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May 31, 2005
iTunes goes to Hollywood
With iTunes 4.8, Apple has quietly added video clip support. Now, any QuickTime movie can be dragged into a playlist in iTunes. This allows easy download, sorting and playback of digital video clips.
But the challenge for Apple is not getting content from the studios, or protecting it, or the technical details of distributing it. Rather, the challenge is to convert iPod and iTunes listeners into viewers.
This also begs the question: How quickly will iTunes replace NetFlix?
It should be obvious to anyone following the progress of downloadable video that the holdups are political and economic, not technical. It has taken a long time to make Hollywood comfortable with digital rights management for downloadable content - and it has been even harder to get consumers to pay for $4 movie downloads over pathetic US "broadband." Services such as CinemaNow have been providing downloadable movies for years, but they have not achieved mainstream penetration. In fact, they seem to be no more than elaborate proofs of concept for DRM technology.
The de facto standard approaches to video distribution, which reportedly make up some 50% of Internet bandwidth use, are of course the ubiquitous file-sharing networks. The current business model for these networks is a non-sustainable "sell ads and run from lawsuits while you can."
So what's in store for iTunes? A natural first step is music videos. These are essentially promotional content, short, small in size, and of relatively low value to the labels, but nonetheless a perfect discrete digital "goodie" that consumers are eager to download and view repeatedly.
But going to the next step, feature-length movies, will take new hardware. This does not necessarily mean a video iPod. It will require hardware of some kind, though, to painlessly get these movies onto TV screens.
There are several approaches to solving the digital home theatre problem, which echo the thin client vs. desktop PC argument of a few years ago:
- Home Theatre PCs - full, desktop-class computers running personal video recorder and audio/video jukebox software
- "Thin clients" - network devices that act as video output peripherals (i.e. Airport Express for Video)
- A video iPod (vPod) that downloads video from iTunes and can also output it to a TV as most digital cameras can today
If you're not familiar with Airport Express, it's a convenient, portable $129 WiFi gadget that lets you set up a WiFi access point anywhere and also acts as a remote audio output for iTunes. If you're running iTunes, you can effortlessly pipe your audio output to any Airport Express, and thus out of your stereo system or TV speakers, anywhere in your home.
It's often said that iTunes is essentially a loss leader to promote iPod sales. I've also been told that Steve Jobs doesn't believe in home-theatre PCs. The Airport Express allows the Mac to remain the "digital hub" for your home entertainment. So it would be consistent with this vision (and Mac rumor sites are conjecturing) that Apple will come up with some sort of WiFi video output device (perhaps based on its implementation of MPEG-4/H.264/AVC video) that can connect to the television and serve as a "video out" for iTunes and QuickTime.
It's interesting to note that such a device almost exists already: Apple's $500 Mac Mini has DVI video output, and many people have found that they can hook one up to their HDTV and watch their QuickTime videos on the big screen. I'll be at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in a couple of weeks, and many of us are hoping that Apple announces at least one of the video solutions listed above. Stay tuned.
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P.S. In the meantime, video iTunes has at least solved one problem that has plagued Mac users for a decade. It has a "full screen" feature for movies. That means you no longer have to pay $29 for QuickTime pro in order to play your movies fullscreen.
May 31, 2005 |
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Bubbler blows up distinctions between websites and blogs
I'm often asked how a blog differs from a website. I usually say that blogs are websites that are organized like journals, generally created with software that lets you make frequent posts and supports things like reader comments and trackbacks, which aren't typically found on business sites. Blogging connotes a lot of other things, of course, like strong opinions, brutal honesty, and an ongoing conversation. SiliconValleyWatcher, for instance, uses Movable Type even though it is organized more like a news website than a traditional blog.
Bubbler, a new service from Palo Alto-based startup Five Across, really blurs that distinction in interesting ways. Founded by graduates of Apple and Adobe, Bubbler is a database-driven service that lets creators toggle between blog and website conventions, does away with ftp'ing files to a server, and even removes the concept of a broken link (except for outside links).
When I talked to Five Across CEO Glenn Reid, he emphasized that divorcing content from presentation was the key to the company’s technology. That’s been an objective of Web technologies for many years now, especially Cascading Style Sheets. But having a goal is one thing and having a system that actually works seamlessly is quite another.
