricing of UMPCs? Rumors are beginning to spread that this might just be the case. Oh, boy. Here we go again.

All I can say is, maybe this time Apple will provide some much needed competition and show the OEMs how this game is played.

What I’d like to see is a device with a display larger than the iPhone’s, great connectivity, a great browsing experience, good battery life, and a rich programmable platform. Put all of these together at a reasonable price and you have something I and many others would purchase. Price it in the $1000 range and you have a flop.

Intel needs to sit down with its engineers and think this through a bit more.

Update: Some are suggesting that the first-to-market MIDs will be in the $750 range. Still too high if you ask me.

The experience better be killer at this price. Otherwise, I’m going to be in line with everyone else buying, not a MID, but another Apple product.

djay software has released a multi-touch trackpad scratching and mixing app for Macs. Gotta love it.

I got a chuckle this morning when I installed the Worldwide Telescope app.

Why? When you install it on a Vista machine you have to install DirectX 9. Thing is that Vista already comes with DirectX 10. So think about this: To get the richest interaction in a showcase app like WWT, you have to “downgrade” your graphics library. All I can say is: Make up your mind. Is DirectX 9 or 10 the state of the art?

If DirectX 9 makes sense in a topnotch app like WWT, then DirectX 9 should be in Vista.

Don’t get me wrong, as a developer I understand and appreciate what’s going on here. It’s just that during this transition period, it’s worthwhile to keep the spotlight on issues like this, so that things don’t get worse.

Downloaded the WorldWide Telescope (WWT) app from Microsoft Research last night. In a word: Beautiful. Highly recommended.

The program lets you fly through the night sky, visiting pictures captured by earth bound telescopes as well as those from Hubble and the like. You can’t visit the surface of Mars at ground level alongside one of the Mars rovers, but you can zoom into a nicely displayed image of Mars which slowly floats across the screen. Yes, everything is moving! It’s cool just to zoom so that Mars or some other planet is in view and sit there and slowly watch it to pan off to the side. To do so, click on “Search” in the toolbar and type whatever planet or star you’d like to zoom to. The Worldwide Telescope does the rest.

Besides visiting a surface like Mars or the moon, one other cool thing I’d like to do with WWT: use it as a spacecraft simulator. Imagine if you could define your own rocket, launch it at a specific time of day, to a specific heading, and then “guide” it to some point in space. That would be cool. Since paths are definable in WWT I imagine there’s some way to do this with the either a helper app or a 3rd party toolbar add on. I see that the team is trying to open up the app to developers in some way, though nothing is available yet.

I’m wondering if the third party access would enable you to add and share your own telescope images–yeah that might make a mess, but then again a WikiTelescope would be kind of cool–especially if you had a picture that made it into the collection.

I’ve been passing the WWT link around all morning and everyone has been excited to hear about the program. At least one person has experiences crashes and can’t run the program. This is on a Vista machine with some classic driver problems. I’m wondering if there isn’t pushing his drivers over the edge again. Hmmm.

At the 2008 Government Leaders Forum Asia on May 9th Bill Gates shared some more of his enthusiasm for the Tablet PCs and more specifically Tablets in education.

“….I’ve got one last thing to show, and I previewed this earlier, and that’s related to the student Tablet. To me this is an important milestone, and Microsoft has been investing in this for a long time. We see lots of ways that we’re going to drive this into the mainstream. In fact, my own daughter goes to a school where she uses a Tablet PC, and it’s phenomenal to see how comfortable she is, how she learns better. She tries out her knowledge, she communicates with her teacher in a new way. It is completely digital. The Internet is there, the ability to create things is there.”

and on technology in schools:

“One of the things that I always share my enthusiasm for when I talk about the future of technology is the idea of students having a computer individually, and later today you’re going to hear from a teacher and a student who are experiencing that, and piloting what that’s like. Clearly that has to be a very robust machine that can last - you can drop it - it’s got to be inexpensive, it’s go to be powerful, but the hardware and software changes make it a question of when we can do that, not a question of if we can do that. Textbooks are on their way out. In some countries, that will happen in three or four years. In some it will be five or six, but I’ll be so bold as to say that over the next decade we’ll look at a textbook the same way we look at things like a paper-based encyclopedia today. And we look at it and we say, hey, it’s not rich enough, it’s not animated, it’s not inexpensive enough, it’s not flexible enough, it doesn’t give you the richness that the digital form of that can provide. And so these advances really make a huge difference.

