Less clutter, designed for mobile, and more room for creativity.

A few days ago, I decided that I couldn’t write another post for the existing SplatF — there were too many things bothering me about it. (That’s also the same reptile-brain malfunction that leads me to buy a new iPhone every year, I think.) So here we are: The second major revision to SplatF’s structure since launching in mid-2011.

What’s new?

• Less clutter. I’ve spaced things out a little more, deleted a lot, made the site’s navigation interface even smaller, and added more whitespace. Article text is generally bigger, and some posts (including this one) will now have HUGE headlines. The most important thing to me is a fun and pleasant experience for reading and writing this site, and I think this is an improvement.
• Designed for mobile. SplatF now uses a “responsive” layout, which basically means that you’ll see different/more/fewer things depending on how big your browser window is. My articles are great fodder for bathroom trips, boring meetings, and train rides, so I wanted a clean iPad and iPhone experience. There is some compromise, as in all areas of life, but I’m happy with the tradeoffs. (Btw, almost everything is now retina-tuned, too.)
• No more comments. More than a year after adding reader comments to SplatF, they’re going away. I was never happy with the quality and volume of conversation. Most posts attracted a few throwaway comments, and high-traffic posts filled up with lame arguments between people I don’t know or care about. (I’ll take much of the blame for being a hands-off, generally absent moderator.) The real SplatF community seems to be on Twitter, where I’m interacting with you all day via @FromeDome and @SplatF. I still want to include some element of participation on this site, but the standard “block-o-comments” at the bottom of an article doesn’t seem to be the right solution. So today, it’s gone. (Maybe Twitter should make something for this? Or is this what Branch is for? We’ll see.)
• New font: Avenir. The French word for “future”. I’ve been using it for a bunch of stuff at City Notes, and I really like it. You may recognize it as the font Apple is using more often in iOS, including Apple Maps. It’s modern with a sense of adventure — the spirit I’d like all my projects to have. (Webfonts by Fonts.com, btw.)
• Fewer sharing buttons. Today, we’re saying goodbye to Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. Twitter is the only sharing button I’ve seen get any real usage on this site, and it makes sense: SplatF articles are typically tech- and news-focused, which is where Twitter shines above the rest. I hope to do more with LinkedIn — I’m impressed with its growth as a media brand, and I’m contributing some articles there — but the sharing button wasn’t earning its keep.
• New quote posts. You’ll see big quotes on the site now. The most interesting thing about business is the people involved, and I want to highlight that more often, starting with the smart and stupid things they say. (Add, subtract: I no longer have “link” posts, where the headline links directly to an article or website. I was rarely using them properly, and they were more trouble than they were worth to create, especially on my phone. You’ll just see more short posts from now on.)
• More room for creativity. As an independent publisher with limited technology resources, not much production time, and basically zero budget, it’s hard going beyond the template for most posts. At very least, this new look will support bigger and prettier photos. I hope to do more interesting things with it, too, as time and inspiration permit.

That’s enough for now. Let me know what you think. If something looks terrible, or is driving you crazy, I’ll try to fix it. There are still some things I need to add back — you may notice there’s no way to search the site right now, which a few people were actually doing — but I wanted to get this up first.

As always, thank you for reading.

In addition to selling ads on sites like mine, Say Media also publishes a great quarterly magazine. (That’s where my big feature story on the evolution of tech journalism ran last year.) As of this issue, the magazine is now digital, with a clean, attractive, responsive design.

Check out Unusual Suspects, a nice article about web storytellers by my friend (and former Forbes colleague) Lauren Streib. And this interesting cover photo of ReadWrite editor Dan Lyons, who explains his vision for the site.

Remember The Time?

For the past week, I’ve been researching in Paris, where the streets are filled with beautiful people, the cheese is everything, and the mobile Internet is slow. Or, at least, slower than what I’ve gotten used to in the States, where I’ve been using 4G LTE on my iPhone for the past 5 months.

It feels strange saying this, given how long and how far Europe was ahead of us at seemingly everything mobile-related. But — at least for now — the U.S. is legitimately kicking Europe’s butt at wireless.

Yes, there is some LTE service in Europe — particularly to the east — and some 4G service in France. Even my current carrier, Orange, is starting to roll out LTE in Paris. Maybe by my next visit, I’ll get to use it.

