This week we talk to Scott Jenson about the future of mobile, Internet of Things, connected devices, Internet connected toasters and infrastructure policy.

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Show notes

Music provided by: Oedipus

• Mobile Apps Must Die
• Zombie Apocalypse of Smart Devices
• The UX of Data
• Breaking Development Talk - Why Mobile Apps Must Die
• Of Bears, Bats, and Bees: Making Sense of the Internet of Things
• Spime
• Raspberry Pi Used To Replace A 30-Foot GSM Base Station And Create A Working Mobile Network
• Was the Internet just an accident?
• Home-Automation Startup R2 Studios in Acquisition Talks

Transcript

Jim: Hi, my name is Jim King and this is episode 18 of the Breaking Development podcast, a podcast focused on web design and development for beyond the desktop. My guest today is Scott Jensen. Scott is a design veteran who has been doing user interface design and strategic planning for over 20 years on projects like Apple’s System 7, the Newton and Apple human interface guidelines. Scott was director of Symbian’s design lab, a manager of mobile UX for Google and a creative director at Frog Design in San Francisco. Today, he is head of UX for Parlay Labs, a start up in Palo Alto. Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott: Hello. Thank you.

Jim: Over the past two years you’ve been writing, I wouldn’t say prolifically. There’s not a ton of writing but man, it’s been powerful.

Scott: Thank you.

Jim: Some of them have gotten a little more attention than others, some catchy titles like Mobile Must Die.

Scott: Mobile Apps Must Die, but yes.

Jim: Mobile Apps Must Die, that’s right and the Zombie Apocalypse of Smart Devices.

Scott: It sounds to me like some things catch and some things don’t. It’s a little bit like I think writing pop songs. You think they’re all the same and though they’re all the same quality and some take off and some don’t. But it’s a long…it’s been an interesting ride for me because I feel like I’ve had the same core belief from the very beginning and each one just kind of flowers a different petal so to speak. I’m mixing my metaphors but the idea is that I just keep finding there’s more to uncover, there’s more to explore.

Jim: Yes, and I think that’s what’s interesting about this series. I lump them together as a series because they really are, starting with the Zombie Apocalypse of Smart Devices all the way through to your most current one. They really build upon each other.

Scott: That’s exactly what happens and that’s why I enjoy the opportunity to speak about it so much because usually what I’ll do is I’ll speak about it and then I’ll get all these great questions and like what about this and initially, for example, I talked about a smart toaster as a joke and someone really took me to task on it. In formulating the response I realized a toaster is actually a pretty cool idea but it takes you awhile to get to these points so it is a journey.

Jim: Recently I shared with you that even Vince Cerf is now using the toaster metaphor.

Scott: One can hope that the influence went that direction but that is a long hope.

Jim: Yeah. So, start us off with some of these ideas. Start us off. When I first took notice of some of your writing, where you came to my attention was the Zombie Apocalypse of Smart Devices. I read that and I was like, “Wow, this is exactly what I’ve been thinking.” Then I just couldn’t wait for the next one and you came out with a series there really quick and then we invited you to the conference.

Scott: Yes, I actually had…it was really odd. I never really started. I never really intended to have a series at all. It was very strange. Something was just bumping around in my head for years. I was asked by UX magazine to write an article. Usually you don’t get asked very often to write an article so I usually have a general rule that if someone asks me to do something I say yes. This had been kicking around in my head for awhile and so it came together surprising quickly. It got some good response and then I followed it quickly up. I find often when I start to write multiple ideas start emerging and I have to kick them out. So, in addition to the Zombie Apocalypse article there was a huge thread about data and how data was being used. That quickly was followed by a second article about the UX of data, how data itself has an experience. That was my first two piece. Then I ended up doing two more before I was invited by you guys and that was seminal because it caused me to take the first four articles and stitch them all together. I realized a bigger piece was forming and that’s where I wrote Mobile Apps Must Die after the Breaking Development Conference. That was my biggest piece. That’s the one that got the most readership.