Glenn comes from Apple, and Bubbler’s model is pretty Apple-like. It uses standards like CSS and JavaScript as appropriate, but at the core is proprietary technology that enables the company to deliver a solid user experience. There's no part of the process that Five Across isn't touching - you use its client software and its servers. Bubbler sites run on Five Across servers. While the service sits on TCP/IP and outputs HTML/CSS/JavaScript to a web server, everything in the middle is proprietary Five Across stuff.
This approach is not unusual. Flickr, for instance, takes a closed source, open API approach. How they do what they do is secret; what is open is the method of writing apps that lock into it. Bubbler is also closed-source, and it's not clear how open the APIs will be. It’s hard to argue with the success of the iPod and its tight integration with iTunes. On the other hand, its hard to argue with the success of the Web. But, why argue? There is obviously room for both kinds of companies.
Although Bubbler is intially offered as a hosted service, Five Across' ultimate business model, unlike that of Movable Type creator Six Apart, isn’t to run a hosting service but provide an OEM technology to other companies and networks. Look for ISPs to offer Bubbler to customers as a blog- or web-building tool that blows away anything they currently offer. And look for Bubbler to cut deals with institutions in vertical markets, such as real estate.
Blog or site? The difference is a template
Like Blogger.com, Bubbler offers a bunch of CSS-based templates. But unlike Blogger and other blog tools, the templates don't all look like blogs. Enterprise and small business templates look a lot more like website than blogs. Because Bubbler lets you disable blog standards like date, author, comments, trackbacks and so on, your “postings” can easily look like web “content.” Bubbler makes it easy to upload photos and files - just drag from the desktop to the app.
To put Bubbler through its paces, I took a site operated by my sister in law, Working Aussie Source, and re-created the home page in
Bubbler. I think she’s an interesting and typical case study. She paid someone to build her site but it’s become gainly and out of control. Not knowing any HTML, she’s been unable to update it and certainly unable to redesign it. Using a basic template, I recreated her home page in about an hour. But that took some faking up of blog entries, and I wasn’t able to replicate her basic design. Here's my Bubbler version of Working Aussie Source.
To move past the templates (shown in the screen shot), you have to dive into CSS. Clicking on Customize Template simply opens an HTML file for you to edit and upload to Bubbler. There’s no ftp app to run though; Bubbler handles the uploads. Editing the CSS isn’t that hard unless you’re building elements from scratch - moving elements around is fairly easy. Still, I don’t think that matters much. The creator of Working Aussie Source is not going there - she’ll need a wysiwyg editor for rearranging page elements or many more templates to choose from. Even TypePad, which is no wonder of user interface, allows users to control the positions of different elements and makes it relatively easy to paste in code for AdSense and other JavaScript do-hickies.
Five Across PR told me that the company's low-end market - real estate agents, photographers - would be happy to use templates, especially since Bubbler lets you use your own images in the templates. But I think this is leaving a lot of potential customers on the table. Designers, for instance, insist on total visual control but have no love of maintaining sites, tracking down broken links and threading through JavaScript rollover code. They would be very happy with the amazing way Bubbler makes those issues go away. If Bubbler can combine design control and ease of use, it could become a very interesting product. It will never be for everyone, but it is an exciting breakthrough in web authoring.
May 31, 2005 |
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Tales from Syndicate conference - Tuesday: Sneaking out to catch the Star Wars geeks .......and dinner with the in-crowd
...the final prequel to the climactic pre-finale of the series recounting a week's epic adventures at the Syndicate conference in New York...
Time Out journalists and Star Wars geeks
It's Tuesday in New York city, the first day of the Syndicate conference, and it's almost lunch time. I run into my buddy Dave Galbraith, a co-author of RSS 1.0, co-founder of Moreover and now, the founder of the flickriscious Wists.com (is that enough plugs Dave?). With Dave is Buck Smith, channel dev manager from Moreover.
Buck suggests we skip out and visit the geeks lining up for the opening of the latest Star Wars prequel. We walk about six blocks to where the movie is scheduled but there are no geeks, just a few tents with British flags. There is a guy in a stormtrooper uniform on the corner, but it turns out to be a bunch of journalists from Time Out magazine raising money for charity and charging $5 per Polaroid pose with the stormtrooper.
We're reluctant to pay the $5 (and Dave is Scottish) but they sweeten the deal with “we'll throw in a couple of girls into the shoot.” In that case, fine, I say, and pay $20 for photos all around. But do we need to have the stormtrooper in the picture, I ask?
It's all for a good cause, I'm told. Unfortunately, I can't remember which one.
I suggest they also offer boys, just to be fair.
