I still edit all my photographs (thousands) in LightZone, and have always vehemently made statements against Adobe Photoshop. Not because of the lack of photographic capabilities but primarily because of the proprietary language it forces you to understand before you can use Photoshop effectively.

Photoshop remains the “vi”- editor of photo editing, powerful yet very cumbersome to use. No secretary uses “vi” today, and the future of Photoshop is moving further and further away from the mass market Adobe should be trying to attract. Nothing new there.

But Photoshop CS4, after a long track record of rather meaningless innovation and UI revamps now includes some very nifty innovations worth looking at, as the videos demonstrate. Content aware scaling (from a company Adobe acquired last year), panoramas and the new 3D capabilities are very cool. So, if you’re interested in rudimentary 3D capabilities before you jump into Maya, check out Adobe’s website where the nifty new capabilities of Adobe’s Photoshop Extended are available for roughly $1,000. But, perhaps this time around, the premium price is worth it.

Credit where credit is due.

Tags: Photography, Photoshop, LightZone, Maya, Photographers, Adobe

Facebook, one of the fastest growing social network sites has really screwed up User Interface (UI) design with its new look. Take a look at the screen capture above. Now you tell me in 5 seconds the intuitive difference between clicking on: [Facebook] and [home], [home] and [profile], [profile] and [Georges van Hoegaerden], [settings] and [profile], and [settings] and [Georges van Hoegaerden].

But more importantly, Facebook has clearly not read my blog on removing the technology language to appeal to consumers, an issue that prevents many consumer technology companies from maximizing their growth potential. But who’s counting at Facebook these days?

Facebook is a technology company that exposes social networking capabilities in a very technological fashion. The examples are plenty: the workings of the UI described above, the categorization of data optimized to suit their internal data-models and the very complicated way to add applications to the platform, and we can keep going on. But for now, they’ll get away with it. Other consumer technology companies won’t be that lucky.

A great user interface can never be an objective by itself as that just presents a pretty face, try living with a person that only has that. The ultimate user experience (and this is where I politically depart from the previous analogy), is defined by an ecosystem of capabilities, cost and ease-of-use that creates the real and sustainable appeal.

BMW figured out early on that the Ultimate Driving Experience™ is what sells cars albeit their engine capabilities and timing was their initial core strengths. Today they sell the sum of all parts, The Ultimate Driving experience: great engine capabilities, spiffy performance, practical design and excellent comfort - a thrilling way to drive from A to B.

Facebook currently has a horrible “Ultimate Social Experience”: good (but no longer unique) social networking, so-so performance, impractical design and pretty bad comfort. Those are probably the reasons why 90% of my Facebook friends never use any Facebook features but simply create an account.

Many of Facebook’s recent poor decisions (including ad network issues etc) are evidence that user growth is outpacing their ability to grow up. And that could be catastrophic. Facebook is a great social networking platform with a lot of potential that many people rely on.

Facebook better watch out and prevent that too many people will start hating it. Those same users may use Facebooks own social networking capability to turn it off as fast as they initially turned it on.

Tags: BMW, FaceBook, Performance, Platform, Consumer

Two days ago we got word about the demise of the Photoshelter collection marketplace. Not surprising because Photoshelter was not a marketplace. Technologists have a tendency to slap the marketplace label on anything they build, without understanding what it truly means.

Marketplace models, criteria, funding and execution are fundamentally different from premium market models. Photoshelter was really nothing more than a replica of Getty Images without Getty’s money to buy inorganic growth.

Here is how Photoshelter failed to meet marketplace rules:

Marketplace violation 1: Photoshelter artificially arbitrated supply, through a lengthy subjective signup process in which Photoshelter arbitrators determine whether you get to play.

Marketplace violation 2: Photoshelter artificially arbitrated demand, as it aimed to sell it to “the industry’s top buyers”, not to everyone.

Marketplace violation 3: Photoshelter gave preference to images they liked, rather than simply connecting any supply with any demand.

Marketplace violation 4: Photoshelter deployed a sales-force (from Getty and other photo agencies) that promoted a premium market model, like any sales-force driven by quotas would.

But CEO Allen Murabayashi makes a few damaging statements in his blog on why they failed and tries to blame that on the market as a whole:

“Licensing photography is fraught with clearance issues”
150 Years of photography exchange has resolved the fundamental issues of rights management quite effectively. Getty-Images, Corbis and others have gone through a well defined process in order to clear rights in their move from analog to digital exchange. Photoshelter has relied too much on a model that requires people intervention, while the majority of rights and enforcement can be embedded in and enforced by technology and made the responsibility of the asset owner. In the same way eBay sellers are responsible for the fulfillment of transactions. That enforcement guarded by a true meritocracy will quickly weed out bad behavior (that plagues any marketplace).