Jim: Yeah, and that’s an interesting article in and of itself because of the idea, yeah it is a bit of an inflammatory title, but the idea that people are going to be overwhelmed by all these apps, and that’s without taking into consideration the ideas of the small connected devices that we’re interacting with that are going to start proliferating.

Scott: Exactly, I actually get frustrated as you said; it was motivated by the fact that we’re going to have a whole new form of interaction that comes from being surrounded by clouds of devices. And that app as a paradigm we’re not going to see us through. That’s why I was saying mobile apps must die. I was actually trying to not be inflammatory. Clearly, there’s inflammatory words, but I was talking about the paradigm because I get so tired as a consulted Frog everyone wanted an app. They didn’t care about anything else, they just wanted an app, and it was just lemming desire. So, I was trying to kill an intransigent idea. Yet, somehow I become the poster child for mobile versus web. I was like, I did not want that. That was like to me completely trivialization of my ideas. That really frustrated me.

Jim: I don’t get the sense that is what you’re saying at all.

Scott: Well, I wasn’t trying to, but I believe that because of the title; people turned it into …I read so many comments…”Well, the article is too long, but I think that web sucks” That’s just Youtube comments. I think, there was a certain kind of bounce that it got because I tapped into a zeitgeist. That was kind of fermenting at the time. I do want it very much to be a broader discussion, and a more numerous one.

Jim: Taking that, you came up with an idea of a just in time interaction. So, we’re taking now into consideration these devices. Small, internet connected low cost devices that were suddenly going to be interacting with through some sort of devices perhaps our mobile phones. You said,” Well, we can’t have an app for every single one of those. We can’t have an app for every store that we shop in, but you came up with this just in time interaction idea. Can you gives us some idea what that is?

Scott: Yeah, sure. It’s just that fact. Just think about what’s in Kickstarter right now. There are like eight or nine devices that will automate your home. Are you really going to open up eight apps, and close them down as you leave your house every morning? It starts to become ridiculous. And, that’s just your house. There’s this idea that every website has its own app, which also becomes equally ridiculous. This works on multiple levels, at the pure app limit at the hardware automation level. The basic idea…the analogy I have been using recently is growl for Macintosh. If you know that application….

Jim: Sure

Scott: It’s an application. It’s the one app that unites all notifications. The idea is pretty simple. That you have one app, and in the long term it will be part of your operation system that is the last app you’ll ever need. You install this app and then as you come across anything else want you to interact with, it will let you know. So, it becomes effectively a gateway to all the functionality that you will be swimming through throughout your day. That’s what I mean by just in time interaction. The interaction comes to you . You don’t have to come and manage and guard your phone to find the right way to kinda talk to this device.

Jim: That idea, I think, really turns the argument around because today it’s app centric pushing to the user. In your paradigm, it’s this device centric broadcasting basically to the user, and then there has to be some layer that doesn’t exist today that is going to be sorting this out for us to make it manageable.

Scott: Right, there is a very clear analogy to this, which is Goggle today manages the web for us. We go to Google, and type in a couple of things, and it says here’s a thing you probably want, and you click on…you’re done. We’re very comfortable with that. The idea that there are thousands of websites that do sports pages doesn’t freak anybody out. They just Google it and go for it. Yet, people get freaked out when I tell them we are going to be surrounded by thousands of hardware devices. We have an answer for this! It’s called intelligent search. That’s why step one is being surrounded by devices, and then not seeing them at all. Then Step two is the ability to effectively Google your room, and then get some way of kinda organizing it and ranking it. Just the fact that we can have access to billions of websites, and yet we feel very comfortable with that today, we can have thousands of smart devices, and you should also have access to that. The same organized ranked way.

Jim: When you discuss this you talk about it in the terms of these things will be riding on most likely HTML, on JSON, on these APIs, Restful interfaces. But this is not to say in the way we use them today, right?

