Transcriber: Dan Forest-Barbier Reviewer: Capa Girl
Hello!
So, I'm here to talk to you today about an idea
that may seem a little bit crazy.
It's the idea that even software,
the non-physical parts of the devices that we use day to day --
should have screws.
I'm going to do this by way of an analogy.
So I'd like everybody to sit back as we imagine
how similar people who buy cars are to people who buy cellphones.
So -- I'm certain a lot of you out there own a car -- (Laughter)
No hands are being raised --
but I'm just going to assume a lot of people drove here today.
So, we spend a lot of our time in a car.
So, you can think about when you commute to work and you commute back,
takes a half hour -- maybe twenty minutes --
and a half hour back, and you might do something in the evening,
go shopping, go somewhere on the week-end, occasional trip.
You're looking at, you know hour, hour and a half on average spent a day in a car.
If we think about the amount of time that you spend awake:
in 24 hours, 8 hours spent asleep.
Between the time during the day and 8 hours spent asleep,
we're looking at 16 waking hours per day
and we're looking at almost 10% of your life spent in a car.
With this amount of time, you start to really bond with this device,
and it's starting to become an outward representation of yourself.
It's something that a lot of people around you start to notice
and it's something the car dealers themselves notice
and they use it in their advertising.
They really like setting up the idea that a car is a status symbol,
it's something that you own in order to really, you know,
set yourself aside from your neighbours.
This here being the Porsche Panamera,
which will be interesting a little bit later.
The cars, they aren't cheap.
They're something that you're plunking down
tens of thousands of dollars, in order to obtain.
Which means they're a major purchase:
they're something that you'd love to have a lot of options.
And luckily you have them,
whether it's something very large, like a Hummer
or small like our very own Make It Work Mini Cooper.
All of which you can obtain at your local car dealer.
Now, there are lots of little separate options you can obtain on your car.
Some of them come with a GPS navigation,
or bluetooth radio, so you can connect your phone,
or the rearview camera, which is becoming popular these days,
in order to see what's going on right behind you,
because sometimes if there's something short like a kid or something,
you might run into them if you don't have a camera like this,
and so it's nice to have these things.
All of these different things and their performing are what we tend to call packages,
so the dealer will be punting at you and be saying that they've got a certain package,
that they certified that it works and they've gone through
lots of safety certifications and they've also put together
a warranty that will come along with that product
and they decided that there are certain types of
maintenance that they can and will perform on that car
in order to make that guarantee happen.
Now, some things we'd still like to do to our car despite
the fact that it didn't come with the car originally.
And there are lots of options: we can attach things with string,
so you see people who attach string with little air fresheners or fuzzy dice.
Some people use suction cups giving them a more solid
connection: reddit alien bobblehead,
or the car radar detector.
People oftentimes use paint despite the fact that paint is
an aspect of the car that is important to its rust protection.
It's oftentimes considered something a little bit modifiable.
People put racing stripes on it, or can go for an entire
custom theme to their car that matches their lifestyle.
Now, some people however really want to be able to go further
and luckily the car dealer will offer options on the things
that the car was designed to be able to kinda swap in and out.
Here's an example:
you can take the radio out of your car
and then go get a new radio.
You might also go out and get new tyres, it's something
that's very oftentimes assumed that you might need
different treads for different weather conditions,
and you might need chains in certain areas.
Now, what is that duty of warranty?
Well, luckily there's this thing: it's a federal act, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act,
it states -- and this is taken from Wikipedia:
“Warrantors cannot require that only branded parts be used with the product in order to retain the warranty.”
So, you're going to get that radio, you're going to get that new set of tyres,
you're allowed to go and buy a radio off the shelf,
as long as it fits in with your system, even if it's from a 3rd party.
However still, some people want to go further,
they want to go through that warranty,
they want to make all kinds of crazy modifications to their cars
and they might start switching to making modifications
with tools like bolts.
Some things might not really be advised on your car.