But this trip, it’s been a lot of waiting for emails to send, a lot of No Service indoors, and a lot of falling back to the even-slower EDGE network. My 3G speed tests have not been impressive — a small fraction of the bandwidth I’m used to. On the plus side, there is cell service on the Métro, which is nice. (And it was easy enough to buy a local prepaid SIM card, pop it in my Verizon iPhone, and not have to pay for international data roaming.) Still, I’m a little surprised to be saying this: My phone is going to become a lot more useful when I’m back in New York.

Service, of course, is just one piece of the mobile puzzle. But as I wrote for SAY Media’s magazine last year, two U.S. companies are also leading most overall mobile innovation worldwide. It wasn’t always this way.

A decade ago, a tour of the world’s mobile-phone capitals might have started in Finland, home of Nokia, stopped in London to visit Sony Ericsson (itself a joint venture between a Swedish telecom giant and Japan’s gadget leader) to Korea for Samsung and LG, perhaps to Germany for Siemens, wrapping up at Motorola — the company that invented the cellphone — in the Chicago suburbs. Of these, Samsung is now the only one still profitably making mobile phones, and its strengths are still mostly hardware and distribution — it’s hardly a software-platform company.

Today, the most important mobile corridor in the world is the one in Silicon Valley, California — the nine-mile drive between Google’s headquarters in Mountain View and Apple’s in Cupertino. Until the next revolution, at least.

More SplatF On The Road: Japan’s Amazing iPhone Accessories

Netflix’s new “House of Cards” series — almost halfway in — is worth watching, and could prove to be an important — or at least memorable — point in television history.

1. It’s better than it needs to be. It’s certainly the most compelling made-for-digital series I’ve ever seen — it actually feels more like a very long movie than a TV show — and deserves all the attention it’s getting. I don’t really care about U.S. politics or Washington D.C., but Kevin Spacey is entertaining and the production is novel enough that I’m going to keep watching it, even with better things to do. (It’s a good thing, in hindsight, that this wasn’t junk!)
2. The picture quality is impressive. It’s easy to forget how lousy and compressed $80-a-month “HD” television service from Time Warner Cable looks when it’s what you’re used to. But this Internet stream looks great. The Apple TV box has been a fantastic viewing device. And even considering Netflix’s limited control over Apple’s user interface, it was much easier to find than a new show on cable.
3. Binge watching is awesome. I’ve done this, of course, with old shows on DVD and on Netflix, but never with a “new” show. Will this coax HBO to try releasing an entire season at once? Or another cable network? Or do they still rely too much on creating live “events” out of their shows?
4. This screams for an offline, “Netflix To Go” feature. I’m flying to Europe this week, and I’d love to be able to bring some episodes with me on my iPad. In every other situation, I could just buy the episodes I want to watch offline on iTunes, and go back to streaming Netflix when I’m home. But when Netflix is the exclusive distributor, this isn’t an option. (I’d pay extra — either an all-in subscription, or on a per-episode basis — for this feature. Though Netflix has avoided pay-per-view in the past, partially in an effort to keep things simple.)
5. Remember commercials?
6. There could be a better watercooler for these kinds of shows. I’m not really the watch-shows-and-seriously-discuss-them-on-Twitter kind of guy, and most of that stuff is now more annoying than interesting. (It was fun a couple years ago, I suppose, when Bourdain started tweeting during his shows. Now a lot of that stuff feels forced and distracting, unless it’s sports or news.) But I’ve seen a bunch of people talking about this: How do you discuss a show when there isn’t even a universal point of up-to-date-ness? (For example: Should you tweet potential spoilers?) Perhaps unintentionally, “House of Cards” even includes a sort-of mile-marker hashtag mentioned in the show, #GoZoe, and you can kind-of see what people are saying once they’ve reached that point. But that doesn’t scale. Also, hashtags still give me the creeps. (I’ve also learned to be skeptical that any special service created for this sort of discussion would actually catch on — RIP, Hot Potato — but it’s definitely worth some thought, and possibly some experimentation. And, overall, I think Netflix could do a lot more with media. Feel free to give me a call, Mr. Hastings!)
7. Imagine if Netflix had kept going with Red Envelope Entertainment, its before-its-time production and distribution wing. Perhaps it could be way ahead of where it is now? Or maybe Netflix needed to shut it down — and spend a few years working with the studios, during which its subscriber base grew tremendously — to get to its scale today?
8. Will this help push ISPs toward consumption-based bandwidth billing? This isn’t just a TV series/movie that the cable companies are too lazy to offer on-demand, it’s one they can’t offer at all. (Barring some sort of Netflix premium channel.) It’s arguably the most legitimate scripted competition yet to the cable-dominated home-entertainment monopoly. Time to start billing for those Netflix streams by the gigabyte?
9. Think the HBO suits are a little soft that Bill Maher did a guest spot on “House of Cards”? Or is any publicity for “Real Time” good publicity?
10. Most important: How big will this be for Netflix? At the end of 2012, Netflix had 27 million U.S. streaming subscribers. For context, that compares to about 3 million viewers for an episode of “Mad Men” — a decent proxy for TV show for smart people that you have to dig down the dial for, around 20 million for network-TV-laziness-fueled “The West Wing”, and perhaps around 30 million U.S. HBO subscribers. I haven’t seen Netflix say anything concrete about how many people are watching “House of Cards”, but let’s pretend it’s possible that it’s up to a million or two viewers by now? Maybe few hundred thousand new subscribers will come out of this? Possibly, maybe, a million? Those aren’t holy-crap, drop-the-mic numbers, but they’d certainly be very good ones — helping legitimize Netflix as a platform for original content and getting studios excited about making shows for it. And that would be an excellent result.