Scott: Well, exactly, and I think that’s the other thing that I keep pushing is this paradigm shift is that we’re so stuck in this model that we have big expensive phones and you buy apps that this idea of being surrounded by dozens if not hundreds of smart devices really I think changes things up. So, I think that’s the big difference. That’s why I wrote that article about bears, bats, and bees.

Jim: Right.

Scott: Because this is such a rich and complicated space to just say apps are going to die doesn’t really do it justice. For example, right now we’re having smart appliances like Nest, a controller for your house, or the Withings bathroom scale. These are still fairly big devices. They have big apps. Clearly the first step is to just simply replace a native app with a mobile that app that you discover in time. As you get more devices, for example, I don’t want to interact with every individual smart light bulb in my house one at a time. That’s ridiculous. I could have 100 of them and I don’t want to have 100 apps. At some point these smaller devices that still are intelligent have to aggregate and that’s where the Restful interface comes in and that’s why I was distinguishing between bats and bees because bats deserve an app and bees probably deserve a slave app that takes care of them all. That’s again, where I was trying to create vocabulary for us to break this problem down and talk about it better.

Jim: Right. I’ve got a quote here from your article, The Zombie Apocalypse of Smart Devices, saying that “the desktop paradigm seems to be binding us, preventing us from seeing new ways of working”.

Scott: That’s pretty much my talk in a nutshell because every time I talk people go, “You can’t do that. You can’t do that. What about this?” It’s so hard for people to let go. Not that I want people to agree with me flat out but you’ve got to realize that we’re not going to have this model for the next 50 years. It’s amazing to me how people could become so attached to old ways of doing things just because it’s comfortable.

Jim: Right. Yeah, exactly. I’ve been having this discussion internally. I was in the process of writing a blog post and basically it’s taking some of the ideas that you had and saying, “You know, since its the end of the year, let’s hypothesize. Let’s just take it and look out into the future.” I said, “Look, you’ve got these two pieces of technology out there right now, not the only ones that are going to exist, but the ones that exist right now.” You’ve got Google Glass that’s coming and Google Now. Let’s say we merge those together. Understanding that Google Now is this very much a hands off interface that is organizing things based on what it knows about you. It knows a tremendous amount you and then popping this up to you. Because what we’re talking about is a very tiny screen with very limited ability to interact for input. To me, that’s kind of where this is going yet as soon as you bring up that topic, I got the same issues that, “Well, nobody’s going to want to do that. They’re not going to want to wear these things. They’re not going to want to interact in that way.” But that’s not really probably going to be true. They’re going to move on. It’s a different way of interacting I guess.

Scott: I think whenever you move to a new paradigm it takes awhile. That’s why it’s always fun to study the history of technology. When Ken Olson predicted that there would only be the need for 20 computers in the entire world or that before Ford came along people didn’t really thing that cars were going to be that valuable. Or when the phone came along people thought they would listen to…use it to listen to the opera in distant cities. When you first come up with a new technology people always misunderstand it. There’s a certain amount of just splashing around in puddles that we need to do childlike to figure out what these technologies are good for. So, I think to go straight from the insights that we’ll have smart devices to how they will work is probably expecting a bit too much of us. Right? We need to just splash in puddles for a bit but I do believe this idea of moving to a different model is really important and we need to start playing around with it because it is the case, I think, that not only are we going to have smart devices, but we’re going to start having smart displays. I was working on a vision video at Frog right before I left. I do hope it comes out, but we were getting pretty excited about the idea that you can have, they’re making actually, laser projector lightbulbs right now. So you replace one of your lightbulbs in your kitchen with one of these laser projectors and your entire kitchen counter can become a smart display. And all that’s completely yet another, kind of, blowing up because what does it mean when anything that you have, any physical object with a digital component or not, you can place it on that surface and it can come alive. I mean is that interesting? Is that silly? Is that a problem looking for a solution or a solution looking for a problem. So there’s this, I feel like once you start to have smart devices and thats why again the bee versus a bat argument. If all I had was an RFID tag and a piece of frozen garlic bread I don’t really want to interact with it, but if I do set it on my smart kitchen table it, or my countertop, it might be smart and then something might fly out and it might say, this is the nutritional information, and this is the best way to cook it, and you know by the way you can turn your oven on right now, or any other types of interactions I might want to have with that or possibly, even you know, a crass example is to order more. I feel like there’s a lot of things for us to explore that break out of this paradigm of staring at a phone.