“Stock photography is a slow growing market dominated by a single player”
Nonsense, the term stock photography is an artificial classification (made up by its current participants) that bares no value. Today $22B of photography is exchanged of which less than 10% is transacted electronically. Growth through the premium market model of Photoshelter is limited because the photography market requires a free-market.

“Research Requests move too quickly for individuals to react in a timely fashion”
Perhaps they do in the “top buyer” segment, but certainly not in all. Since Photoshelter artificially limited the demand characteristics, any assessment of market traction and behavior should be taken with a grain of salt.

“Buyers desire more diversity, but convenience (aka subscription deals) triumphs this desire”
Absolutely, buyers deserve diversity, and buyers should be presented with the ultimate experience (subscriptions are not the answer). What has fundamentally changed in a 150 year old analog photography market is that demand does not come from a few buyers, but a highly fragmented buyer market that will want to use an image for any purpose (not just for your average advertising purposes).

“A crowd-source model for stock will likely never work”
Absolutely disagree. Photoshelter deployed a premium market model on a market that requires free-market principles. It failed for the same reason Getty Images fails to become a market-leader in the un-arbitrated exchange of digital photography (identified by roughly 30% market ownership). Getty Images grew by inorganic growth and acquiring other photo agencies with staff photographers that create the majority of images it sells (less than 7% come out of third party supply according to a statement by its CEO in 2006).

Photoshelter, as lovers of photography, seemed to have their hearts in the right place but not their execution. And they neglected to respond to our offer for help one year ago, when we saw their demise coming.

Tags: Photographers, Photography, Getty-Images, Growth, Free-market, Marketplace

Let’s look at photography (my hobby), arguably the most important purchasing-driver of computers (after the ability to access the internet) by consumers. Media management (yes, on the desktop) remains more than a Billion dollar market opportunity.

Case in point: new announcements of Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture tout enhanced interoperability with third party plugins to manage and edit your photographs. Don’t you feel good about that warm open-source-like karma of interoperability?

I don’t. Both vendors have deployed their next trick to customer imprisonment. And plenty of uninformed customers will fall for it. Here is why you shouldn’t:

1/ There is no need for an additional platform for photo management.
Photo editing capabilites of both applications are mediocre (no layer based editing, no advanced local editing etc.) and their asset management capabilities are little more than a replica of file system capabilities (even photographic attributes such as exposure, aperture and other attributes are maintained by the file-system metadata today). So, except for making nice photo albums and calendars, why else would you slug thousands of photographs in a proprietary asset management format that is less reliable than the underlying file-system and requires seperate backup and archiving strategies to maintain.

2/ Plugins have worked for years on file-system based photographs.
The announcement of the interoperability with plugins is really old news as those third party applications have been working with file-system based photographs for years. This is a platform on top of a platform, designed to milk more money out of customers and locks them into a proprietary technology stack. A prison with the windows open is still a prison.

3/ The operating system needs-to and will evolve faster.
The pace of meaningful innovation of the Personal Computer OS is deplorable. Microsoft has not made the PC operating system significantly smarter over the last ten years and that has opened the window of opportunity for Apple to surpass Microsoft in usability (rather than functionality). The ability to easily create and manage user-generated content such as, Photography and Video, has now become important adoption drivers to the platform, OS-vendors have yet to respond to. Photographic capabilities should be built-in (not priced-on). These days the unique media experience of the platform is the differentiation that sells the computer (since they all do internet quite well).

As a consumer, buying into seperate photography management siloes will cost you significant time and money (as the former CEO of a photo software company, researching the alternatives, I tried). My advice is to wait until an agile vendor steps up and turns media management into a core competency of the computing experience.

In the words of Ray Lane (partner at KPCB and former COO of Oracle) who once said customers are better off skipping some steps of innovation (in his case to skip client-server for three-tier internet architecture), I have just presented you with my reasoning to skip-over Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture. Not because I don’t like some of its functionality, but because it is strategically a dead-end street.

The next evolution of media management will soon eradicate the old one and deliver lasting differentiation to the vendor that owns it and provides a much, much better media experience to the consumer.

I am planning on having something to do with that.

