Apple fades in race to conquer TV

FT.com

Last updated: November 29, 2013 7:32 am
By Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco


It is the revolutionary television that gadget fans have been waiting years for. A camera recognises you and instantly personalises the screen. Ask what is on the Discovery Channel, the voice recognition understands and shows you. Call up Breaking Bad, and the device offers a choice of episodes on live TV, Netflix or its own video service.

This might have been the Apple TV that Steve Jobs had in mind when he told his biographer Walter Isaacson in 2011 that he had “finally cracked” the perfect user interface for TV.

Apple TV compared
Chromecast, PS4 and Xbox One

But instead it is Microsoft’s new Xbox One console, which has received rave reviews for its media-centre capabilities as well as gaming.

“Using voice to navigate around the TV experience opened my eyes to the potential with this experience. Other boxes have tried this and failed,” said Ben Bajarin, analyst at Creative Strategies, in a review of the console.

A year ago, when Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, began to raise expectations that it was about to launch a new TV product, the company’s existing set-top box was par for the course in a market of humdrum streaming devices and clunky smart TVs. But now it looks in danger of being left behind by the more radical steps taken by its rivals.

As well as the Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4, which both sold 1m units in their first day on sale this month, Google has released its $35 Chromecast, which allows smartphone-toting couch potatoes to transmit wirelessly whatever is on their small screen to the big one. It works with most devices that can run Google’s Chrome web browser.

Apple offers something similar with its Airplay feature, but it is limited to its own devices and its Apple TV receiver is three times as expensive.

At the same time, Samsung is courting developers to make apps that run on its mobiles and smart TVs, as well as touting integration between them for consumers, such as carrying over a film from a TV to a tablet when you leave the living room.

“A more advanced living room play is beginning to look like a growing opportunity for Apple,” says Dan Cryan, digital media analyst at IHS. “The rest of the market has moved on a lot.”

Google, Microsoft and Samsung all have viable “ecosystems” that encompass the biggest screen in the house and the smallest in the pocket, Mr Cryan says, while Apple still sits on the sidelines in TV.

While the Xbox One console is delivering Apple-like revolutions to TV viewing, the iPhone maker could yet take on Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony at their own game . . .

“It would be strange for a company as involved in entertainment as it is to not try to further its involvement in the one major screen and point of interaction out there in consumers’ homes that it’s not already got some kind of story for.”

This week, Apple paid about $360m to acquire PrimeSense, an Israeli company that provided some of the technology behind the previous Xbox’s motion-sensing device, Kinect.

“Some sort of living-room appliance is in Apple’s future and gesture technology could be critical,” wrote analysts at Jefferies in a note to clients this week, calling PrimeSense a “global pioneer and leader in gesture technologies.

“Smart TVs and gaming consoles are key recipients of these technologies.”

However, Jefferies analysts also described Apple TV as “the Unicorn”, as it had been rumoured for so long without ever being seen.

Apple executives have been dropping hints about its plans for the TV market for almost two years. Mr Cook said on several occasions throughout 2012 that it was an “area of intense interest”.

“It’s a market that we see, that has been left behind,” he told NBC last December in a rare TV interview. In May, he said Apple had sold more than 13m TV boxes to date, about 6.5m of which were in the previous 12 months.
A more advanced living room play is beginning to look like a growing opportunity for Apple. The rest of the market has moved on a lot

- Dan Cryan, digital media analyst at IHS

Since then, however, Apple’s progress in TV has fallen short of the revolutionary. Its existing $100 set-top box has acquired new channels such as HBO Go, ESPN, the NFL and Sky News.

But while the iPhone and iPad’s user interface has seen a complete overhaul, the Apple TV still looks pretty much the same as before software design duties were handed to Sir Jonathan Ive late last year.

People who own the Apple TV box spend far more on content than those who merely own an iPhone or iPad, analysts say. In June, Apple said it sells more than 800,000 TV episodes and 350,000 movies every day on iTunes, a large portion of which is through Apple TV, generating upwards of $3m a day in revenue.

A substantial amount of that spending is believed to be from “cord cutters” who have used Apple TV to replace their cable subscription. But some analysts believe that Apple’s future is more likely to be working with the existing broadcasters and service providers than against them.

Mr Bajarin says that Apple could take the same partnership approach to TV that it did with AT&T for the iPhone.