The 8,000 pound gorilla wants to make an announcement - NOW
I catch the RSS and advertising panel at Syndicate. Here is the writeup:
It got a little bit bizarre when one of the panelists, Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager at Google, announced AdSense for Feeds right in the middle of the panel discussion. He jumped up, ran over to the podium, forcing the moderator to scoot quickly out of the way, gave a ten-minute PowerPoint presentation, then sat down. Panel discussion resumed.
Afterwards, I asked him how it would stop people from grabbing other people's content and creating RSS feeds from it. He said Google would carefully monitor the feeds and the organizations that sign up.
Sounds a bit people-heavy to me - not the Google way, which is if it needs people, we are not interested. That's because it's not scalable if it is not machine-based. You can't scale to keep pace with the internet if you have to rely on adding people to handle these kinds of tasks, IMHO.
Syndicate organizers say nice things about SVW
I meet some of the Syndicate organizers and they are very happy at the turnout and also at the traffic SiliconValleyWatcher sent to their online site. They said most of it was from our readers, which is great news.
And it was the lunch panel organized by one of our sponsors, Nooked, SiliconValleyWatcher, and Jeremy Pepper, featuring A-list blogger Robert Scoble, Forrester's superstar analyst Charlene Li, InfoWorld's Jon Udell, Dave Galbraith, and EVP & Director of Worldwide Operations for Edelman David Dunne, that brought a lot of attention to Syndicate and brought out some of the media big guns.
The Syndicate organizers said they are planning another conference in San Francisco in November and I said we would be happy to help out again, in organizing panels, additional tracks, etc. After all, this is our backyard...
Carnivorous Bloggerati
The place to be Tuesday night was eating steak at Gallagher's Steak House with all the top digerati attending Syndicate, A-list bloggers, various fathers of internet standards, and a few flacks and hacks. It was organized by one of our sponsors, Nooked, and Nooked's flack, Jeremy Pepper.
I arrived a little late. I had stopped first to visit with my old friend Lauren Stein, who lives just a couple of blocks away in Hell's Kitchen. Lauren works as assistant vice president at Financial Dynamics but used to work in San Francisco at Outcast and Ruder Finn.
By the time we got to Gallagher's the Nooked dinner party had taken over at least three very long tables and were hard at work trying to drink their way through Nooked's marketing budget for the year. I remember chatting with Heidi Cohen for a long time, she had some interesting ideas about online marketing strategies.
It was good to see the same old crowd at these things: Marc Cantor holding court on his table, Fergus Burns tucking into his Guinness, Renee Blodgett hoping around in social gadfly mode, XML co-author Tim Bray looking dapper in his hat, and the rest of the gang...
Blog: Is it an online lie detector?
At the dinner, I got into a discussion with Robert Scoble about whether it is possible for a journalist to write unbiased news stories even if that journalist is biased. I said it is possible.
He said he did not think it was possible and that if the news reporter revealed their bias, he would be able to better judge whether that news story was biased.
I said that was too much work, and that the danger was in introducing his (Scoble's) bias into the mix. Because he would adjust for revealed bias, which might not be there. (It is not difficult to write a fair and balanced story yet hold a personal opinion otherwise.)
Robert Scoble said that each time he doesn't tell the truth online, his readers find out. I said that maybe we could construct a type of “Turing test” to see if a truthful blog voice can be picked out from fraudulent scammers.
Would readers be able to spot who was lying and who was truthful, just by reading a blog post? I think it is possible and I would love to try this out. How about it Robert? Let's set up a few tests and see...
Find out what happened on Wednesday:Moderating two celebrity panels at Syndicate
Find out what happened Thursday. A bleary-eyed blogger on Wall Street
Find out what happened Friday. Blogger swagger in the heart of New York city
May 31, 2005 |
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May 30, 2005
News roundup: BitTorrent searches, the evolution of Sims, IBM's blogging launch and more
Even on a holiday, interesting news pops up from the Valley. Here's a roundup of some of the headlines.
Bram Cohen, inventor of BitTorrent, has released a search engine [BBC report] to make it easier for users to find BitTorrent files. Cohne was
profiled in Wired magazine in January...
Sims creator Will Wright is working on Spore, a game in which players determine the evolution of species. The game will be multiplayer but not in the usual sense. The BBC reports:
The aim is to use a central computer to gather players' creations and share them with everyone playing the game. "You end up playing a galaxy of 100,000s of worlds. And because players are creating the worlds, everything will be different," said Mr Wright.