One that I think is particularly interesting is that the way that we interact with these machines will change. We use the keyboard and the mouse today. On the mobile phone, we largely use the little keyboard, and it’s impressive how well people are able to use that small keyboard. But we should complement that with new approaches, and there’s a number of additional approaches that I refer to as natural interface. Speech input, where you talk and the system recognizes it. Pen, where you take a pen and you write ink, and it recognizes what you’ve written. Touch, where you can just point to things and move them around. A great example of this is that in the future the desk of a worker will be a touch-sensitive surface. The cost of that display and having the software that can see what you’re doing will be very, very low, and so you can take different documents, have them laid out there, point to one, expand it, have the sales data, or the survey data, or the quality data, or the calendar easily manipulable so you can navigate through it just by pointing at things, and then if you see something that surprises you, you can take your pen, write a little note, pick which colleague you think should take a look at that, click on that, and off it goes. And it’s very straightforward.

Likewise, your walls will be able to display information, because the cost of the screen will be very low, and they too will have a camera that can watch what you’re doing with the magic of software. And so your whiteboard, what was the chalkboard, will be intelligent. That will be true in the office, in the meeting room, in the classroom, at home. And so things like taking photos and organizing them, just very natural.

This is the kind of thing you’ve seen in science fiction movies, but in fact it’s now moving into the market, and moving into the market in very low cost. Our first product in this space is called Microsoft Surface. It’s a flat table. And just a few months ago that rolled out to the early customers and the response has been phenomenal that people love that natural capability of interacting.

Well now, with computer technology being so amazing, and so empowering to the individual, how do we get it so that we have broad benefit? Whenever we make scientific advances, we’re faced with this dilemma, and when we have new medicines, are they only for the rich? We go all the way back to look at reading, which of course in its early days only the very elites were literate, and it took hundreds of years before low cost printing, and government programs around libraries and schools got to the point where every country took a goal of saying that all the population deserves to the literate. And the world as a whole, most of the world, has done very, very well on that. Well now we have almost a new type of literacy, digital literacy, and making the computer accessible.”

(Emphasis is mine.)

As I read comments like this I jump inside with excitement. Who knows how long it’s going to take to achieve and whether it all comes out like we think it should, but is there any doubt that we’re going to figure out even more ways to make our lives more efficient, more connected, more enjoyable?

In the last two weeks, since Seth Sandler uploaded his video showing how to make a multi-touch box, people have played it over 350,000 times. That’s 350,000 plays in 14 days–roughly 25,000 a day. At half this rate over the next few weeks I wouldn’t be surprised to see this video go over 500,000. This speaks volumes about the degree to which people are interested in new interaction technologies. Although the keyboard is going to be central to how they will be using computers for a long time, people want more.

The strong interest in Jeff Han’s multi-touch work, Microsoft’s Surface initiative, and homebrew multi-touch efforts like Seth’s all reflect this.

I had a blast building a multi-touch box and am now on the way to constructing a full-sized multi-touch system. Others on YouTube have been posting their successes too.

By the way, I agree with the Interactive Multimedia Technology blog: “Hint for high school teachers: This sort of thing would be a great project for an after-school technology club!”

Absolutely.

Here are a couple other recent homebrew multi-touch efforts, several of which follow Seth’s multi-touch box recipe:

Front projection touch test by SkeeeTouch

A projectionless, multi-touch box by jpcancio

Multi-touch box by PatukyHC

Barecelona multi-touch demo.

“A first-rev 720p multi-touch video wall by Obscura (Love the ink in the demo ). Here’s the same whiteboard being used to in a two-player Missle Command game. You might remember this large display demo from last summer.

Multi-touch paint using a box

Hhomebrew FTIR multi-touch surface with rear projection

Brad Hayes’ with rear-projection multi-touch

And here are a couple other people that built multi-touch boxes and posted their results.

This homebrew movement is growing fast. It reminds me of the days back in the late 70s with homebrew microcomputers.

After TechCruch’s comments the other day about how terrific the new natural language aware PowerSet.com search would be I was eager to check it out. I was going to sign up for the beta and then I decided to wait for the launch. I didn’t have to wait long. It’s up now. Check it out.

I admit I am quite skeptical about the Powerset venture. The “core” of the product may be from Xerox Parc, but I’ve seen lots of people try to throw technology at search and see it come up short. My skepticism was telling me that this was to be another case.

Powerset is trying to leverage natural language processing to improve the quality of search. Rather than go for indexing tons of web pages they decided to focus on the semantics and what they could glean from Wikipedia (in one case). Half of this makes sense. The focusing on Wikipedia part. I’m completely guessing about the NLP side and from this part I’m guessing they focused too much on the NL and not enough on flat out the semantics regardless of any technique.