“The Xbox One has convinced me that a very disruptive opportunity exists to become the one box for TV,” says Mr Bajarin, “and you don’t become the one box without doing a deal with the service providers”, because they still control direct access to their networks.

Apple could one-up Microsoft by striking such a deal with the lure of better technology and the opportunity for cable companies to sell more expensive services, he suggests, citing Apple’s recent talks with Time Warner.

But striking many of those deals across the patchwork of satellite and cable operators in the US and abroad would be a long-term task. One former Apple employee says the company believed taking that approach was too risky because it would rely on competitors’ networks for quality of service.

If Mr Jobs had indeed “cracked” how to sell an Apple TV through such networks, this person said, it would be on sale by now.

Perhaps PrimeSense and other deals can help Apple raise its game in the living room but for now, many watchers of the company still doubt its TV unicorn exists.

Fatal distraction

Technology Quarterly:Q4 2013

Monitor

Mobile phones: People who use their phones while driving are causing carnage on the roads. Can technology reduce phone-related accidents?

Nov 30th 2013 | From the print edition

FOR motorists, mobile phones have been both a blessing and a curse. In 1995, when 34.5m Americans carried them, fatalities from road-traffic accidents began to fall—in part because accident victims and witnesses could immediately phone for help, says Peter Loeb, an economist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Sadly, the trend reversed four years later. By 1999 there were 97.8m Americans touting phones, and in some cases calling and even texting while behind the wheel. The fatalities from accidents caused by drivers using phones began to outweigh the number of lives saved by the ability to summon help quickly. At any given daylight moment in America today, roughly 170,000 drivers are reckoned to be texting and 660,000 are holding a phone to an ear. Of America’s more than 35,000 annual road deaths, a quarter are now linked to phone use, according to the National Safety Council, an NGO.

It is a similar story around the world. The slaughter on the roads is often more terrible in developing countries where people may be getting their first phone and their first car, says Etienne Krug, head of injury-prevention for the World Health Organisation (WHO). In India the deadliness of drivers using phones surpassed that of drunk-driving three years ago, says Harman Sidhu, head of ArriveSAFE, an Indian pressure group. Mobile-phone distraction, he reckons, accounts for nearly a fifth of the more than 230,000 annual fatalities which the WHO estimates now take place on India’s roads.

More than 140 countries prohibit drivers from holding a handset to their ear. Some 30 or so also forbid the use of hands-free headsets. Most modern cars come equipped with hands-free systems to make and receive calls. Yet many studies show a deeper problem is the extra cognitive workload a driver takes on when talking to another person on the telephone. Texting is even worse and is widely banned at the wheel; texters are even more likely to kill someone or die in an accident. How can technology help keep drivers focused on the road?

Caller information is already displayed on a dashboard screen by the hands-free systems in some cars. It can also be shown in the “head-up display” of vehicles which project information, such as the car’s speed, so that it appears to float beyond the windscreen. This can be less distracting because the driver does not need to adjust visual focus when looking between the road and a screen, says Sachin Lawande, a technologist at Harman, an American company which makes audio equipment for homes and cars. Such displays can also respond to gestures, like a wave of the hand, to silence a call instead of looking down for a button.

Some worry, though, that the temptation to put more information into head-up displays could lead to drivers reading e-mails, scanning calendar appointments and so forth. Better, some say, to stick to voice commands. These can be used to operate a phone no matter where it is in the car, says Peter Mahoney of Nuance Communications, an American firm which makes voice-recognition software. However, in April a study funded by America’s Department of Transportation found that speaking text messages could be as dangerous as typing them. (Nuance’s software was not used in these tests.)

A number of companies think the best tactic is simply to disable drivers’ phones. DriveScribe, an app for Android smartphones that is made by a company called Drive Power, sends out auto-replies that the driver is unavailable while a vehicle is in motion, and unblocks communications only when the vehicle stops. Mike Moen, the firm’s boss, concedes that many drivers will not willingly give up access to their devices, but says some parents require their teenage children to install the app if they wish to drive. Cheaper car insurance might persuade more drivers to accept phone-disabling features.