Tags: Platform, Photography, Consumer, OS X, Operating System, Innovation, Integrity, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple

Since a platform is the technology foundation for a marketplace, platforms - to achieve extraordinary growth - need to instill the rules of marketplaces as we laid them out in our previous post.

But not all platforms are created equal and some self-proclaimed platform vendors do not adhere to marketplace principles. That could mean you as a provider think you subscribed to a meritocracy - with equal opportunity exposure - yet other participants (your competitors) get pay-to-play advantages. Potential buyers in that tainted market are actually shopping in a premium market, not the free-market they expect to be most economic and trustworthy.

Other synonyms of the same phenomenon abused in the technology industry include: ecosystems, exchanges, communities and networks which all serve identical needs in connecting disparate supply with disparate demand, something a premium market is unable to do.

Consumer companies understand the freedom of choice customers demand. Enterprise software and services vendors have long basked in the glory of premium markets and have a long way to go in order to truly build winner-takes-all free-markets, which in total size are often larger in size than the total size of premium markets in that category.

In the Enterprise space the majority of customers (roughly 80%) buying products or services deviate from its intended design and want to add on, integrate or correlate those off-the-shelve configurations with other ones. Enterprise customers often spend more money on customization than they spend on licensing fees for say, Oracle products. Hence the requirement for a true marketplace of additional enterprise components (check out Serena, great concept but marketplace execution and marketplace compliance - yet to be developed - will be the tell-tale of their real success). Salesforce.com's Appexchange seems to provide the best proximity to a free-market of applications we've seen, although we have yet to verify its integrity against the marketplace rules.

Developer programs from companies like Oracle (with OTN), Microsoft (MSDN) and others use surrogate models of marketplaces to mimic, but not truly deliver on its powerful benefits. Go visit their websites and you'll notice no mention of third party products. There literally is no marketplace, although Microsoft has a link to "a library", if you can find it.

Apple (with the iPhone Developer Network) is experimenting with its rules but apart from compliance to the free-pricing rule, its overall compliance to a free-market is minimal. And, today, they don't need to. Apple still has time to deploy some premium market tricks as long as Google with Android doesn't deliver on a real marketplace for developers early.

As a software provider you may need to run on and comply to a major vendor's technology, just don't assume a developer network, exchange or community will make you rich - not until the marketplace supports a true meritocracy. And for that, again, real marketplace principles need to be deployed.

Tags: Apple, IPhone, Experience, Microsoft, Adobe, Photography, Internet, Democracy, Communication, Innovation

We could debunk every statement Getty-Images made with regards to its recent earnings call but we've essentially done so in our extensive blogs about the company. Apart from the negative outcome of the call, we instead want to highlight the systemic attitudinal problem of the company.

First off, Getty's success is based on the fact that it believes it can predict how images (or other media assets) are going to be used by the buyer. It continuously re-purposes images and image rights to meet a supposed buying trends it is never going to be able to predict. With massive changes in photography Getty has frequently trailed trends rather than enabled them. The usage of the image should be determined between seller and buyer, with Getty's infrastructure merely supporting that transaction.

Second, the usage and type classification in the earnings call is the kind of double dipping I've seen many companies in trouble do. There is a dramatic overlap between editorial, creative, rights managed, royalty free, royalty ready and a myriad of other popular image definitions. The sole metric of success for the company is number of images sold at what ASP, and at what cost. No Wall-Street investor will be able to make sense of the fog Getty has put up in the conference call to hide the fact that organic growth is miserable.

Third, Getty arrogantly describes their (lackluster) performance as the market trend, as if they are the market. No, Getty, the market of image usage is actually growing faster than you are able to support. The real news is that Getty is losing market-share.

The lack of transparency makes Getty-Images an un-investable business, both from a market and acquisition perspective. The bottom line from the call simply confirms that, forget about everything in-between.

Tags: Apple, Broadcast, Comcast, Consumer Packaged Goods, DVR, Netflix, Media, Entertainment, ITunes, HD, Mobile

Getty-Images appears to be having trouble getting sold for $1.5B according to an article in The New York Times today. Perhaps the 40+ investment banks on Wall street and an equal amount of large private companies that visited our website really took our Puffer Fish analogy to heart.

So what could be done with Getty-Images? The problem with finding an acquisition partner is Getty-Images' hybrid business model. For a technology acquirer the services business with staff photographers is a burden they will not want to swallow. On the flip side, very few other services companies than perhaps the Associated Press can find solace in the photographer factory that is an integral part of Getty-Images.

