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Netpliance Sponsors 100 Creative Mobile Computing
Halcyon writes: "The maker of the Flat Panel Linux Box for $99, Netpliance once again gains the interest of the open source community by posting the winners of the Pilot 100 Program. The program originally started by the development department of Netpliance in order to tap a new market created by these $99 Internet terminals turned portable pc's. Some skeptics of Netpliance have speculated that these refurbished machines are a cheap way to conduct R&D through easily bought community members, but I don't see any of the winners complaining. Decide for yourself. " What's strange is that they are trying to get people to put Linux/*BSD on machines, when I had thought that's what they were trying to *stop* before.
I have no idea about the TV-out, as I haven't ever tried it. You would think that it would be just a hardware issue, with the exception that some video modes (basically anything much over 640x480) is not going to be useful on the typical TV.
Netpliance had to do something to stop people from buying the boxes at $99 and not subscribing - they lost a few hundred dollars every time someone did that, and they weren't going to stay in business long with that happening. They did a knee-jerk reaction at first, but everything I've heard from them since has been fairly mature, in making sure that they don't lose money selling the hardware (which would be rather stupid and moreover, if they went broke, that would be the end of those terminals at any price), while trying to find a way to approach the new demand - namely, the new, unforseen use the community found for them. So they made refurbs available (and I wouldn't complain if I got one, either!). Within days of the fiasco earlier, they said "we want to work with this - how can we do it?" And it looks for all the world like they're trying.
I'm not sure if that top-of-the-story blurb was supposed to spark discussion, but it came across rather troll-ish. I don't think Netpliance has been acting anti-linux since the first days of the hardware hack, when they had a money-sucking crisis on their hands.
The point about the lack of a COM port on the BookPC is a good one, and it should be noted as well that the integrated modem is a crapola Win-Modem which I would suspect is not supported at all under Linux. For me, it doesn't matter, as we are only using the kyb, ps2-mouse, SVGA-video, ethernet and spkr-out ports on our BookPCs.
"What's strange is that they are trying to get people to put Linux/*BSD on machines, when I had thought that's what they were trying to *stop* before"
look at their project goals:
1. a linux/gui combon in 8mb of flash vs the 10mb that QNX uses
2. a linux browser in 7.5mb flash (equal to their current product)
clearly, they want to be able to insert linux and stop paying QNX licensing fees.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
After the market correction, I think that many tech companies will be reevaluating their position in the marketplace--especially B2C companies that offer expensive loss-leaders. Earlier in the year, Netpliance alienated an entire community of people interested in their product simply because it did not fit their original business plan.
Now that the market has made it clear that even tech companies must be profitable, Netpliance is trying to reach out to OSS developers who would be willing to either pay a premium for their machines or develop free applications that could make the I-Opener an even more valuable platform.
As indicated by the chargebacks without customer consent made in March, Netpliance's realationship with its own customers is shaky. They seem to be motivated only by an overriding sense of self-interest even at the complete expense of customer satisfaction. I foresee a major culture clash in their interactions with the OSS community that will ultimately not be beneficial for either party. It's too bad, though, they make a cool product.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
...what kind of demand they have for their little LCD box. If I were in Netpliance's shoes, and I saw the field day that hackers had with those boxes, I would have no idea how to begin because apparently people want to use my box for things other than dedicated net access. What would be the easiest way to see what people want to do with the boxes?
Why, just what they are doing now, of course. If you look on that page, you see all the things that people (potential customers) would like to do with the i-opener if they had the chance. It is a marketing coup: you get 1) free programming through the power of open source, 2) free promotion throughout a possible target audience, and 3) happy potential customers. What more could a company ask for?
The inquisitor has spoken.