SVW recently published a scoop on IBM's blogging initiative, a story that generated a lot of interest and comments. IBM's stance on blogging was later officially released by IBM blogger James Snell. Here's the policy in a nutshell: You're speaking for yourself, not IBM. ...
The Wall Street Journal asked a stable of media experts what Old Media should do to survive. Here's a smattering of advice. Network news: Tear down the facade of how news is made. Network TV: Broadcast to PCs. Newspapers: Think about stories, not circulation; allow readers to create their own papers. Movies: Forget about DVDs, go online. Music: License P2P networks to sell songs. More at WSJ (Via CyberJournalist
Renee Blodgett has a report on Jeff Hawkins' new thing - computing systems based on the brain's neocortex. ...
May 30, 2005 |
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May 27, 2005
MPEG-4 vs. Microsoft VC-1: why high-definition video software standards are irrelevant
About a year ago, Microsoft made great strides in legitimizing its technology for broadcasting by getting its Windows Media 9 video codec (now grandly titled Video Codec One, or VC-1) accepted by the industry's standards body SMPTE.
And both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray groups, representing the two competing High-Definition DVD hardware formats, have agreed to support Microsoft's codec as well as the MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding standard in their new hi-def players.
This presents an interesting question. The Windows VC-1 and MPEG AVC camps are fighting over which is the "best hi-def codec". But with the future media players supporting both codecs, does it matter which one content producers choose? I think the software doesn't matter anymore.
Everyone's familiar with the names of some codecs because their acronyms are widely used, but here's a little more background: MP3, Apple's AAC, WMA, RA, and OGG are all audio codecs. They all compress analog audio down to less than a tenth of its original size when storing it in digital form, then convert data back to analog so that we can hear it.
To use them on an audio player, such as a computer, you need to pay a fee. The popularity of MP3 is its ubiquity; the popularity of AAC is due to its use in the iTunes music store. The popularity of WMA is that it is the default format for any music ripped on a Windows machine. The popularity of OGG is that it is royalty-free. But they all do their job, and a computer (and many portable music players) can easily play them all.
The modern video codecs are also very similar to each other, and use similar mathematical techniques. They all break the picture into a lot of squares, and then use fancy mathematics (like those used in JPEG pictures) to represent these small squares with the smallest amount of bits. (You can find a technical comparison of the differences here.)
But they are all roughly comparable in quality, and the the VC-1 vs. MPEG AVC battle is a technical stalemate; the differentiating features have much more to do with implementations, price, and of course politics.
Some will still argue that it's essential to have a single software standard, to make sure that a 2005 hi-def DVD video player can play media produced in 2015, just as a 1995-vintage DVD player can still play DVDs made today. But that's also less relevant than ever.
The real thing that is causing the software standards to be irrelevant is powerful hardware. Traditionally, "computerization" of an industry required application-specific computer chips. For instance, automobiles, PDAs, sewing machines, and DVD players all used completely different microchips.
But now, powerful general-purpose computers are getting so tiny that it doesn't make sense in many cases to make hardware that's too specific.
Sure, if you need to mass-produce a cheap, single-function portable video device, you design or purchase the right microchip that implements, say, some version of MPEG-4 or Windows Media. But a home theatre PC or hi-def DVD player doesn't have to be power-efficient or small (in fact, DVD player cases are mostly empty - they're just a small circuit board and an optical drive).
Initially, HD DVD players (or Blu-Ray DVD players) may be expensive. But they don't have to be. In fact, the Mac Mini has a street price of $499 and can play back some HD-resolution content. You could assemble a PC for less and play back hi-def Windows media. And a full-fledged home theatre PC can play back anything you throw at it.
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As I commented in an earlier blog, it's entirely possible to design hi-def DVD players that can support new video codecs through software updates alone. People already patch the firmware on their DVD players to unlock new features; a sufficiently general-purpose processor in a DVD player (or a video decompressor chip that can be reprogrammed) could adapt to future Windows or MPEG AVC standards. It's not inconceivable. In fact, people are starting to expect the hardware to do post-processing to the video to tune it to their own HDTVs.
Even if my flights of fancy about upgradeable DVD players turn out false, people have gotten used to $29 DVD players. It's going to be hard for vendors to sell hi-def DVD players with stratospheric prices. And when players become cheap enough, people WILL go out and buy a new one if they need to.
So the fighting between groups supporting different hi-def codec standards may seem important right now. But in the long term, it's only a minor skirmish in the battle for the living room.