Some of these spoiler options get a little bit crazy.
But you can also start ripping the car apart in little
pieces and get down to the wirings that go through
the car and try to really increase the functionality of it.
Sometimes it might be something as simple as a single speaker,
it might be you want to turn your entire car into a giant speaker. (Laughter)
Hopefully, you can still hear things in the inside,
but probably not. We can hear you outside though.
These are all kind of things that end users might do,
but there also are enterprises and there are academic
reasons like people want to be able to make modifications to things.
This is a picture of the Stanford entry to the DARPA
grand challenge which was to build an autonomous
vehicle that would be able to go 30 miles throughout in desert driving.
They actually got the help of Volkswagen in order to be
able to connect up with the drive by wire systems of
the car, and some humorous parts here:
that's an entire power strip because they have so many
computers -- there are 6 computers running here --
and over there is a joystick which they were using for
doing initial test piloting.
There's even a show, it's called “Pimp My Ride”,
all about all the kinds of crazy modifications people like to make to cars.
The premise is that the host -- DJ rapper Xzibit --
will do interviews with somebody who is kind of
volunteering their car up to the crazy car gods
in order to find out what would be an interesting
modification that they and the audience would appreciate.
They spend the rest of the show making that
modification, but at the end they unveil it to the person
who donated his car up with this particular spiel,
which goes something like,
“Yo dawg, we heard you like bowling, so we ripped
the trunk of your car appart and we put a portable bowling
lane in there, so no matter where you are and no matter
where you're going, you can pull over to the side of the
road and get your lane fix.” (Laughter)
You'll see many other types of interesting modifications
people make, but that stereotypical phrase has
actually become an internet meme so you'll see things
like, “Yo dawg, I heard you like Macs so we put only one pedal in your car.” (Laughter)
“Yo dawg, I heard you like apps so we made an app to make apps using an app.” (Laughter)
Which luckily gives me kind of a cheap transition over to the world of cellphones.
A lot of you out there probably own a cellphone.
And probably a lot of you aren't going to raise your hand again or cheer.
But that's okay because I bet a lot of you do.
Some of you may in fact own multiple cellphones.
I'm talking about the repetitive stress injury on that one.
I'm going to make the argument that you're spending
a lot of your time again, with cellphones.
If you take and add up like 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there,
and the occasional 4 hour call home to grandma,
you've got the business meeting you might be doing with
conference calls. You spend a lot of your life on the phone.
It's something that hopefully isn't overlapping too much
the amount of time you're spending in a car.
I'll make the argument that again it becomes something
that people really bond with.
You may know someone who sends a lot of text
messages, and on their phone they can send text
messages faster than you can even think.
It's also something that kind of becomes an external
representation of self, I'll say, because again it's
something that you spend so much of your time bonding with.
And it's something that many of your friends end up interacting with.
And it's something, I will again say , that the people who sell these phones know.
This is the iPhone 3G white edition.
The white version only came on the 16GB - the more expensive model.
Browsing around online forums I would find many people
who were waiting for the white one to come out,
because that way their friends at a glance
would know that they splurged to the expensive one.
But there are even dedicated design groups that spend
a lot of time working on phones.
So back to our Porsche Panamera.
Porsche themselves, their designer made a design for a phone
that was specifically for Porsche customers
kind of fitting with the theme and the ambiance of their
entire breed of cars.
And, I'm going to again say this is a major purchase.
So, now a lot of you out there may be saying,
"Well, it's only a hundred dollars, maybe two."
Maybe free with your contract.
But the keyword there is “with your contract”,
and so if you look at it over the course of the year or two your contract is,
you may be talking about thousands of dollars you're
plunking down again.
In the United States we tend to think about the phone
being a free add-on, but really if you think about the
entire package you're spending thousands of dollars for
getting a device for a number of years and some kind
of service package.
So, luckily again, there are all kinds of different options.