For now, yes, it comes with name-your-flavour-Windows. We'll see next year, with Linux sharing 8% of desktop (50% more than apple), growing strong in Europe, leading the i-server market... Specially if the usb-makers decide to join Linux as the 3D-card makers have done. And the legacy ports... a "secret" way of comunicating good'ol 486 servers with your home-made x86 appliance. (I guess today it was warmer than expected -grinn-)
MaDuIxA PoWeR -----> Down with Phone Monopoly, Down with Cable Abuse http://maduixa.8m.com Linux Machine # 38068
But as for theories that NPLI is doing this as "only a publicity stunt", it may be so -- but there's one other option that hasn't been considered. As pure market research, that project list is easily worth the $40000-odd in hardware it cost them to get it. And I applaud them for sharing it with us.
I was going for an MP3 player out of one of mine, and use the serial port for input for my digicam and/or embedded GPS unit (Garmin GPS-25). The other one was gonna run a stripped-down Linux and vgetty to act as a voice mail terminal.
I didn't sign up, mainly because I figured that while this would be fun for me to do, it didn't really involve enough development on my part to qualify for the programme. I mean, I was just gonna put together some software that other people had already built, and tell the compiler to optimize for size instead of speed. While I've enjoyed poking around with the hardware (headphone-out, line-out, VGA-out, mounting an external IDE CDROM case for MP3s, and lots of fun with a Dremel tool to make sure all my mods looked as though they'd been built into the machine from the factory) I figured my software projects were "too lame".
Hmph! Looks like I missed out on a free IO! ;-)
Meanwhile, my congratulations to all whose projects were selected. While some may have the look of "gee, someone got a free IO for doing that", some look very promising. But the bottom line is that whatever the project, folks are getting their hands dirty and their feet wet, and a company is rewarding them for it. This can only be a Good Thing.
The beauty of open source (and the thing I overlooked when evaluating my project) is that with open source, "nothing's too lame". Because we're developing on our own time, we're allowed (even encouraged!) to follow our whims.
Out of any 100 ideas, only a handful will find market acceptance anyways - but only in our development model can we afford to make the 99 mistakes before we get the Killer App. We make lots of mistakes, but we can afford to, so we learn from them. We evolve. We - to resurrect a much-abused term these days - innovate.
I sincerely doubt that Netpliance will gain much from this program. Out of the 100 people that they are sending I-Op's to, they would be lucky to get 5 decent, innovative projects. If that many.
How do I know this? Well, I am one of the winners, and all I did was throw in a bunch of buzzwords and catchphrases to increase my chances of winning the hardware. "Smart home" "Self-aware appliances" "Java middleware" "Wireless authentication" You get the idea.
I, like most other people, will turn this unit into a MiniLinux based gateway / firewall / bedside alarm clock and mp3 player. But I initially considered that proposal to be too tame and not likely to win a free I-Op, so I made up this really impressive sounding proposal. The kind of proposal that I could possibly follow up on, only if I had the funding and the time. (And I have neither)
It turns out that more than half of the winning proposals are as tame, if not moreso, than my real plans. Most of the proposals that are featured sound clueless as hell. It makes you realize just how BAD the non-winning proposals must have been.
Its also a model companies like those that belong to the RIAA, computer hardware/software, and mre should consider. Open-sourcing leads potentially greater returns at smaller risk, by spreading the development out to hundreds or thousands of people. I mention RIAA, because they could so have easily joined the on-line mp3 movement and easily grabbed massive influence. When companies choose to innovate we all win, thanks for a great start Netpliance! I hope your efforts succeed and the marketplace rewards you.
Ideas you may wish to take back to NPLI for future hardware revisions:
- Replace the IDE port with a SanDisk port and make it accessible. The thing boots off the 16M SanDisk, and a user-supplied 32- or 64-M CompactFlash card can be used to "load" the stereo with MP3s.
- NTSC-out. The 10" screen is cool for day-to-day use, but if you hooked the MP3-loaded CompactFlash-enhanced thing up to your TV and ran visualizations... This would require a major redesign of the motherboard, but might still be cheaper than going active matrix on the display.
- Wireless (IR) keyboard interface and software to support the use of a remote control.
- Line-out, which, as we know, is already 99% built into the existing design.