May 27, 2005 |
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The further life of a blogger: Moderating two celebrity panels at Syndicate
...Part three of a bloggerific week in NYC
Wednesday May 18 was my big day at the Syndicate conference in New York. I started off moderating an early-morning panel with Michael Terner, CEO of KnowNow, the RSS corporate services company, and Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, the corporate wiki company.
Dr. Paul Kedrosky of the University of California and David Schatsky, senior vp at Jupiter Research, talked about how enterprises are using blogging, wiki and RSS technologies to publish to their employees and business partners. Paul made a good point that corporations are loathe to hire editorial staff because they want to keep headcount low - but they are already publishers of information internally and externally.
Strangely, this is one of the only Syndicate sessions that looks at corporate use of these media technologies, and it is well attended. The time flies by and I have to wrap things up. At the end, a large bunch of people rush the podium for more information. Not a bad panel all in all; only one person escaped early, and I saw only one dozer!
Lunchtime super-panel
My lunchtime panel, which was sponsored by the European RSS corporate services company Nooked (an SVW sponsor), was a lot livelier. Jeremy Pepper of Pop! PR helped organize an excellent panel and we had uber-blogger Robert Scoble of Microsoft; John Udell, formerly of Byte and now of InfoWorld; Charlene Li, Forrester's superstar analyst; David Dunne, EVP, Director Worldwide Operations at PR leader Edelman; and my buddy David Galbraith, co-author of RSS 1.0 and now with his post-MoreOver.com project: Wists.com.
Fergus Burn, CEO of Nooked introduced the panel. I skip the bios and launch the group right into the thick of things on the topic of future scenarios for RSS. They respond with gusto, they are animated, happy to play devil's advocate with each other, and responsive to my interruptions and occasional attempts at humor.
Again, the session flies by and I can barely remember what was said, other than the fact that Robert Scoble reads/scans through 1340-plus RSS feeds. But they have to be full-content feeds, otherwise they get zapped.
Charlene says her heavy travel schedule means she is away from her young children a lot, and so she has created a private blog in which she can communicate with her kids.
At the end of the panel I remember to announce our launch of ionRSS.com:reporting on the business of RSS, edited by RSS guru Richard MacManus.
Is Google stomping on or validating the RSS ad market?
Later in the afternoon I chat with Bill Flitter of Pheedo about Google's announcement of AdSense for Feeds. I joke that this “validates” the market.
The validation argument is a common take by companies in response to the entry of a much larger competitor to their markets. But Bill might have a point, and at least a few months of grace: “Placing ads in RSS feeds is actually a better place to advertise because it gets to more readers, but few advertisers realize this yet. Now with Google validating this market the phones are ringing off the hook.”
Coming soon: Find out what happened the previous day at the conference, and why all the A-list bloggers and Internet pioneers at Syndicate were at the Nooked dinner...
Also read about Thursday and Friday's events.
May 27, 2005 |
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May 25, 2005
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May 25, 2005 |
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May 24, 2005
Video download is patent infringement, and there's a price to pay
I used to keep a patent watch blog that tracked peer-to-peer (P2P) technology patents. Basically, when you start a company, you're expected to patent your technology, either offensively or defensively, whether you think it warrants it or not. So every company that enters a field starts patenting everything it thinks up, and, to take a cynical view, as long as the diagrams in your patent are different than other patents, you'll have a unique invention - enough to safely do what you're already doing without risk of being sued for patent infringement.
But what if your patent covers your entire industry? And what if you never build your technology but simply sell the patent to a licensing company? That's the case with a company called Acacia (just Google "acacia patent"), which has been enforcing its Digital Media Transmission (DMT) patent since 2002. The patent basically covers any kind of video transmission: download, progressive download, over any type of network, as long as there is file storage involved. Legally, Acacia has a patent on pretty much any type of digital download.
Instead of going after the technology creators, however, Acacia has decided to go after people using the technology profitably. This makes perfect business sense.
With big companies, patents are a sort of barter currency, cross-licensed so that each company can continue to do what it was already doing:
Company 1: "We've got the patent on smaller hard disk drive arms".
Company 2: "Fine, we've got the patent on smaller hard disk drive heads. Lets trade."
It all makes sense when the patents are owned by the same companies that create the technology. But it gets weirder when patent-holding companies enter the picture.
The thing about patents is that by merely writing the patent, you've "invented" the technology. You don't have to have it implemented when you draft the patent, although an expert in your industry must be able to build the invention from your patent.