These all look very similar, but they're all different
for people who are using them and there's all kind of
variety outside of this type of essential thing.
And again, we see the types of options they come with:
we see the built-in GPS navigation,
the bluetooth radio so it can talk to your car,
we see the front-facing camera so that you can do
videoconferencing with your friend,
and then we see the things that people want to be able
to do that didn't come with the phone.
And so, many of you probably know about things like the
Appstore that comes with the iPhone.
So there are many, many apps available:
this is a picture of the “app wall” at WWDC
which was showing live installations of things from the appstore.
But I'll make the argument that an app is kind of a jail.
You're almost trapped inside of an icon, unable to get out.
When you've got that icon, you can open it and close it
but that application isn't changing the way the entire system works.
Many people wanted to be able to do more.
So luckily, some systems like for instance the Android
allow you to interact with a couple key things,
like a radio or tyres.
So here's an example of a modified keyboard that you
can get -- called Swype -- on Android devices.
But for most devices that's not the case.
So you end up having to do something called jailbreaking.
This is a program called QuickPwn from 2 years ago that was really popular,
which was used in order to jailbreak some of the various iPhone models.
The goal is to build a change in the software inside it,
something that Apple didn't provide - so instead of
the Apple logo, it's booting up with a PwnApple logo. (Laughter)
One of the primary things the jailbreak tool does is
it installs an entire different alternative to the Appstore
-- which is called Cydia, a program that I wrote.
But, I won't say that's the only application that's ever existed.
So, another one for an example is Rock Your Phone.
We've been recently working together on a lot of things.
You can start to see some of the parallels:
Rock Your Phone, Pimp My Ride --
You know, a lot of the wording is even similar.
And there are systems on other devices --
WebOS internals has something called Preware this is fairly popular.
Now people may say “no one does this”,
I'll make the argument actually that almost 10%
of people do. This number floats between 6% and 12%,
that's what I hear from various analytics companies.
Now, what are they doing?
And so here I'm going to give you a little roller coaster
ride of things that people do.
So here's a stock iPhone, Steve Jobs might say,
“Any wallpaper you want as long as it's black.”
Again a connection to Ford, the original model T.
He has started allowing wallpapers
-- I was kind of impressed.
But, here somebody has gone through and changed
all of the icons, all of the graphics on the system
-- this is a theme called “Elite Pro.”
Here's somebody who's gone through --
they wanted it to look in the whole mystique of Porsche
and so they spent some time working on a theme.
But it's not just these kind of graphic changes,
people want functionality modifications,
to change the way the device operates.
So, maybe you want your icons to be in a different
order on the screen, maybe you want to have an
incredibly large number of icons,
switch between pages really rapidly,
maybe you want to switch between applications really rapidly.
Here's an example of something similar on the iPad.
Maybe you need -- on the lock screen you want
to be able to take it out of your pocket and see what's going on,
see pictures next to names in contact list,
the ability to do mass changes to your email,
send rich text email -- a feature that the iPhone doesn't normally have,
download files in Safari,
download YouTube videos and add them to your iPod library,
or -- and here's the right time to be making a connection back to Pimp My Ride:
“Yo dawg, we heard you like Tweeter, so we ripped the status bar of your phone apart
and put an entire Tweeter client in there so can simply slide down from the top of the screen
and slide into a Tweeter client no matter what you're doing.”
And some of the groups that you'll find doing this are
xdadevelopers, modmyi -- places you can find more information.
To get back to this idea of software having screws,
I feel that we really need to be able to safely take
these apart, put them back together,
make modifications like this.
The Nexus One is one of the few phones that has such
functionality. It has a builtin feature for doing OEM unlocks,
and the WebOS devices from Palm also you can
plug in the old Konami video game code in them in order to unlock them.
But otherwise you're left with things like LimeRain and GreenPoison
-- applications that have been released yesterday
and today in order to jailbreak your current iPhone
which may be in your pocket.
So, thank you very much!