Basically, I'm thinking there's a secondary market - there's obvious demand for turnkey MP3 solutions. MP3 solutions that give the user a "home audio component" feel plus things like TV visualizations that they can't get anywhere else may be a big market.Since NPLI derives revenue from service fees, how about either adding a CDROM built-in and phoning-home to get the CDDB data. The aggregated data of who listens to what and when could be resold. The user's value-add is that it's a CD player that tells them what the name of the song is, as well as has all that funky NTSC-out visualization.
Not terribly nice from a privacy point of view, I know, but hey, it's what CDDB is probably doing anyway ;-)
> I'm a bit disturbed that the Netpliance page mentions that the internal IDE header has been disabled.
Maybe in BIOS, but everyone who's bought one has been able to hack it. It just takes a little more effort (either boot with a hard drive and proper geometry settings, or remove the epoxy from the old BIOS socket and swap in a new chip) now than it did in March :-)
If you've ordered one, it'll eventually get there, and you'll eventually be able to hack it.
The AC continues:
> If Netpliance just wanted a stable Java environment and a suitable browser, they'd need to look no further than Tao's Elate for the OS and JRE side and Espial's Escape for the browser solution
When you get your IO, hack away. The resources (Ken's BBS, the IO mailing list @scsiboy.com, and all the web sites) are all still out there. I for one would love to see what you come up with. I wimped out and got a 6.4G hard drive for one of my boxen, but I still have another one for which "no moving parts" is my design objective.
> This is obviously about saving money, not delivering the best product, although in light of how much money us cheapskates have cost them (have a heart, guys, you might end up working at a startup with a crappy business model someday), they probably need the break to stay alive
The "arms race" between NPLI's hardware mods and the hackers countering them served only to provide the hackers with amusement. The real way to stop sales to the hacker community (as you correctly point out, this is something they pretty much had to do) was to beef up their TOS. Which they did.
It's just that with the credit card charging issues to people who really did buy them for their parents, and their strong-arm phone tactics on people who ordered pre-TOS (trying to tell them that the new "$500 termination fee" TOS applied retroactively) they (IMHO) overstepped the bounds of good taste and sound business practices.
That said, these tactics have stopped now, and NPLI has behaved well for the past month or two. Yes, they're constrained in their ability to meet demand for the units, but they no longer appear to be engaged in questionable business practices.
(Sadly, that was another reason I passed on the Developer's Corner. At the time I would have been most tempted to sign up, they were (IMHO again) really skirting the limits of the bait-and-switch laws, I just didn't trust them. I'm immensely gratified to see they've cleaned up their act.)
Check these little "BookPC" boxes out... They use the same i810 chipset as the iPaq, but include both a floppy and CD-ROM drive (or DVD-ROM, depending on configuration). It is possible to buy them with no OS installed (which is what we did). You can find more info on them here:
http://www.pal-tec.com/BOOKPC.htm
We bought ours through buy.com, and they were also significantly cheaper than the iPaq. Performance between the iPaq with a P III-500 wasn't significantly different than the BookPC with a Celeron 500.
Netpliance posted their quarterly report not too long ago. In it are figures describing the number of subscribers they've gotten so far, and a line item for "appliance subsidies". Divide it out, and you get about $400 per subscriber. Add the $99 iOpener charges the customer, and you get $500/machine.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Well, it's been just a little bit to late. We've already agreed on moving from PC to iPaq (http://www.compaq.com/ipaq ) machines. It will be a blessing for overcrowded desks.
;)
iOpener + MOD-Kit iscool, but also still too far away in the future for us.
Anyway, Netpliance movement is heading the right direction (cheap Linux boxes will get sold better than hot cookies). And it's way ahead of other "internet appliances" that haven't yet arrived to the market.
Maybe I'll get one for home
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MaDuIxA PoWeR -----> Down with Phone Monopoly, Down with Cable Abuse http://maduixa.8m.com Linux Machine # 38068
Obviously they can't make money on these machines at $99... they want to sell the ISP service with them, and that's where they are going to make their cash - they hope.