1/ Buy company at a decent value
2/ Separate content producer business from content distribution
3/ Privatize each
4/ Sell content production business
5/ Revamp content distribution

ad 1/ To establish a fair price I am eager to see the operating plan metrics separating content production from content distribution in order to find out to what extend both lines of businesses have suffered from being under one roof (there may be some opportunity hidden in there)

ad 2/ Content production is a business model that, in today's world, needs to be separated from distribution. With the internet in place as the conduit for distribution, very few company can still afford to compete with the content produced by a "free-market". There is some remaining value left in the production of "premium" content for a "premium" audience, in the same way the Associated Press is able to provide this service to a confederation or co-op of newspapers.

ad 3/ Build companies that focus on what they do best, one produces content - one distributes it. Not within a single company or P&L or board. Each with its own growth trajectory.

ad 4/ Just like in the "premium" production of news articles (where bloggers compete), the news media will require a "premium" production of editorial photographs that has some trust associated with it. Perhaps a deal can be struck with AP - or a new version of AP can be created with identical goals. Getty-Images already has established a large installed base of agencies who can lease resources on a subscription basis.

ad 5/ Long term, content distribution is where the money is. The Long Tail of photography is massive, much larger in total image exchange than any Super-Store will ever be. Thanks to the Internet. But to build an effective free-market, a core of premium supply is needed to create its initial pull, Getty-Images certainly has that. To make this new company a winner though, it needs to truly support free-market principles, something very few companies can pull off.

We'd be happy to assist in the assessment of the Getty-Images acquisition value along the lines of the aforementioned strategy and even more in the post-acquisition execution. Our passion for photography, the ever increasing reach of the internet, and the value produced by all photographers around the world creates a fantastic new opportunity.

Tags: Adobe, Photography, LightZone, Aperture, OS X, Asset Management

My 3 year old daughter uses my iPhone to play music videos and YouTube videos and has not touched a PC (or better, a Mac) yet. With the same content available on either she's obviously seen me operate my Mac and looks over my shoulder now and then, but finds all the keys and even the "Magic-mouse" complicated. Clearly a usage experience is more important to her than shear processing power. Sounds familiar doesn't it? Nintendo anyone?

What I see in so many early business plans today is the old-fashioned notion of deep technology expertise, something most traditional investors still harp on. I see too many BMW engines being developed without attention being paid to the development of The Ultimate Driving Experience®. True, you can't build the driving experience without great engines, but BMW, like no other vendor understands that the total experience is the selling point. In the end, technology will become commoditized and its differentiation will be determined by the way it interacts with content, media, social network, end-users to create a well designed user experience.

Apple is another company that understands that focus on user experience very well. Its products are a piece of art, its function (to a novice) is at least competitive. Buying a Mac is an experience, and so is using it. A much better experience than buying a PC in every way. The box your Mac comes is even a work of art, the way it folds open, the new materials, everything builds to the experience. As a customer you feel special, owning an iPod with your name engrave on it and all your music in it. And that is what Apple customers are buying into: feeling special and appreciated. Attention paid to you!

Now every market segment has its own definition of user experience, so don't go do what Apple does before you understand how you can differentiate. But every software, service or content vendor should consider building a unique customer experience that in the end - sells more. It's a CEO level responsibility because it involves making sizable investments in complementary areas, not just a marketing ploy. The days of just selling a product are over.

Tags: Bose, Experience

Many times I am asked to help a foreign (usually European) company to make it in the United States. But the pursuit of the American dream requires that sacrifices be made. Everyone wants to be a star like Elvis Presley, yet few have the real determination to do so.

So, why are US companies so different. The internet is releasing the fictional boundaries of technology, making its usage and its future development available to anyone. Universities in Europe are doing a much better job teaching technology, yet we don't see a significant amount of European companies become successful. What is going on?

While I don't have all the answers, I can offer a few personal observations of why the American way - and - dream is alive and well:

1/ More entrepreneurs are bred by a capitalistic society than a socialistic society. Entrepreneurs with a personal stake and drive for success boost investor deal flow and premium supply. A significantly larger investor pool yields higher valuations for premium supply.

2/ Solid early-stage business acumen. While technology and programming skills can be acquired by virtually anyone, the European petri-dish, the ecosystem that supports the early-stage exchange of technology products and services is missing. As a result people with the business skills needed to bring those early stage products to market rapidly is virtually non-existent in Europe.