Another app, TextLimit, disables the touchscreen on iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices when the GPS in the device determines that it is moving at a preselected speed, says David Meers of Mobile Life Solutions, the app’s developer, based in Atlanta. Aegis Mobility, a Canadian firm, is pursuing an alternative approach that would operate both within the phone and within the network: telecoms operators would not route calls or data to devices on the move.

But what happens if you are the passenger in a car, or on a train, and you want to talk and text? Phones in moving vehicles could be unlocked if users pass a short test, suggests Andrea Henry of Iowa’s Department of Transportation, which is planning to supply teenage drivers with Aegis Mobility’s apps. Alternatively, signals around the driver’s seat could be scrambled by a dashboard-based jammer such as the SkyBloc, made by Trinity-Noble, an American firm. It works well but may also block passengers’ phones, says Eyal Adi, head of the firm’s office in Ra’anana, Israel. Non-government use of such kit is also illegal in many jurisdictions (though a Panamanian shipping firm bought about 100 units). It seems there is no simple technological fix—unless, that is, self-driving cars become widespread, freeing drivers to use devices unhindered, and improving road safety all round.

From the print edition: Technology Quarterly

Move over, Siri

Technology Quarterly:Q4 2013

Monitor

Predictive intelligence: A new breed of personal-assistant software tries to anticipate what smartphone users want, before they ask for it

Nov 30th 2013 | From the print edition

THE idea of artificially intelligent personal assistants—digital secretaries, made of software, that take dictation, manage contacts, book lunches and arrange transport—has been around for many years. But truly successful examples have proved as elusive as flying cars. Perhaps the best known example is Siri, the personal assistant built into Apple’s iPhones and iPads, which can understand complex spoken sentences such as “Please reschedule tomorrow afternoon’s meeting from 4pm to 3pm”. As clever as this is, however, Siri still feels more like a technology demo than a really useful assistant.

The next generation of assistant software aims to go one step further by pursuing an approach known as “predictive intelligence”. It exploits the fact that smartphones now have access to fast internet links and location data, and can draw upon personal information, address books, e-mail and calendars. 

The aim of these new assistants is to anticipate what information users need, based on context and past behaviour, and to provide it before they have even asked for it. Such an assistant might, for example, spontaneously suggest that you leave early for a meeting, because it has spotted heavy traffic en route; present directions to your hotel when you arrive in a foreign country; offer to book a taxi or hotel based on analysis of an incoming e-mail or text message; or offer personalised suggestions for dinner in the evening.

“The phone has all of these data sources, and we are still the ones who pull out our phones and take the first step. Why does a human need to initiate this process?” asks Bill Ferrell, the founder of Osito, a predictive-intelligence application for the iPhone. Instead, software should reduce the friction involved in performing tasks on mobile devices and reduce the need for manual input. Today’s cumbersome interactions are, Mr Ferrell argues, an awkward transitionary stage in the evolution of mobile devices that predictive intelligence will see off. With the advent of wearable devices that support fewer input methods, like smart watches and Google Glass, there will be a need for less interaction and more automation.

Google, for its part, considers predictive intelligence to be the future of search. Its Google Now service is arguably the most advanced incarnation of predictive intelligence; installed in many millions of Android devices, it is certainly the most widespread. In recent years Google has improved its search engine through semantic analysis and, more recently, personalisation. Anticipating your need to search is a logical next step. It draws upon search history, stored personal data and past behaviour to provide “the right information at just the right time” in the form of cards that appear on a smartphone’s screen. Google Now’s algorithms can also take advantage of partnerships with third parties—including airlines and event organisers to access ticketing information. A new feature even allows Google Now-enabled devices to listen to the sound of your television, identify what you’re watching and provide programme information in real time.

There are many other contenders. The Android and Apple app stores are filled with personal assistants of various kinds. Some draw primarily on calendar data (Donna, Sunrise, Tempo) and others on e-mail or location (Osito, reQall). Apple, which looked somewhat behind the curve on predictive intelligence, bought Cue, a personalised-agenda app, in October. It included some predictive features in the latest update to its mobile-device operating system, iOS 7, such as estimated journey times to frequently visited locations.

As ever more personal information becomes centralised in smartphones and the accuracy of positioning technology increases, these assistants will be able to learn new tricks. But innovators must tread carefully. For one thing, predictive intelligence can be creepy. Some people may not like the idea that their phone is tracking what they are doing so closely. It’s also hard to get right: assistants will inevitably make mistaken predictions, leading to unwanted notifications. Many smartphone users are already struggling with “notification fatigue” as apps and online services compete for their attention.