Anyway, so now that Powerset has launched I decided to do a 20 second test and I think many people will be surprised at the results, but not in the way you might think.

Here’s what I did. I searched for the difference between Tablet PCs and UMPCs:

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The results were much like I expected. It’s hard to tell if any of the results targetted the query I gave.

Of course, I was being a bit unfair with my question. So I split it up into two parts. First, I asked what a Tablet PC is:

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And then “What is a UMPC?”:

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It’s just my opinion, but neither sets of results are that good. And what’s with the semantic summary at the top of the query results? What does it mean for UMPC features to be “system and low.” And worse, what does it mean for UMPC to “takes” “flight.” I can guess, knowing what I know about the market, but why am I guessing? I am performing the query supposedly because I don’t know the answer.

I’m not surprised by the poor quality of these results though, because Wikipedia has a small draw and being community driven it’s going to have a disproportionate voice that doesn’t “get” Microsoft’s efforts. And as a complete guess I wasn’t surprised to see the UMPC and Tablet PC to fall into this category.

So unimpressed with my 20-second Powerset search I decided to try Google. I asked it “What is the difference between a Tablet PC and a UMPC?” Not too bad. From what I see the third link is to an article entitled “How to buy a UMPC or Tablet PC”. Hmmm. That might give me a pretty good description of the differences I presume.

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Not completely satisfied though, I decided to try Live. For the same query, here’s it’s results:

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My. My. Look at this. The first link is to a forum post that is titled: “What is the difference between Convertable and Hybrid tablets.” Kind of close in terms of it being a comparison, but actually the link is of mediocre quality and a bit off target. I’m looking for a comparison between Tablet PCs and UMPCs.

The second link is a another so-so match. It’s titled “So what’s the difference between the Samsung Q1 and Q1B?” Both of these are UMPCs. Not qiute right.

Link 3 is getting warmer though–at least the title is more suggestive: “Define the Ultra-Mobile PC.” However, if you follow the link to Gottabemobile, it’s more about what UMPCs are and their differences with low-cost PCs, such as the Eee PC.

Scanning down the page though, you’ll see several articles with titles including the phrase “what is the difference between…”. Although none of them are exact matches, this does suggest that Live Search is placing greater sorted emphasis on content that also contains mention of at least UMPC or Tablet PC. Not bad. In fact the bottom two links on the page are “Difference between a MID vs UMPC” and “What is a UMPC.” If you read through this article, sure enough it compares in bits and pieces UMPCs to Tablet PCs. To me, although the artile is biased towards talking about a UMPC, it’s hands down a winner.

(Note: The Live query results aren’t very good if plural keywords are used, such as Tablet PCs and UMPCs. So the stemming logic in Live isn’t so hot. Not terrible. Just not as good as it could be.)

Yahoo search with the same query gives a valient effort too by strongly matching against the phrase “What is the difference between…” However I dont’ see articles that are strong matches, although I do see mentions of Tablet PCs and UMPCs which lead me to believe that with a little digging I might figure it out.

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I also tried Ask.com, but the results weren’t that good though there is a sidebar in which you supposedly could narrow the search by clicking on “Definition of a Tablet PC” and “What is the Tablet PC used for.” Of course, the narrowing list doesn’t mention anything about UMPCs. So I left this out.

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So, my conclusion after a couple of 20-second queries is this: I’ll stick with Google and Live with Yahoo in third place. Powerset? Well, maybe if I just want to search Wikipedia.

Was this a fair test? No. I really need to do more tests. However, it is in a domain I know something about and I’d expect any search engine to handle well. It’s not that obtuse a topic. Now, maybe I’m using the Powerset search engine “wrong” and another form of queries would do well. I’ll be watching out for the experiences of other bloggers.

An aside: Michael Arrington gives kudos to Powerset for returning good results for the query “when did earthquakes hit tokyo” and suggests that people try Google to see how good Powerset is. Well, he’s right. The results from Powerset return the first hit with “The special wards of Tokyo are as follows: ….Tokyo was hit by powerful earthquakes in 1703, 1782, 1812, 1855, and 1923.” A very good match for earthquakes in the last few hundred years. The results from Goole aren’t that spectacular. However, if you search for “wikipedia when did earthquakes hit tokyo,” you’ll be surprised. The third hit to “Dogpile” has the phrase…”Tokyo was hit by powerful earthquakes in 1703, 1782, 1812, 1855 and 1923. The 1923 earthquake , with an estimated.” This is the exact same phrase Powerset returned.