Jim: Yeah. Definitely and you know I see this as today we have to go through a lot of hurdles to get that sort of information, that data, you know whether it’s input, you know we have to type in a bunch of information to retrieve some data or scan a code. A manufacturer, a competitor of one of my clients had started putting QR codes on the front of a welding product, a metal welding product and people could scan that and it would take them to the information about that product. Where to get owner’s manuals and how to videos and safety information, but that’s things that we have to do, but what you’re talking about is going beyond that to where the environment is going to handle a lot of that for us, these little devices, they’re going to, basically the Bruce Sterling spime concept. They’re going to know where they are in time and space, they’re going to know about themselves and share that data with you through this just in time interaction.

Scott: Well I think you’re touching on two very different and powerful points. I mean the first is the spime concept, which once a device becomes trackable it gains a form of virtual computation. In other words this piece of frozen garlic bread has no processors of any kind, but it will pass processors. Whether it’s at the factory or in the truck or in my refrigerator and each one of these can then notice it and track it and if we’re very very clever then they can kind of collaborate and say this is the journey that this has taken, for example. This is the temperature at these various places so you can know if it became unfrozen at some point. So all of a sudden a device can act as if it has computation and that’s I think the heart of Bruce Sterling’s spime concept. The other one that you talked about was the difference between QR codes and the next step that goes beyond QR codes and that’s segwaying right into my value must be greater than pain argument because, and this is why people keep thinking of me as a technologist, but at heart I’m really a designer. I’ve approached this entire problem as a design problem not a technology problem and there’s something very very profound about taking something simple like a QR code and making it seven times easier and when it gets that easy it becomes used in a much more trivial way. So, for example, I think the QR code example, the welding equipment you gave, is brilliant. It’s actually almost identical to what I talk about when I smart toaster. There’s lots of reasons to interact with a device that the company really wants you to do, but if you can make it really easy so that you literally just do Google Now and the Google Now just shows you your toaster and you’re in as opposed to opening up a scanning app and trying to just line up the QR code and you know getting it in focus. People will do that significantly more often and that’s not really discussed much. The fact that if you make it super easy it will be used for more trivial reasons.

Jim: Right. Yeah one of the examples I use is, take for instance you’re out and about doing your shopping or whatever it is, your daily activity. It’s near lunch time. Your Google Now, or whatever that app would be, knows that it’s near lunch time and knows based on your past history the places you like to eat, sees that those places are nearby, and just serves that up to you without you have to have input anything. Today that interaction is, okay, find restaurants near me or find Chinese restaurants near me. Whatever that is. It takes some input from us to get that, but here you turn that and suddenly it’s serving it up to me and that same thing would apply to all of these products devices once that intelligence is built in.

Scott: I think that’s worth considering, but it verges on irritating. We just have to be careful. I don’t think you implied that or you meant that at all, but I feel like there’s always been this very unholy alliance between mobile technology and advertisers and you give them half a chance and they’re going to be beeping at your pocket for a 25% off coupon for Crest and I’m feeling like we have to be careful to manage that line. Especially because in recommendation systems they always talk about false positives and false negatives and you didn’t, I think, want this at all but without too much going wrong your scenario could turn into I just want to find a place to park and it’s telling me where to buy a hot dog and I’m like, “Shut up.”