“There’s a balance between coverage and precision,” says Baris Gultekin, one of the architects of Google Now. Predictive technologies rely on a technique called Bayesian inference to combine multiple signals and estimate the accuracy of a given prediction. Mr Gultekin says Google Now’s notifications have to pass a “high bar” of both likelihood and usefulness in order to be displayed. It is tempting to push information to users based on a clever deduction, says Mr Ferrell, but it’s better to be silent than wrong. Yet some users even complained that the first version of Osito did not pop up often enough. Who would have predicted that?

From the print edition: Technology Quarterly

Roboconf

Technology Quarterly:Q4 2013

Monitor

Telepresence: What is it like to attend a conference remotely, via a robot proxy that provides video-conferencing on wheels?

Nov 30th 2013 | From the print edition

SCI-FI writers have long imagined technologies that would allow you to manipulate and control a perfect replica of yourself in a distant location. Today’s remote-presence robots are crude by comparison, amounting to little more than videoconferencing on wheels. But they can still be surprisingly nifty, as this correspondent discovered while pottering around RoboBusiness 2013, a robotics conference recently held in California, from the comfort of a desk 1,500 miles (2,500km) away, in Austin, Texas.

This was made possible using a Beam (pictured), developed by Suitable Technologies. It is a wheeled robot equipped with a camera, microphone and loudspeaker, and a screen displaying a live feed of its driver’s face. Instead of appearing to “locals” (as people at the remote location are known) as an image on a static desktop monitor, you are thus embodied in a physical object 1.57 metres tall, weighing just under 50kg and with a top speed of 1.5 metres per second.

Two wide-angle video cameras (with zoom and pan controls) provide a 105-degree field of view. A downward-pointing camera shows the area around the base to help you avoid obstacles. You pilot the device using the arrow keys on a computer keyboard. It all feels like guiding a character in a slow-scrolling computer game, except that the character and the game world are not virtual, but real. Beam and its ilk are limited for now: they cannot manipulate objects at the other end except than by knocking into them (few sport grippers), they are confined to relatively smooth floor surfaces and they require a high-speed internet link. But that still allows them to work in plenty of situations. Attending RoboBusiness by Beam, it was possible to visit booths, chat with people and attend meetings. The audio and video were clear regardless of the hubbub on the conference floor—and when talking to people using other Beams.

Taking notes involved the use of old-fashioned pen and paper, because the Beam lacks a built-in recording capability. Scott Hassan, Suitable Technologies’ boss, says the company decided against it, lest the robot be perceived as a surveillance device. But there is nothing to stop Beam users using separate devices or software to record audio. Accordingly, some people might prefer not to talk to what looks like a roving closed-circuit television camera.

Attendees at RoboBusiness reacted positively to the device, though a warm welcome was only to be expected from the sort of people that you find at a conference about robots. Conversations began and ended naturally, as they would in person, helped by the fact that you can point your Beam towards your remote interlocutor while talking, and turn away when you are finished. The only thing missing from the conference experience was the ability to sample free drinks.

Suitable Technologies deployed 50 Beams in this experiment. In 2015 it wants to have 10,000 of them roaming round the Consumer Electronics Show, a big trade event held each year in Las Vegas that is attended by 150,000 people. Beams currently sell for $16,000 a pop, but the company wants to offer conference organisers the option of renting the devices to attendees at a price that would be competitive with the cost (flights, hotels, and so forth) of attending an event in person. That said, if Mr Hassan and robots have their way, the whole notion of “in person” may be need redefining.

From the print edition: Technology Quarterly

The internet’s fifth man

Technology Quarterly:Q4 2013

Brain scan

Louis Pouzin helped create the internet. Now he is campaigning to ensure that its design continues to evolve and improve in future

Nov 30th 2013 | From the print edition

AT A glitzy ceremony at Buckingham Palace this summer, Queen Elizabeth II honoured five pioneers of computer networking. Four of the men who shared the new £1m ($1.6m) Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering are famous: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, authors of the protocols that underpin the internet; Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web; and Marc Andreessen, creator of the first successful web browser. But the fifth man is less well known. He is Louis Pouzin, a garrulous Frenchman whose contribution to the field is every bit as seminal.