Yes, Google could tweak their results to take into account language more. You can see that in how Live and Yahoo appeared to have good results with my earlier queries. But is this a tweak to Google or a $100M business?

Update: Danny Sullivan does a much better job of explaining the potential value of Powerset. I don’t agree with him about the value of the semantic summaries (their value applies when you already know the meaning behind the sparse words) and in terms of the outline I think he’s right, it looks like there’s potential there. However, this means that the content will have to be contained within Powerset. That may work under Wikipedia’s license, but not other content. So I’m confused how far this is going to go. Now if Powerset wants to leave it at being a better host for Wikipedia content, that’s one thing. But a general search engine? That’s another.

OK, I changed my mind. This is my last and final post today about multi-touch today.

Are Apple users more enthusiastic about multi-touch?

After scanning through various blog posts on multi-touch, I’m begining to wonder if the Apple community is vocally more interested in the technology than lets say those from Microsoft. A quick check using Google’s Blog Search makes it look like this is so. This may be a byproduct of the fact that Apple was the first to demonstrate multi-touch in a mass-shipping product: The iPhone.

I think, however, that the Windows world is also keenly interested in multi-touch too–whether standing up at a multi-touch whiteboard/display, or sitting down at a Microsoft Surface computer, or potentially sharing and sifting through content on a slate Tablet PC.

So far, Google (because of TouchLib) and Apple (because of the iPhone SDK) are early leaders in multi-touch when it comes to giving developers multi-touch tools.

Is multi-touch more slate friendly?

Is it just a coincidence that Apple launched its multi-touch technology on essentially a slate–the iPhone–rather than one of its notebooks? I don’t think so. In fact, I think that multi-touch is more natural and more compelling on a slate-type device. (I’m defining a slate as anything here where there isn’t a predominant, keyboard built-in.)

What does this mean for Tablet PCs? It means that Tablets as they have evolved in the Microsoft sphere (as notebooks with handwriting and touch) are vulnerable to an attack by slates–if and only if slates prove to work well with multi-touch. Take multi-touch away and maybe the Tablet PC convertibles will be safe for awhile.

On the other hand, if multi-touch proves out to be as freeing as I think it might–especially for “slate” surfaces–it could mean a resurgence in slates. This might begin for small handhelds, such as MIDs, as well as large displays and then slowly encroach into the notebook space.

It also might mean that if Apple were to sell a slate (as many rumors have indicated) with multi-touch (supporting native rotating windows and the like, which are very multi-touch friendly), that they could ignite a firestorm of interest in “Tablets.” Nah.

What might a multi-touch slate mean for keyboards that are so important to us now? I’m not sure. Maybe we’ll see them working more side by side with convertibles. At this point I wouldn’t see multi-touch being the key, but rather the interconnectivity between the various computers.

One more multi-touch post. I promise. Just one more.

You know that multi-touch board that CNN has been using during their election returns shows? It comes from Perceptive Pixel, the company founded by Jeff Hans–a pioneer in multi-touch systems.

[Found via MacRumors]

High-school student, Bridger Maxwell, won last week with his OS-X based multi-touch computer in a regional science fair. His project was featured last week on Engadget.

On his blog he writes: “I also won first place in the engineering category and *drumroll* an all-expense-paid trip to Atlanta, Georgia to compete in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF)!”

Cool! Congrats!

A multi-touch wall demo.

Despite all the chatter about how hurt Yahoo is at this time, the panic doesn’t impress me. In fact, I don’t believe it. I don’t think Yahoo is that irrevocably harmed–or was that harmed to begin with even before all this Microsoft-Yahoo talk.

In fact, I kind of see Yahoo being in an interesting, good position. It has lots of users. It has a good reputation among its users. And it has experience on the web. Don’t forget, it’s also the number 2 guy in search behind Google.

There’s been lots of talk over this past year about how Yahoo was going down hill. Much of it came from the Bay Area. Doesn’t surprise me one bit, because there’s so much competition for startup talent in the Bay Area. Yahoo became fertile recruiting grounds–that is if you couldn’t get anyone from Google. However, lots of people have been leaving just about everywhere over the last year or so. It doesn’t mean one thing or another–other than a handful of first generation people peaked in the organizations there were in and took the opportunity to “cash out” and a bunch of others started seeing greener grass.

I still think though that Yahoo is in a great position to ramp up. Here’s why: Google may be the darling right now but they’ve become lathargically uninspiring as of late. The slide started about two years back or so when gobs of Bay Area people started complaining about Google releasing stuff too fast and needed better processes. I cringed at the time, hoping that Google wasn’t paying attention. Unfortunately, it looks like they were. The problem? Much of the comments came from third-party management experts–not the kind of mindset that created Google in the first place. Like all companies, Google was entering a new phase, but the lesson they should have learned was not all about how to slow things down so that they could manage things better. It was to learn how to manage what they were capable of doing.

