Tech and You : Coming Attractions

At Last, the iPhone

Steven Levy — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:41:03 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I went to Pittsburgh for what I thought would be a day trip. Since I was headed back that evening, I didn’t take my laptop, but because of thunderstorms across the Eastern Seaboard, my sojourn turned into an overnight stay. So I had an opportunity to give a good workout to something I had received the previous day: a review unit of Apple’s eagerly awaited (boy, that’s an understatement) iPhone.

During my travels and airport delays, I was able to keep up with my e-mail, negotiate my way around the downtown, get tips on the city from an old friend whose number I don’t normally have handy, check the weather conditions in New York and D.C., monitor baseball scores and blogs, listen to an early Neil Young concert and amuse myself with silly YouTube videos and an episode of “Weeds,” all on a single charge before the battery ran down. Now, just about all those things could have been done by devices that are already out on the market. But considering I’d had the iPhone for just a day, and never taken a glance at a manual, it was an impressive introduction. In contrast, I’ve had a Motorola handset for two years and am still baffled at its weird approach to Web browsing and messaging. What’s more, with the exception of learning to type on the iPhone, which requires some concentration, doing all those things on that five-ounce device was fun, in the same way that switching from an old command-line interface to the Macintosh graphical user interface in the mid-1980s was a kick. And when I showed the iPhone to people during that trip and in the days afterward—especially people under 25—the most common reaction was, “I have to have this,” sometimes followed by a quick, if alarmingly reckless, consideration of what might need to be pawned in order to make the purchase.

And there it is: one of the most hyped consumer products ever comes pretty close to justifying the bombast. Apple has a history of using cutting-edge technology, slick design and friendly software to break the common logjam in which our machines have the capability to perform certain tasks, but developers haven’t figured out how to make the experience easy, even pleasurable, for users. That’s one reason why people, especially the tens of millions who love iPods, have been so eagerly awaiting the iPhone. “Everyone we talk to hates their phones—it’s universal,” Steve Jobs told me on a call to my iPhone a couple of days ago. (The control-freaky Apple CEO was just checking up to see how I was doing.) If you’re looking for quibbles, flaws and omissions, you’ll certainly find them in this first version of the iPhone. (I’ll get to these below.) But the bottom line is that the iPhone is a significant leap. It’s a superbly engineered, cleverly designed and imaginatively implemented approach to a problem that no one has cracked to date: merging a phone handset, an Internet navigator and a media player in a package where every component shines, and the features are welcoming rather than foreboding. The iPhone is the rare convergence device that actually converges.

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The D List

Steven Levy — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 19:49:55 GMT

The fifth annual “D” Conference, run by the Wall Street Journal with hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, was so full of digiluminaries that nearly every time the name of some tech macher was invoked, the person in question was spotted in the audience. The highlight of the event was a joint appearance by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs -- closer to a lovefest than a smackdown, but not without some barbed interchanges or two. (Like when Jobs mentioned how much he liked Bill’s Zune team because “they’re our customers” for iPod.)

There were also a host of new products, news of which was embargoed until their release at the conference. I’ve already covered one in depth: Microsoft Surface. Here’s a rundown of a few more. Please note that these are not official product reviews--none of them have undergone careful evaluation in the field:

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Microsoft Runs the Table

Steven Levy — Wed, 30 May 2007 04:01:59 GMT

The New Table Top System: Microsoft's Surface computer

Sometimes the most interesting things lie beneath the surface. But Microsoft's new computing initiative—and one of the coolest things out of Redmond in a while—is all about what’s on the outside. Today the company announces the first in what will be a series of new products that transform tabletops, desktops and wall panels into interactive displays that will, says Microsoft's Project General Manager Pete Thompson, "blur the lines of the physical world and the digital world."