3/ Resilient attitude. Young Americans (and ex-pats like me who never felt at "home") are taught to make money and make themselves happy, young Europeans are taught to get a job at a reputable company and be happy. Taking risk and thinking different is a requirement of being a successful entrepreneur, in addition to withstanding a great amount of adversity.

4/ More risk-taking buyers. Customers, partners and acquirers are more entrepreneurial too. Aggressive competitive cultures force buyers to be more entrepreneurial. Technology innovation is accepted as the instrument of differentiation in many US businesses and customers will buy products that give them competitive edge and better quality-of-service.

5/ Continuous focus. Focus on success, short and long. Building a business that goes through several transformations to meet continuous market milestones is crucial to success, rather than a formal majestic plan with many dependencies that never materializes.

So, is there no hope for foreign technologists? Au contraire, I've seen some great technologies that, if unlocked, can find early traction and impressive valuations. It's time to judge a technology not by the country it comes from but the content of its innovation. The american dream is waiting for you. Are you up for the ride?

[In remembrance of Martin Luther King]

Tags: LightZone, Apple, Adobe, SLR, Free-market, Photography, Photoshop

To quote Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal at Consumer Technology Ventures last week, quality is an important pillar of success for consumer products and I couldn't agree more. Many times products are hyped with incredible promise (marketing) but the product either doesn't work as advertised, requires other services to be activated or simply is not ready (does Zune ring a bell).

From that perspective I am less happy that Apple (the only PC platform I have ever bought), is gaining popularity. Price pressure and popularity does not always do wonders to quality.

I currently use a 2-year old Powerbook G4 1.5Ghz of which the fan (right after the one year warranty expired) makes a noise like a sawing machine, and I had to reduce the speed of the processor to keep the fans from cooling. For work I purchased a $999 23-inch Apple flat-panel that produces stunning image quality and brightness, yet the ghosting of images on this expensive piece of equipment allows me to see which window was there 5 minutes ago. I expect the best from Apple and I am willing to pay a premium, but I am not willing to pay a premium for under-par quality.

Now, I am not picking on Apple because it is the worst performer in the consumer space, quite the opposite. Apple undoubtedly is the best performer in the business, but given that, Walt's comments make even more sense to me. Switching off of Apple is not an option for me, but griping is.

Update:
After unscrewing at least 20 screws on my out-of-warranty Powerbook G4 (directions courtesy of iFixit), I discovered that the reason why I had reduced the processor speed on my laptop for over one year and avoid the fan from coming on was created by, get this: a quality control sticker in the fan compartment that had come loose and was spinning along with the fan. A simple removal of the sticker solved the issue.

Tags: Electronic Arts, Gaming, Xbox, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Entertainment

Last week I sat in at a VC panel and the general partners from a few early stage VC firms who agreed that founders should have deep and many years of domain expertise in the companies that they are investing in. I disagree.

For one, true disruptive innovation does not come from compliance to an existing market. Apple, as a pure technology company, has proven it does not need to be a content expert to take the music business for a spin, and a massive overhaul. Real innovation starts with a healthy skepticism about current markets and its tactics. Coming up with new approaches to make money, and fundamentally changing the workings of paralyzed markets, is what makes my heart tick.

In my career I've always taken the disruptive standpoint. I became one of the most successful media experts for Oracle, not because of my prior domain expertise: I had none, but because of my drive to disrupt and look at the issues from a different perspective, one that is not necessarily tied to common acceptance. Finding and believing in OuterBay Technologies when it was unpopular and (yet) unsuccessful and creating a new market segment no industry analyst had heard of and starting immergo video communications without prior video communications knowledge and signing up big brand customers like IDG, blowing existing 20 year old production companies away, are living proof of why domain expertise is over-rated. SoftKinetic, the company I just became the CEO of, enables the next disruption in home entertainment no-one has travelled before.

The right investments are those made into people with guts, who vow to change how markets work and create disruption that unleashes new money. As Einstein taught us early on: imagination is more important then knowledge.

Tags: Wall-Street, Mossberg, Apple, Premium, Quality, Consumer, Images

Many times the question comes up, what exactly is Web 2.0? Although we are not great supporters of buzzwords that have little real meaning, we are - just this time - tempted to put our big-thinking in the mix.

We believe it describes a set of technologies to support the immense popularity and growth characteristics of free-markets.

Free markets have been in existence at least since 1637, when dutch growers imported Tulips from Turkey and engaged in heavy bidding wars with buyers at the onset of the flower markets. [In the interest of "full-disclosure"; I grew up in Holland].