So they don't care what OS you run on it - as long as you pay them their $20 a month (or whatever it is) to get the service from them.
That's why they were discouraging the conversion - because then you aren't tied to them any more, and they los money on the hardware. People were treating it as if $99 was the actual price tag - and trying to dump the ISP service - so they could just get a cheap, relatively protable, linux box with a flat-screen.
BlackNova Traders
Over the holidays I saw the iopener on display and thought it might be easier for them to use, no windows to accidently click on. Even though the iopener only has a 10" screen, they have no trouble reading it at all(I suspect the 800x600 resolution helps). Now both sets of grandparents are using the iopener for email. They might also be web browsing, I just don't know.
WebTV would not have worked well for my mom's parents, they are mobile(live in a trailer, summers in Wisconsin and winters in Texas) and thus only have a 13" TV. The picture quality isn't that great, and WebTV would have been unreadable.
Based on using my laptop as a DVD player on my TV, I'd think something like WebTV might be usable. However, my TV is properly calibrated(I have the laser disk w/the TV test patterns and the blue filter for color adjustment). When I hooked up the laptop to my aunt's TV the text was unreadable. I suspect most people do not have their TV properly calibrated, and thus would get a crappy picture using something like WebTV. It's probably part of the reason the old C= 64 only used a 40 column display, they were designed to use TV sets as monitors.
I'm one of the people that got into the pilot100 program, and I have to admit, most of the projects, including my own, were kinda weak. I don't know what all got submitted (Netpliance: Post all submissions!) but a lot of the ones chosen were exactly the same. "I want to configure an IO to play Mp3s"
What can I say though, I'm getting free hardware for the first time in my life. More than I can say for any other company. And, I'd like to actually see if I can pull of my project, in some form atleast.
Don't get me wrong - other developers - some of the project ideas were also really cool. But the majority was same ol same ol.
This company has a serious problem. Nice concept, lousy implementation. They have managed to totally blow their retail channels apart (first CC now COMPUSA). They are quite backlogged on their site as to new units (roughly 4 weeks) so their retail channels will go hang for a long time. This is because they will serivce their own site first since they can enforce their TOS there before they provide the retail channel where they can't/won't/or are unsure of.
I wish them luck, they will need it...
Some skeptics of Netpliance have speculated that these refurbished machines are a cheap way to conduct R&D through easily bought community members...
So what? This is the whole idea of releasing source code. The community gets cheap, cool xterms, they get cheap R&D. If a big Open Source project starts, sure they lose some code control, but in exchange they get an R&D Department that dwarfs MS, et al.
That's the reason Netscape released its code. Everyone benefits. You get vastly improved R&D and mindshare from the developer community. They get control over the code development, and a product that they want badly enough to be coding for themselves. Customers get peer-reviewed security and stability, feature rich and inexpensive products. Stockholders get improved profits due to quality and lower development and support costs. Everyone wins. Except your closed source competitors.
I'm not sure I would call myself a Netpliance skeptic (I'd love to see a computer that even my mom could use), but there is nothing wrong with pursuing a profit for their shareholders. This move maximizes that profit, so more power to them.
If this hurts your altruism gland, just remember that that stock price will be people's retirement plans and college savings funds. Or that when people make more money, that they tend to give more to worthy but unprofitable charities.
Linux could easily fit into the memory provided.
Point in case the lin7k project, Linux for Psion 5 and related hardware. I personally have had linux running on my Psion 5, purely in the standard 8MB RAM, no not even a compact flash disk. Admitedly there is only so much you can do with such a device but it boots and will give you a shell, even network using Slip!
The iopener comes with 8MB of Flash and 32MB of RAM, build a tiny kernel which just supports the iopener hardware and a compressed initrd image and you probably have a very functional system. X may also be possible, even ignoring projects such as nanoX, XFree86 v4.0 includes a mini X server for devices such as the itsy.
Linux does not have to be Fat, RedHat were talking about their embeded linux project at the UK Linux Expo las week, kernels as small as 32k were mentioned.