Jim: Yeah.

Scott: So I think this idea of systems that want to recommend, if the system was more like here’s Google Now. You fling it open and then it says, “Hungry?” and if I click on it then it shows me. That’s the kind of let me tell you what I want and then you reply. So I feel like there are some design steps you can take to accommodate your point, but allow me to express a little bit of interest before you give it to me if that makes sense.

Jim: No, that makes perfect sense and I think those are the things that have to get worked out. Unfortunately today we’re still talking about serving up images to people on a web page instead of talking about these interactions that we can have. I like to quote, pulling up my quote here so I don’t get it wrong- Tim Berners Lee had put this out in his original proposal for the web and he said, “We should work toward a universal linked information system in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics, techniques, and complex extra facilities,” and I think that’s what things have become is when I talk about design. Okay, let’s take a step back to that because I think when you and I talk about design and when the average person just talks about design, the guy going about his job, they really mean two different things. When you’re talking about design, you’re really structuring things, architecting things, to really get a point. Whereas typically when we talk about design, we’re talking about how can I entice people with interesting colors.

Scott: Right. I mean and designers love to argue about the types of design. Whether it’s information architecture or whether it’s visual design or whether it’s consumer experience and so there’s all sorts of ways that people like to slice and dice, but you’re right basically. It just comes at various levels.

Jim: Right. So let’s talk about the conference for a second. I have to put in the plug. We’ve got three conferences coming up in 2013. Now you’ve been to these conferences. You’ve spoken at two of these conferences.

Scott: I have.

Jim: What’s your favorite part of the conferences?

Scott: Well I think the best part is just the type of crowd that it attracts. It’s a fairly small conference and it attracts great speakers and it attracts really great attendees and so without doubt I think the part I enjoy the most are the questions and the interactions that come both after I give a talk, but also just in the evening sessions. It’s just a good group of people to kind of explore the topic with.

Jim: I like how you frame that as evening sessions. What you’re really talking about is that amount of time that takes place after the conference closes for the day, right?

Scott: Absolutely. Yeah.

Jim: Yeah and we pick these venues. For instance in Orlando, it’s at the Gaylord Palms. I’m not sure. You haven’t been to that one, but you’ve been to the Opryland, the Gaylord Opryland property.

Scott: Those huge, sprawling masses of consumption? Yes.

Jim: Exactly, but the one nice thing about those is you don’t have to really go anywhere to meet any of your needs. The restaurants are there. The entertainment is there. The places to get together and meet after the conference are there. So in addition to having a great line up of speakers, which we hand pick every one of our speakers, you get all that interaction time that you don’t normally get at other conferences. When you are at a typical hotel or venue where people have to travel all over the city or you are blocks away from finding a meal It’s hard to get people naturally congregating together to have those conversations. That’s the part that I like about the conferences. In addition to the speakers.

Scott: We can possibly quibble over the venue but, the bottom line it happens, it happens well, it makes the conference worth it. I agree with you. The fact that you hang around and you have places to talk to people it adds a lot to the conference.

Jim: We just posted on our website our October conference, which is in Nashville. We have one coming up in April in Orlando, Florida and San Diego during the summer, in July. There are three conferences for people to choose from. They’ll all have different speakers lined up so, you are going to get something fresh at every one of them. I encourage people to register.

What’s hot on your plate right now? What are you thinking? I know you’ve just transitioned in roles and you’ve had some time, have you given any thought to what’s next?

Scott: There’s what’s next personally and there’s what’s next with this overall framework I’ve talked about. For this conversation, we should stick to the framework. There are two directions in which we are going. I’ve been approached to write a book about this, which is interesting. I am considering that even though, I am a little busy right now. I think a book would be a good forcing function to do this because, in many ways, I have been writing a book, one chapter at a time. That’s actually interesting.