The Dutch auction (also referred to as "The Essence of Fairness" with respect to IPO markets) was created when ample supply was met with equally impressive demand, and a unique trading mechanism was developed. Apart from the details of the trading options (which eBay has adopted), we want to focus here on the dynamics of the market that are so different from the technology industry in its current incarnation.

The technology industry (still in an immature state) has built success around companies that identify and carve out a one-to-many relationship with customers. Successful companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco etc. staved off early competition and now act as the single asset owner of the technology they sell to many customers, fearing little organic competition. We call them what they are; demi-cartels. A great position to be in and very profitable, but the technology market is about to get a shakeup, not dissimilar to what happened in the flower markets.

The creation and composition of technology assets, whether those assets are applications, databases, code or new media content, is emerging from the hands of specialists into the realm of a much broader set of providers.

Suddenly, the technology industry faces competition it has never seen before. And it is responding by changing its tactics [ technology taxonomy in motion], it has to. Oracle loses a big customer because it refuses to put up with fat margins, exorbitant pricing and 20% support fees and makes the switch to a little vendor called MySQL. New online capabilities enable Craigslist, where posting classified ads is free of charge, to hasten the demise of traditional newspaper classified advertising. MySpace takes the need for people to express themselves out of the hands of the specialists.

New many-to-many market models arise and dramatically impact the old rules of the game. New content establishes micro-celebrities that drive the popularity of a free-market technology platform. The Pareto principle is dead (well, not really - its amplitude will change).

So, Web 2.0 is a platform strategy (rather than a proprietary stack) that enables many-to-many relationships between buyers and sellers of electronic assets. When transparency and integrity are key objectives in the creation of these marketplaces, Web2.0, with whatever technologies that represents, actually has a chance of becoming a buzzword we can speak fondly about.

Tags: Blackberry, EBay, PDA, Motorola, Cingular, AT&T, CNN, Design

Apple's latest Aperture software personifies how the technology industry fuels its own growth by creating new software that drives new incremental hardware requirements. Managing an increasing library of 16,000 photographs is what I do when I am not working or playing with my family. And when Apple's Aperture came out late last year, I jumped on the promise to manage those assets (or liabilities in some cases) more effectively. While I had the bottom-of-the-barrel of Aperture's hardware requirements, a not so shabby 1.5Ghz Powerbook, the expansion with 2Gbytes of memory and a 160Gbytes replacement hard-disk seemed a foregone conclusion. But not so fast, Aperture's performance that is. Even this configuration leaves you yearning for a large flat-panel, so the windows and photographs can be displayed in sizable fashion and with the clarity they deserve. An Intel Dual-Core wouldn't hurt either.

The bottom-line is, a two year old, top-of-the-line Powerbook is suddenly on its last leg. I can only wonder what upcoming updates of Microsoft Office, Adobe CS3, Dreamweaver and others will do to my geriatric Powerbook. Desktop software is still an important catalyst, fueling new hardware replacements in a slowing PC market. Software and services will live alongside each other for quite some time, in the interest of PC manufacturers and admittedly, end-users.

Tips for Aperture enthusiasts:
Two tips that will smooth a transition and took me two months to figure out: 1/ Remove all videos from the iPhoto library, Aperture will abort, in my case after 14 hours, if you don't. 2/ De-fragment your hard-drive after a successful import, or simply copy the main Aperture library to a backup disk, remove the original and copy it back. The Aperture import process fragments the library dramatically; I ended up with a Library of over 6,000 file fragments, absolutely killing performance.

Tags: Apple, Photography, Intel

Recently I was asked to think about how to improve the phone features and functionality in an ever commoditizing "Terminal market" (an Ericsson acronym). There is a lot at stake here; lots of people buying phones, 2.2B of them to be exact, not enough of them buying the associated internet service.

Improve the specs and make it look good is the easy answer to that question. That is, if you are building a phone not a PDA. In a PDA you can pull technology, services and memory into a bulky enclosure and rely on nerdocrats to buy them; not a large market. So how do you build a phone that is just as smart and fits in the enclosure of a RAZR? Or smaller? Research shows that people buy cool looking phones, rather than bulky ones stuffed with functionality.

The answer in my view is services. Just as the power of the iPod stems from the iTunes library on your desktop connected to the iTunes store, phones should become re-play devices to services provided on the backend. The phone should be an iPod geared towards managing and replaying service data; contacts, calendar items, music, news are pushed out to it automatically, pictures are taken, stored and uploaded automatically to your section of the "store", ready to be shared and, yes, sold. Enabling free