In the early 1970s Mr Pouzin created an innovative data network that linked locations in France, Italy and Britain. Its simplicity and efficiency pointed the way to a network that could connect not just dozens of machines, but millions of them. It captured the imagination of Dr Cerf and Dr Kahn, who included aspects of its design in the protocols that now power the internet. Yet in the late 1970s France’s government withdrew its funding for Mr Pouzin’s project. He watched as the internet swept across the world, ultimately vindicating him and his work. “Recognition has come very, very late for Louis,” says Dr Cerf. “Unfairly so.”

Born in 1931, Mr Pouzin grew up in his father’s sawmill in a village in central France. Drawn to the dangerous machines he was barred from touching—not just the saws, but the steam engine that powered them—he tinkered instead with a Meccano construction kit. His parents encouraged him to apply to the École Polytechnique, France’s most prestigious technical university. After graduating, Mr Pouzin designed machine tools for the state-run post, telegraph and telecoms provider (PTT).

But then, in the 1950s, he read an article in Le Monde, reporting from an annual exhibition of office suppliers at which IBM, an American technology firm, promised that its computers would soon handle all sorts of bureaucratic drudgery. Enchanted by the potential of computerisation, Mr Pouzin moved to Bull, IBM’s French competitor. There he managed a dozen engineers crafting applications for the Gamma 60, a temperamental machine “which filled two large rooms across two different floors”. But the rigours of the job—and Bull’s partnership with RCA, an American company—exposed the limits of his skills. “I realised if I didn’t learn to program or speak English I couldn’t have a career in computing,” he recalls.

A two-year sabbatical at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave him the chance to do both. In the early 1960s Mr Pouzin moved his young family to America, where he joined a pioneering team working on time-sharing systems, which aimed to make better use of expensive mainframe computers by enabling several users to run programs on them at once. Mr Pouzin created a program called RUNCOM that helped users automate tedious and repetitive commands. That program, which he described as a “shell” around the computer’s whirring innards, gave inspiration—and a name—to an entire class of software tools, called command-line shells, that still lurk below the surface of modern operating systems.

The French exception

In the late 1960s France’s politicians launched an ambitious plan to bolster the country’s computing industry. In 1971 they challenged IRIA, a state-funded computer-science institute, to begin research into a national computer network. Mr Pouzin was asked to lead the project, which became known as CYCLADES.

Mr Pouzin visited American universities to learn more about ARPANET, a network funded by the military that had been switched on two years before, and which relied on a promising new technique called “packet switching” to deliver data from one machine to another. Chopping up all communications into data packets of fixed size, and allowing machines to relay packets to each other, meant that there was no need for a direct link between every pair of machines on the network. Instead, they could be wired together with relatively few connections, reducing the cost and increasing the resilience of the network. If a network link failed, packets could take a different path.

But to Mr Pouzin, ARPANET seemed over-designed and inefficient. Every computer required a complex piece of hardware to link it to the network, because ARPANET’s design included a connection set-up phase, in which a path across the network was established for communication between two machines. Packets were then delivered in order along this path.

Mr Pouzin’s team came up with a leaner, more efficient way to do things. Instead of deciding in advance which path a series of packets should travel along, they proposed that each packet should be labelled and delivered as an individual message, called a datagram. On ARPANET, strings of packets travelled like carriages of a train, travelling in strict order from one station to another. On CYCLADES, packets were individual cars, each of which could travel independently to its destination. The receiving computer, not the network, would then juggle the packets back into order, and request retransmission of any packets lost in transit.

Such “connectionless” packet-switching reduced the need for sophisticated and costly equipment within the network to establish predetermined routes for packets. The system’s simplicity also made it easier to link up different networks. The first CYCLADES connection, between Paris and Grenoble, debuted in 1973—closely watched by Dr Cerf and Dr Kahn, two American scientists who were by this time mulling how best to overhaul ARPANET. They built on Mr Pouzin’s connectionless, datagram-based approach, so that concepts from CYCLADES found their way into the TCP/IP suite of protocols on which the modern internet now runs.