The first example of Microsoft Surface is a table, just short of two feet high, with a 21-by-42-inch top. Under a sheet of acrylic is a 30-inch hi-res horizontal display. That's all you see—the five camera-sensors, the DLP light engine, and the Vista computer that makes it all run are hidden, encased in the body of what looks like a more-fashionable version of the original Pong game. (Presumably, the device runs a version of Vista that doesn't ask you all the time if you're sure you want to proceed.) But the impact of all that hardware is evident as soon as you touch the "massively multi-touch" surface. The machine can process dozens of inputs at once, from one person or a group. Whether you're doing virtual finger painting, moving digital images around like physical pieces of paper, or pointing to something on a map and getting information on that spot, it's clear that the standard sci-fi movie vision of having people interact with virtual surfaces as if they're real (see "Tron," “Minority Report” and many other flicks) has now arrived.

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Meet the Next Billionaires

Steven Levy — Sun, 13 May 2007 23:15:59 GMT

From the May 21, 2007 issue of NEWSWEEK - Sitting at the long trestle tables in Y Combinator's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters last January, the Weeblies felt wobbly. Back home at Penn State, the three undergraduates were alpha geeks, go-getters who'd capitalized on the university's requirement that students have a Web portfolio by creating software that makes it really easy for students to build a personal site. The trio—David Rusenko, Dan Veltri and Chris Fanini, all 22 years old—decided to start a company, calling it Weebly because it sounded good and the domain name was open. Then last November they heard about a company called Y Combinator that gives seed money to fledgling start-ups and imports a bunch to Silicon Valley for three months of intensive entrepreneuring. They sent off their application the day before the deadline, and made the cut.

Now they were here, just down the road from Google and Yahoo, one of 12 companies that would be part of Y Combinator's winter program of total immersion in the Silicon Valley start-up life. For a techie, it was as if you were making home movies one day, and the next day found yourself on the Paramount lot with a contract and empty film cans to fill. No matter where the start-ups came from—Sweden, Chicago, Oxford or even the South Pole (yes, one person arrived straight from graduate research there)—their lives would never be the same. Also attending the dinner that night were veterans of the previous three Y Combinator programs—some of them millionaires before 25. You don't see too much of that in State College, Pa.

That's the charm of Y Combinator. It's "American Idol" meets Wired magazine. The inspiration came from Paul Graham, a high-energy 42-year-old who himself had a monumental start-up experience, selling his company Via-web, an e-commerce application, to Yahoo at the height of the boom, enriching himself and his buddies. In the spring of 2005 he made a speech at Harvard that was a broadband update of Horace Greeley ("Start up, young man!"), then realized that he could help make it happen for others. He gathered his former partners—Trevor Blackwell, now making robots, and Robert Morris, who achieved brief notoriety in the 1980s as the author of a virus that almost shut down the Internet—and recruited another friend, an investment banker named Jessica Livingston. They drew up the plans for an operation: from hundreds of applications, the YC partners would cull the 30 most promising, conducting "Idol"-style auditions to choose a dozen or so companies for the program. Each start-up is given $5,000 plus $5,000 per founder (a start-up with two founders would get $15,000). This money covers lodging, food and equipment during the program. In exchange, Y Combinator (named after a mathematical function) gets a piece of the start-up, usually 5 or 6 percent.

Some critics scoff that Y Combinator's investment is peanuts for that amount of equity. But the opportunity is unparalleled—total immersion into Silicon Valley start-up culture, advice from Graham and a fast track to the top angel investors and venture-capital funds. When Graham calls the winners, the founders have only five minutes to accept. "If people turn us down," he says, "as far as we're concerned they've failed an IQ test."

Every Tuesday during the program, Y Combinator hosts a dinner of chili or stew for the start-ups. At this first one, Graham and Livingston distribute gray T shirts emblazoned with one of Graham's pithiest admonitions, MAKE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT. A second, black shirt is bestowed only to start-ups that achieve a "liquidity event"—a purchase by a larger company or an IPO. It reads, I MADE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT.

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