Anyway, the result has given a big opportunity to Microsoft and Yahoo. In fact, before all of this merger talk got started I was going to blog about how of GYM, Yahoo would be at least for me the most interesting of the three to work at. Why? Because I love a challenge and I could see how Yahoo has the capacity to touch a lot of lives. Yes, Google and Microsoft can too, however, it seemed to me that of the three Yahoo potentially might be the most entrepreneurially open. I could be flat wrong on this, but from the outside it seemed so.

So what I was seeing was that while Google was spending time filling holes that Microsoft was leaving behind, and Microsoft was doing whatever Microsoft was doing, Yahoo could continue doing things that ultimately meant something to people. Like what? I’d like to see Yahoo build out its archiving of reference material. Books. Encyclopedias. Dictionaries. Movies. TV. You name it. If I want to find something–something correct–I’d go to Yahoo. If I wanted to really understand something, I’d go to Yahoo. Now maybe that would give Google huge revenues from NextTag and eBay and so on from all the searches of Britney Spears, but in the long term I’m confident long term will win out.

I’d like to see Yahoo services for looking up words. For looking up medicines or treatment options. For looking up well-known people. For facts. For doing your homework. For figuring out how to fix something.

Isn’t this what Google or any other regular Internet search does? Kind of. But two things. First, Yahoo’s DNA was as a directory–somewhat like a library model. So at its core DNA it understands how to be a reference–an archive–and how to help people get access to the information. The next step would be to not just provide web pages to these look up services, but to allow access to the core services themselves and to facilitate the growth of context accessible information. For example, why can’t apps call a Yahoo service to do a dictionary lookup? Why can’t they use Yahoo to archive every step you’ve taken in every program so you can play back what you’ve done? Yes, these can all be done with offline services too. But the point is, who might be best positioned to provide them online in an always connected world? Yahoo would seem like a good match.

Now does Yahoo have to create all of the content itself? Absolutely not. But it could enable content creators–big or super small–sharing revenue along the way to publish good reference content. With the right mindset Yahoo could enable a fresh, context driven version of the web. Wikipedia is kind of doing this already in the traditional web model. But notice, it’s not in the service model. It’s not computer friendly content.

It’s not just about working with content providers that want to type in a bunch of freshly authored content. It’s about working with cellphones that have sensors that can be leveraged to automatically tag content. It’s about doing the same for smart cameras as I’ve blogged about earlier.

The money people will argue that there’s no money in this or that it’s already been done. They might be right in the short term. But then again, if someone does it, would I use it over some other “search engine?” You bet. And more importantly my programs would use it too. So slowly Yahoo would become inextricably interwoven with a large network of apps. Now once we get all of these computers talking with one another, now can you imagine how valuable and significant a systemic change that would be? I can.

Word is spreading that Microsoft’s Ultra-Low Cost PCs (ULCPCs or ULPCs) pricing program will not support touch.

JKKMobile offers up some choice words/advice for Microsoft.

Let’s be clear though that we’re talking about unnamed, leaked sources here. Also, from what Microsoft mentioned publically earlier, they’re basically offering deep discounts for XP Home. By definition, this exludes Tablet bits (essentially) and domain join. For me, touch gets less interesting at this point. In fact, encouraging touch without Tablet could dilute the Tablet market, I guess. XP Home knocks out schools using these as Tablet PCs in any organized manner as well. I’ve already blogged about my thoughts on this. However, schools can always decide to pay a little extra for the Tablet bits and Vista and a machine that can run it reasonably well. This is just an incentive program.

And we’re really talking about a competitive nudge against Linux. That’s what’s motivating this. We’re not talking about where Microsoft’s heart is. We know no more or less whether Microsoft is committed to low-cost Tablet PCs or Tablet PCs in education.

Of course, the problem here is that in its battle against Linux, Microsoft is going to be discouraging Tablet sales and disouraging the notion that Tablet features should be everywhere. This collision course looks unavoidable. To me, it’s not a question whether Microsoft should be blocking touch on ULCPCs, it’s about whether they should be encouraging Tablets and Tablet features to be low cost. For us Tablet advocates, well, we’ve got more work cut out for us. Now, not only do we have the unwelcome $200+ premium for the digitizers, we have an additional price premium for the OS on the low-end.

Oh well, maybe these low-cost PCs will flop and we can all go back to $1500 UMPCs.