Connection lost

Yet the innovations that made CYCLADES so compelling to Dr Cerf and Dr Kahn stirred hostility within France’s PTT and other state-run telecoms providers across Europe. Their engineers considered the design untrustworthy and disliked the way CYCLADES removed intelligence from the network. Mr Pouzin did little to calm fears that his network threatened the PTTs’ traditional way of doing things. John Day, an American computer scientist, recalls one particularly fiery presentation in 1976. “Louis showed a picture of a castle, marked ‘PTT’,” he says. “A user hung by a noose from its rampart; others were storming the walls.”

During the 1970s Europe’s state-run telecoms operators were building their own data networks, based on the circuit-switching technology used to carry phone calls. “It was complicated and expensive,” says Mr Pouzin, “and that’s why they liked it.” Georges Pompidou, France’s president, had supported IRIA, but after his death in 1974 the government turned against it. In 1978 the budget for CYCLADES was slashed. “They said, ‘You’ve done a good job. Now go fly a kite’,” says Mr Pouzin.

That same year the PTT switched on TRANSPAC, a connection-oriented data network of its own design. “It was a blunder,” says Mr Pouzin, “a dead end”. It did not seem so at first—TRANSPAC underpinned Minitel, a wildly successful consumer-information service which France’s phone company launched in 1982. Minitel offered French citizens online banking, travel reservations and pornographic chat rooms a decade before the world wide web. By the late 1990s it had 25m users. But it proved unable to compete with the internet and was eventually shut down.

Twenty years after the government junked CYCLADES, Maurice Allègre, Mr Pouzin’s former boss and ally, was still mourning the decision. “We could have been pioneers of the internet,” he wrote in 1999. “Now we are only its users, far from those who decide its future.” Mr Pouzin moved on to other projects and eventually went into academia. “We wasted a lot of a great man,” argues Mr Day. “The French were slow to take to the internet, partly because of this history. But now that the network is a fait accompli, Louis has become their hero.”

“The internet itself has not changed in 30 years. A century from now it must not be the same.”

In 2003 the government named Mr Pouzin Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, one of France’s highest awards. Mr Pouzin is now 82, and nominally retired. But like many other networking pioneers he is using his fame to campaign for greater openness and transparency on the internet, as its elegant design comes under growing commercial and political pressure. He is a vocal critic of its haphazard governance, in which key decisions are made by a hotchpotch of companies, charities and well-connected geeks, many of them based in America and largely unaccountable to users elsewhere in the world. He worries in particular about the growing clout of the five or six biggest web firms, which encourage users to stay within “walled gardens” of related sites and apps. To Mr Pouzin, this violates the internet’s tradition of openness. “They’ve recreated Minitel, in a way,” he says.

Around 80% of the new technical standards adopted in recent years were devised by American engineers and companies, he notes. He has lobbied for changes that would make the internet more accessible to non-English-speaking users. That campaign won an important victory in 2009 when ICANN, the unconventional charity which manages the internet’s address system, approved a plan to start issuing domain names (including web addresses) written in Chinese, Arabic and other non-Western scripts.

Despite this decision, ICANN—more formally known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—is a particular bugbear of Mr Pouzin’s. Based in California and very loosely accountable to America’s Department of Commerce, the organisation has in recent years worked hard to become more representative of the international community it serves. But some governments would like ICANN’s governance responsibilities—and those of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a loose affiliation of networking experts—transferred to a traditional international organisation such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a dusty UN agency that has long regulated telephony. Handing things over to the bureaucracy of the ITU, however, might slow the development and adoption of new standards. As a result, many countries have concluded that the American-led status quo is the least bad option. Mr Pouzin wonders if forming a new organisation by splitting and combining existing international bodies would be a better approach.

Instinctively an engineer rather than a campaigner, however, his main concern is that the underpinnings of the internet should not become fossilised, but should continue to evolve and improve. “The internet was created as an experimental network,” he says. “It still is one.” He supports researchers in America, Ireland, Spain and elsewhere who are devising ways to make it more efficient and more secure. “The internet itself has not changed in 30 years,” he says. “A century from now it must not be the same.” Mr Pouzin may have helped make the internet what it is today, but that does not mean he wants it to stay that way.

From the print edition: Technology Quarterly

Online Help to Pick a Car and Make the Down Payment

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The New York Times - Business Day

An online service helped Lindsay Frandsen buy a car.

TAMI CHAPPELL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

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By JACLYN TROP

November 26, 2013

When Lindsay Frandsen thought about registering for gifts for her wedding, she realized that what she and her husband really needed was a car.