With a patent as seemingly strong as Acacia's, you'd think the company would be rich - and recently, it has been collecting about $2M per fiscal quarter from the patent. According to Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia.com, Acacia has sent out more than 20,000 letters to companies it believes are infringing.
Acacia's website does not list a licensing price. So Acacia can decide how much it should demand as a "streaming tax," depending on peoples' ability to pay.
So how much does it cost? From digital cable companies, Acacia is requesting $2-$2.50 for every subscriber. On the Internet side, it used to request a $5000 fee from educational institutions, but has lowered that to $500 in some cases.
Many companies go ahead and pay these relatively nominal flat fees, which include an "amnesty" for back royalties, instead of litigating. This is because it can cost $500 just to have your lawyer sign a letter and fax it on your behalf.
About 200 licensees have paid up so far, including big names like Bloomberg, Disney, Playboy and Virgin.
Acacia clearly sees great potential in this business model. Recently, the company bought another patent that might seem familiar. If you've ever used a WiFi hotspot, you'll notice that it redirects you first to a PAY NOW web page. Once you've paid, you can start using the web as normal. Well, that's patented. Kinda like one-click purchasing on Amazon, in the sense that many techies will cry "foul!" and others will go, "well, yah, if I had invented that I'd think it was clever and I'd want to make some money off it..."
Already, Acacia has taken several companies to court, notably some adult-industry (streaming or downloadable porn) suppliers as well as regional (smaller) cable companies.
One of the deepest ironies is that Acacia's quarterly reports, in digital media form, are hosted by a non-licensee. Also, StreamingMedia.com, which has created a clearinghouse of information about this patent at http://streamingmedia.com/patent/) has conferences archived on its site as downloadable video. StreamingMedia is not a licensee of the patent - and has never received a letter.
Patents are often cited as a way for the "little guy" to protect him/herself from the big corporation that might steal his ideas. It now appears that corporations such as Acacia are stocking up on patents that they didn't invent and certainly never implemented, so they can charge little guys - who use such inventions.
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This patent prospecting is such a good business it makes California real estate look like Beanie Baby futures. I just started my own patent holding corporation and we've just purchased patents for the video previews feature on digital cameras, and we also just bought a patent for the key fob. Instead of going after camera manufacturers and car manufacturers, we've decided to take the infringement lawsuits directly to the users.
Please submit your address information in the feedback area below so we can send you a bill.
May 24, 2005 |
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| Tag: Digital Video
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BP, Morgan Stanley have "zero tolerance" for bad coverage
BP, following on the heels of Morgan Stanley, has adopted a policy of pulling advertising from publications that give the company bad press, and requiring publications to give BP prepub look-sees if it is mentioned in cover stories, AdWeek reports.
This strikes me as unbelievably stupid and abusive, since magazines are in a very weak position to reject major ad buys from these guys. It's funny that there is so much talk about journalistic ethics, and about how Newsweek must hate America, when corporations are free to abuse the power of the buck.
AdWeek quotes an unnamed publishing exec: "I think it's OK to have systems in place to pull advertisers out, but clearly we don't show them stories ahead of time. ... It's a stupid request. It makes you think these guys are hiding something."
May 24, 2005 |
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[Sponsor Watch] Infineon, IBM, Macronix Researching Phase-Change Memory
On "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," Odo was a shape-shifter, able to rearrange his molecules to inhabit different forms. Now the idea is being applied to computer memory, as Infineon Technologies AG (a SiliconValleyWatcher founding sponsor) has joined up with IBM and Macronix to research phase-change memory, a new technology that stores data in a special material that can change structure, the AP reported Monday.
Research will be conducted at IBM's Watson Research Center in New York and Almaden Research Lab in San Jose. In phase-change, the material changes from an amorphous to a crystalline structure; the technology promises high speed, high density storage. Data could be saved and available even when the computer is turned off.
Link: AP story
May 24, 2005 |
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A bleary-eyed blogger on Wall Street: more thoughts from a week in NYC and the Syndicate conference
The second installment of a journalist-blogger's somewhat patchy recollections of a hectic week in New York.
The trouble with Thursday last week was that my Wednesday was still going strong. The Syndicate conference finished Wednesday, and somehow afterwards I got caught up with a motley crew of RSS company execs and an investment banker or two.