At the same time, part of me just feels this is become such a clearly complicated space. I am always stunned that I run the gamut: people who totally get and people who are just: “what are you talking about.” It’s interesting to see how I want to approach that. Do I want to write more to answer all these questions or do I want to forge ahead?

I am coming to the conclusion that the fact that I am getting so much positive feedback from people who do get it means that I am not a complete looney. I should keep pushing the ideas forward and not worry about the educational side too much. That is why, on my side time, I’ve been trying to figure out ways we that can build start to build this. Because, as a designer, I feel very strongly that you just can’t do head experiments. You have to actually build something and have it fall over.

I initially built something using Bluetooth and WiFi back at Frog. I learned a tremendous amount. It was a failed experiment but, it was failed in a way that moved my thinking forward. The next idea is to figure out a way, I am looking for some help on this, to create an Arduino platform to make simple apps so that people can see this in action. If we can get this working in Arduino it would simply blow open some conceptual lack for people and get people to understand how this can work.

Jim: Arduino and there is Raspberry Pi out there. Someone just put together, in one of these old Raspberry devices an entire mobile network they could build off of one of these. It just came out today. They really make it easy to do a lot of this experimentation which, in the past, would have had to be heavily funded to accomplish.

Scott: Yes, absolutely.

Scott: Speaking of Arduino, Tom Igoe the guy that kind of started the whole process, he and I had a chat the other day. It was fascinating talking to him because he talked about the fact that you work so hard to roll a ball down the hill to get people really excited about something and they just run off and do something really crazy with it that you never expected.

Jim: Right.

Scott: I think that’s part of it is that for me to think that I can be in front of this movement is madness. This is going to go into thousands of different directions. The biggest hope I can have is to at least hold up a flag and say this is kind of interesting. Let’s not forget this. Let’s not go down the path of old bluetooth thinking. Let’s think of bigger thoughts. I’m at least trying to raise the conversation a little bit because there will be the Raspberry Pi people and the Arduino people and the Beagle Board people and to control it is insane. But I do feel like at least raising these issues and get people talking about it, is all that you can really hope for at this point.

Jim: Right, and there’s been a lot of interesting things coming out. I know Android now is to some extent supporting and has some APIs for WiFi Direct which I think is an interesting protocol to be out there to play with. But devices are out there now with NFC which you could argue that that’s probably not the package we would have liked but it gives us more ways of experimenting with devices and especially on the Android platform we’re able to access bits and pieces of that hardware that we haven’t been able to do in the past.

Scott: Yeah, there’s a whole podcast we could do about how NFC is basically a good technology destroyed by banks. So, I want to…I’d just assume that NFC is just old school thinking that isn’t really going to take off. It’s very telling that Apple, of course, is completely end running NFC and trying to do it entirely through the cloud which is fascinating. But there’s just so many other directions that this is going to possibly go.

Jim: Right. Yeah, I think it’s exciting times and I like to look ahead and see where this is going because we’re finally at a stage in technology where the hardware, the software, the ways we can communicate. We’re at a point where not it’s a matter of how do we assemble all of this stuff to make it do the things we want? It’s no longer at a point where we’re saying, “Man, I wish I had this piece of hardware,” or “I wish I had this piece of software.” That stuff’s out there and now it’s a matter of assembling it and gluing it together and wrestling it into the way we want it.

Scott: Yeah, in fact, there’s a tweet this morning by someone who was just…there’s a new company out that is trying to create effectively middleware for your home. It’s pretty clear that with things like Nest and the light lifex light bulbs and so forth that you need to basically stitch your home together and someone tweeted the coming battle between hardware and middleware manufacturers. I thought that was completely spot on and it shows you where we’re going because as you get smarter hardware there are people who are going to try to write effectively the operating system for your house that will do the equivalent of talking to the Restful interfaces of all these devices and then stitch them all together. But what drives me batty is why I wrote was the Internet a happy accident. That was my last post. Because everyone is trying to make a buck here and I don’t at all want people to not make money but it’s like if we charged for every road you would never have FedEx. They couldn’t afford to exist. Some things need to be infrastructure and some things need to be capitalism. How do we have that conversation and no one’s talking about that.