Ms. Frandsen and her husband, Christian Burris, opened an account with a start-up company that lets potential car buyers reach out to their social networks for gifts.

One year later, the couple had scraped together a down payment from their savings and the gifts from the registry. Hyundai also gave them a $500 credit for taking part in the program.

“We got a good chunk toward our down payment,” Ms. Frandsen, a 26-year-old driving instructor from Atlanta, said without being specific. “It’s like 500 free dollars, basically.”

Prospective car buyers can use Toyota’s Collaborator site to pick options, schedule a test drive and chat about it with friends

While automakers and dealers lament that younger buyers have neither money nor brand loyalty when it comes to buying a car, a host of services are looking to the crowd to help them save for what could be the biggest purchase they will make for several years.

Geared toward first-time buyers, these services, like BoostUp, a Detroit-based company that Ms. Frandsen and Mr. Burris used, are trying to turn car-buying into a social experience.

Toyota and Google, for example, are announcing on Wednesday the Toyota Collaborator, a social car shopping tool where potential Corolla buyers can discuss decisions with friends and family in real time using Google Hangouts.

The Collaborator website allows those in the conversation to customize the vehicle’s exterior color, interior fabric and textures, wheels, transmission and features, including moon roofs and fog lights. After choosing the car’s features, users can take a virtual drive down their own block using Google Street View.

Users can also ask questions of Toyota dealers, schedule a test drive and check whether the car they have customized is in stock. The program is starting with a handful of dealers in San Francisco.

For Toyota, the aim is to be where younger shoppers hang out: online, in Google’s virtual hangout service.

The Corolla “skews very much to a younger audience that relies much more on input from friends and family than experts and brands,” said Kimberley Gardiner, Toyota’s director of digital marketing strategy.
“The goal is certainly to get folks in their 20s and 30s,” she said.
If the Collaborator is successful, Toyota plans to introduce a similar program for another vehicle next spring.

Analysts say that younger buyers are losing interest in buying cars, preferring to live in cities where public transportation is available or to use vehicle-sharing services like Zipcar and Uber.

“Automakers and dealers are going to have to identify new ways to engage these customers and deliver a showroom experience that enhances the process for shopping for a vehicle,” said Joe Vitale, global automotive leader at Deloitte & Touche.

Deloitte’s most recent study showed that shopping for the vehicle was three times as important as its design.

“They expect their automotive shopping experience to be on a par with their retail and technology experiences,” Mr. Vitale said.

Chrysler’s Dodge brand introduced the industry’s first crowdfunding program,Dodgedartregistry.com, in January. Friends and family can contribute to a potential buyer’s Dart fund by sponsoring different parts of the vehicle, like the engine, the heated seats or even the antenna. Users are encouraged to customize their vehicles and then use Facebook and Twitter to announce their goal and solicit donations and gifts.
“You’re trying to break through the clutter and get noticed,” said Melissa Garlick, head of Dodge brand advertising, adding that it was also less expensive than buying television ads.

BoostUp, which is backed by the former Chrysler chief executive Tom LaSorda, helps consumers save money for a down payment and rewards them with matching funds — up to a certain amount — when they buy a car. Users can set a public goal and then collect donations and birthday, holiday and graduation gifts through their BoostUp account, which is similar to a Facebook page, according to its founder, John Morgan.
The company, which says it has more than 30,000 users for car registries, has partnered with Hyundai and 185 dealerships in 35 states. Mr. Morgan said BoostUp would announce more partnerships with automakers next year. The company earns marketing fees from its automaker partners and monthly fees from local dealerships that advertise on the site, as well as the interest accrued on user funds, which it uses to pay its bank fees.

The model works because “there’s a higher conversion rate when consumers are willing to put money toward a purchase,” Mr. Morgan said.

About two-thirds of the site’s users are under 35.

It also helps automakers, who can target their incentives to specific regions to move slow-selling vehicles off the lot, like the Hyundai Accent in the Northeast.

Ryan Deisenroth, 27, of Novi, Mich., created a BoostUp account after a friend bought a Hyundai using the match.

Mr. Deisenroth, who oversees the automotive claims unit for an insurance company, contributed $100 of his own money and received $80 as a gift from his parents toward his car. But saving to replace his ailing Pontiac G6 is difficult, with student loans to pay and a wedding next year.