I seem to remember it was all Bill Flitter's fault. Bill is the chief marketing officer of Pheedo, which serves ads on RSS feeds and also offers behavioral marketing services and analytics. Bill is a big fan of SiliconValleyWatcher and so is his friend, Tom O'Neill, managing director at Summit Private Capital Group. Bill invited me to join his merry band for a meal and a drink. Little did I know it would be 5am before my head hit the pillow.
A fun time was had by all - thanks Bill! Also, I must mention Rok Hrastnik, who by midnight had been dubbed “The Rok of Slovenia.” Rok, just 23 years old, is an astounding character and already a seasoned entrepreneur. He is an expert in online marketing techniques as E-commerce Manager at Studio Moderna in Slovenia.
By 10.45am Thursday I was finally awake, and realized I had to be downtown at noon at Financial Dynamics to talk to this large Wall Street PR firm about blogging. Financial Dynamics is where my friend Lauren Stein works as Assistant Vice President. Lauren had asked me to come in and chat to her colleagues about blogging and how companies are looking to use it in marketing/promotional activities.
I have been doing a lot of these types of meetings, sharing what I've learned so far, talking about some of the questions that blogging creates, and discussing how there are so many answers that we don't know yet. That's what makes it interesting. I also pointed out that Silicon Valley companies are not ahead of the rest in using these technologies; this is still very early days for everyone.
I said that blogging doesn't allow for spin. If you can't walk the walk, then however much you talk your talk, you will not be read. Marketing speak doesn't fly in this world. But if you give as much value as much as you can, the world will beat a path to your door. For that reason, blogging is the best form of promotion bar none.
A pleasant walk amid unpleasant memories
I then spend a pleasant afternoon wandering alone along the waterfront parks and observing the rebuilding of the devastated WTC site. I remember how different it looked when I was here just five days after the attack, helping out my colleagues in the Financial Times New York HQ.
The ruins were still smoking and the downtown area was covered in several inches of powdery ash, as people shuffled stunned and silent through the narrow streets. Throughout Manhattan, the fire stations were covered in messages and flowers.
Walking along a street you would suddenly come across candle-lit shrines to the fallen, walls covered in fliers with photos of lost family and friends, asking if anyone had seen them. Those photos and descriptions of the missing personalized the tragedy like nothing else.
Now, the district is sunny, bright, and new, and multiple memorials are there. But the walls of chiseled names don't hold the same emotional impact as did those missing person fliers taped to the walls.
The Flickricious Wists.com
I head over to my buddy David Galbraith's place, just off Wall Street, where I'm staying the night. Dave shows me some of the enhancements he's made to Wists.com, a very clever, slick but simple way to create visual bookmarks of favorite things. Dave has been adding more features such as an easy way to add images to blog posts and publish in just a few clicks. Dave could be onto a winner here and he already has Gawker Media using it and quite a few others sniffing around.
Find out what happened the day before in Part Three: Wednesday--Moderating the mother of all panels at Syndicate (guess how many daily feeds uber-blogger Robert Scoble reads? 1340!)
Find out what happened the next day in Part One:
May 24, 2005 |
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May 23, 2005
A week in the life of a blogger journalist: Blogger swagger in the heart of New York city...
Part One: Friday May 20
Is that Barry Diller over there, someone asks? I look around and see some people walking past our table in Michael's, one of the power centers for the media elite in Manhattan. I don't think I could recognize the media mogul anyway...
It is Friday and I'm having lunch as the guest of Andy Plesser of the PR firm Plesser Holland Associates and his long time friend Nancy Smith, the sharp and savvy managing editor of Smart Money magazine.
It has been an exhausting but fulfilling week. I moderated two panels at the Syndicate conference and made a ton of interesting contacts, gave a presentation at Financial Dynamics, caught up with buddies and now I'm telling Andy and Nancy about my first SiliconValleyWatcher sponsors, that we launched our sister site ionRSS.com, and our plans for the future. “So that's why you walked in with a swagger,” Nancy teases.
I am not conscious of the swagger but appearances can be deceiving - and that is usually fine by me! As a semi-famous blogger journalist with a burn rate that could lead to flame-out, I sometimes enjoy playing the part of what I'd like to be: a successful micro-media mogul.
The poorer I get, the more affluent I like to appear. If I look like a million bucks, I probably could do with a million bucks. I'm wearing my favorite lightweight gray check suit and floating on the heels of my extremely comfortable Ecco dress shoes.