Also: This Netflix-AOL Chart Will Blow Your Mind

Bloomberg’s Caleb Hannan profiles David Tran, the guy who brought delicious sriracha sauce to America:

The first thing you smell at the Huy Fong Foods factory in suburban Los Angeles is the overwhelming aroma of garlic, a key ingredient in the company’s signature product: Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce.

Huy Fong — the “rooster” bottle guys — sold 20 million bottles last year. So it’s still less popular than Netflix. But it’s definitely on the way up. Look at this Google Trends chart:

Also: 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Greek Yogurt

Pardon the idle speculation, but finishing up the next version of our City Notes travel guide got me thinking.

In the lull between iPhone releases, there seems to be chatter about two possible new additions to the line:

• A “big iPhone” that might capture some of the market that wants a bigger screen than the current iPhone 5. (The Galaxy Note-curious.) See Marco Arment’s mockups here.
• A “cheap iPhone” that might capture some of the market that doesn’t buy $600 (or subsidized) iPhones. Something in the $250-350 unsubsidized range, perhaps. (Hello, China!) This is often called the “iPhone mini” or “iPhone nano”, assuming, perhaps, that Apple would follow the same “mini” pattern it has with the iPod and iPad.

What if these two phones are the same device? What if the big iPhone is the cheap iPhone?

The cost-size curve isn’t straight in computer hardware, because miniaturization is also a cost factor.

• There is a point where making a MacBook bigger costs more, and a point where making an iPad smaller costs less. The 15-inch MacBook Pro costs more than the 13-inch, and the iPad mini costs less than the big iPad.
• But there is also a point where making an iPhone smaller costs more — in component efficiency, battery life, R&D, different materials, etc. That’s one reason why the iPhone 5 costs (very roughly) about the same to build as an iPad mini, which is much larger.

You might assume that a bigger iPhone would be a more powerful one; that the iPhone+ (or whatever it’s called) would be an “iPhone Pro” of sorts. Maybe so. But maybe it’s also cheaper than a smaller iPhone, because weight, size, and efficiency aren’t the primary design goals. For example, the battery could be bigger. Or maybe it could contain older, cheaper, more-plentiful, less-efficient components.

To be sure: This is just an idea. I lack Tim Cook’s knowledge of the component market. It’s possible this is totally incorrect logic. Maybe the “cheap iPhone” will be a small, fat, plastic thing like the old iPhone 3G. (I hope not!) Maybe the big iPhone will be a $900 iPhonePadPro. Who knows.

But it is good to remember that there can be a bigger cost to making things smaller.

Also: Sometimes My iPad Mini Makes Me Want A Bigger iPhone