He hopes to save $5,000 in the next three months so that he can buy a Hyundai. “It’s the match that convinced me to look at Hyundai,” he said. “I don’t have much brand loyalty, I guess.”

Younger buyers are living in a more crowded market than their parents, according to Rick Wainschel, vice president for automotive insights at AutoTrader.com. With more options available, they consider more brands, sometimes doubling the number of vehicles they are considering by the time they make a decision.

“The world that they’ve grown up in isn’t nearly as simple as their parents’,” Mr. Wainschel said. “Now, Kia and Hyundai are players, and the Big Three make good sedans.”

Kids who like vinyl would love newspapers

FT.com

November 27, 2013 4:19 pm


By Michael Skapinker
Never write off any technology, even when it seems to have been buried


The biggest surprise about the rise in vinyl record sales is the age of the buyers. A poll by the BPI, the UK music industry body, found that more than a third of the record enthusiasts were under 35 years old.

How do they even know what vinyl is? Surely their parents had converted to cassette tapes, if not CDs, by the time they came along?

Yet here they are, enthusing about the richness of a record’s sound, the delight of hearing a needle drop on to an LP and the beauty of cover art.

The BPI is forecasting that 700,000 vinyl records will be sold in the UK by the end of the year, the highest level since 2001 and double last year’s figure.

The same is happening around the world. More vinyl records were sold in 2012 than in any year since 1997, according to the IFPI, the international music trade body.

Any music you want is available at the tap on a screen. Pay a small monthly subscription to Spotify and you can listen to songs you haven’t heard for years, as well as whatever is new. And yet here are people buying old-fashioned records.

The lesson is that we should never write off any technology, even when it seems to have been buried by whatever came next. Cinema should have killed off theatre, video and DVD should have destroyed cinema, and downloads and streaming should have seen off the lot.

Yet almost 14m people attended London’s theatres in 2012, in spite of the attraction of the Olympics, says the Society of London Theatre. In 1986, the figure was a little over 10m.

More than two-thirds of Americans and Canadians went to the cinema last year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, and, again, young people who have grown up with online movies and huge wall-mounted home television screens were particularly enthusiastic. The peak US age for going to the cinema is 25 to 39. The next biggest cohort of film-goers is made up of 18 to 24-year-olds.

What does it take for an older technology to survive, and thrive, in spite of the arrival of a new one? A sense of occasion seems to be a key.

Just as vinyl lovers enjoy the business of slipping a record out of its cover and placing it on the turntable, so there is the sense of anticipation as the theatre curtain goes up and you get your first glimpse of the set, waiting for the actors who are about to populate it.

The knowledge that those actors have to get it right every time, the communication they build with the audience as the play progresses and their palpable gratitude and relief as they take their bows are not rewards an audience can get from a film.

The cinema’s virtues are less tangible, but there is the same set of familiar accompaniments – the advertisements and the trailers, the large screen and, increasingly, 3D.

There are activities and technologies I imagine we will never want back. Does anyone have any nostalgia for music cassettes, with their mean little plastic boxes and their tapes with their tendency to stretch and break? Or for video films, whose only merit was that they kept their place, so that you could carry on watching where you last left off? It is hard to imagine, but who knows? If vinyl can return perhaps people will one day renew whatever love they had for tapes that take ages to rewind.

What other apparently doomed technologies will make a comeback when a young generation discovers their virtues? My tip: newspapers.

I would say that, you may think. But while the Financial Times remains committed to print, its declared future is “digital first” and we seem to be making a go of it. My future doesn’t depend on print newspapers surviving.

But newspapers have distinct advantages. I have written before of how I won a student audience around by laying out the virtues of print: it doesn’t need recharging, it is always “on”, it cannot be hacked.

Newspapers have advantages of their own. They are lightweight, disposable and resistant to the vagaries of life.

Recently, on the London Underground, the woman standing next to me apologised profusely. I looked down to see her coffee streaked across my FT. I wiped if off and carried on reading. There was none of the panic that accompanies contact between liquid and anything electronic.

There is something delicious about spreading a paper over a breakfast table and a serendipitous alighting on articles you might not have come across online. Young vinyl lovers, give papers a whirl.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

Twitter: @Skapinker