Jim: Yeah, I agree. That’s definitely a point that very few people want to talk about. It’s not a popular topic to talk about right now.

Scott: Just because we’ve gone so start up crazy and it’s like we’re just like, “Hey, if it’s not a startup idea it can’t possibly be correct.” I love the idealism of the early web because they agreed that if you create a bigger pie everybody gets more pie. This idea that…you could almost see the thinking. The minute you know things are going wrong is when they start their own App store on their platform and then you know its doomed.

Jim: Right.

Scott: …because they then have something to lose which means they’re going to start to act like Qualcom and all these other protectionist companies that basically sue your ass off when they start to threaten their income stream. That’s not how we as a people should be going forward which is protecting our income streams. That just we won’t basically evolve and improve anything if we’re constantly worried about that level of bottom line. Now, I’m not a communist. I mean I want companies to make money but I feel like we have to understand that going too deep is going to basically choke everything off.

Jim: Right and it’s interesting that some of the big companies have obviously caught on to this home automation. Yesterday I saw a press release that a start up, R2 Studios, is a home automation start up.

Scott: That’s exactly the one that I was talking about.

Jim: Oh, is it? Yeah, Microsoft, Google, Apple, they’re all competing to purchase that thing right now.

Scott: Exactly and guess what. They’re going to spend an awful lot of money to purchase it therefore they have to protect it. Therefore it will become a walled garden which means if you don’t play by their rules you can’t come in. It’s just like is this the Internet? Is this…how can we so love and use the Internet and then completely ignore the way it was built? That just stuns me.

Jim: Yep. That’s a good point because without the infrastructure of the Internet, the web wouldn’t exist. Without that infrastructure there’s all these things that we can do today, just would not have happened had they sat down and patented that at that time and said we’re not going to license this out.

Scott: Yes. I agree. I agree and so that’s probably where…It’s interesting how you wander from place to place and I started off with smart devices and now I feel like I’ve almost…my topic has almost led me to policy.

Jim: Yes, that’s an interesting place to move forward. I’m not sure that’s some place I’d love to put my hat in the ring but I think you’re up to it.

Scott: No, I’m not saying I want it at all. In fact, I’m pretty sure I don’t want it. But it’s interesting how you get to the point where you realize that if you’re not building something correctly why bother. It’s just an exercise in futility and what I am seeing is a whole bunch of ways in which people are going to waste a lot of money. We’ll see where that goes. I mean there’s a quote that I have in one of my earlier blog posts that says…it’s got a grim comment about war. I think it was for the Korean War and they said the patient always stops bleeding. He may not survive but he always stops bleeding. To a certain extent I would claim that innovation always happens. It just may take several dead companies for you to get there. There will be these companies that buy this. Say Google buys this company or heaven forbid Apple buys it, creates their own little thing, the walled garden, and they probably even will make money and they’ll probably do for awhile but it is inherently structurally flawed and eventually it will get in run by something else. Then eventually, so yes, in the long run we may have to burn through it for five or six years, and then something else will take its place. I just would rather be thinking about building something that’s got a chance to actually be around for awhile longer and encourage more activity and ultimately frankly more money. More companies can make money on it.

Jim: Yes, all great points. I couldn’t agree with you more. It would be very nice to have some of this stuff worked out or at least be talking about it so that we can move the ball forward. Well, Scott, it’s getting a bit long and we’ve been all over the place. I appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Scott: Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

Jim: Anything else you want to leave us with before we sign out?

Scott: I think I’ve said my peace by thank you very much for the time. I very much appreciate it.

Jim: All right. Thanks a lot.

Scott: I’ll see you then. Bye bye.