A humble blogger
I think the swagger Nancy noticed was just my “front” in case the management of Michael's spotted the humble humility of a blogger in motion and had me ejected (I think I spotted Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis photo ids by the door ;-)
Andy recounts successes for some of his clients, particularly the Iron Horse Winery in Forestville, (a superb winery, in the town where my children live) and new clients such as the Finnish and Singaporean governments. He also says that his vacation home in Puerto Rico was mentioned that very day in the New York Times.
I tell Andy that he should be careful not to get more publicity than his clients, something other celebrity PR bloggers have discovered to their cost. I wish I'd had my camera. The look on his face would have made for a marvellous flickr post.
This is my first meeting with Nancy and we run through an impressively long list of media topics ranging from the furious pace of M&A activities in the media sector to whether the old media truly gets the new new media.
Andy asks me if I can be part of a conference he is putting together in Silicon Valley next month, and I say no problem. I've been speaking at a lot of conferences this year and also visiting a lot of PR companies to talk to communications professionals about blogging and how companies are trying to use this medium (“you cannot spin” is a key point of mine along with “blogging is the most honest form of promotion bar none.”)
The coffee arrives and so does one of Andy's many blessings, his 20 year old son who is studying at Dartmouth College. However, I have to head off and prepare for my flight back to SFO.
I thank my hosts and stroll out of the restaurant and into the majestic canyons of Manhattan. I soon realize that I am just around the corner from the US HQ of my alma mater, the Financial Times. At which point a slight swagger creeps into my stride :-)
[Find out what happened the day before, in part two: Thursday--A blogger on Wall Street...]
May 23, 2005 |
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May 22, 2005
Verizon Fios: insanely cheap fiber to the home
My friend recently got wired up in Topanga Canyon (part of LA county) with Verizon's new insanely fast fiber Internet. I later saw a driving billboard Verizon truck that said "Fios" on it and then I figured out it was their brand name for this service.
[picture courtesy Jacob Riskin]
The monthly prices are extraordinarily low:
5 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $39 (source: Verizon Fios - Packages & Prices) With friends like that, who needs colocation facilities? Seriously though, I pay several hundred dollars for a 5Mbps downstream/768k upstream package from Time Warner. With the $199 Verizon package, you can get 5Mbps of upstream server bandwidth, which would let you serve almost 40 128k MP3 streams, or over a dozen 300Kbps video streams. This kind of upstream bandwidth is also sufficient for you to hook up your TiVo or PVR to the network and watch it in full quality in some other broadband downstream location. (While DVD bitrates are sometimes 6-8Mbps, the bitrates for PVR video are usually in the 2Mbps range, and DivX/Xvid movies are usually under 1Mbps.) May 22, 2005 |
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| Tag: Tech Watch
Streaming media, as far as I can determine, is a euphemism for "internet audio and video.". Companies don't want to be typecast as audio or video specialists, so they use the term "streaming media". But unfortunately, "streaming" is one of those useless "in" terms. When I told the flight attendant on my way to a New York conference that I was speaking about streaming video, she stared blankly and asked what streaming was.
Then, at the conference, after my six hour talk on Windows Media, my friend, also a presenter, told me that he didn't consider "streaming media" an industry. A day later, while speaking to a prospective publisher, the editor wondered if "streaming media" was a good term to use.
I tend to agree. Sure, with enough branding, the abused term "streaming" could take hold. In marketing buzz-speak, it essentially means "putting video on a web page or something."
But the argument against using the term to describe an industry goes something like this: Television is an industry; but "analog broadcasting" isn't. Consumers don't care about how broadcasting is implemented except as far as that affects price points and features. Tech geeks excepted, people generally don't worry whether you'll need an antenna on the roof, or plug something in to your cable box or hub.
Presumably, the promise of streaming media is that it will "deliver your content over the Internet or networks". But then all the work of streaming media, except in brand-new industries such as downloadable music, is simply a replacement for existing technology, i.e. "now we don't have to Fedex high-quality training DVDs to our branch offices, we can spend the same amount of money downloading low quality versions of them and hiring IT staff to hook up T1's to each office..."
The StreamingMedia article IPTV and Streaming: Distinguishing the Differences discusses some of this. Streaming technology, at high bitrates over well-controlled networks, just looks like, um, cable TV. But of course, it's more difficult (currently) to get this working versus traditional cable, and the quality of service can be lower.
We had the same problem a few years ago when I was working in the P2P "industry". Everyone liked to point out that P2P (peer-to-peer networking, i.e. the technology that powered Napster) was a technology and not a business model. Three years later, I still work in what I guess you could call the "P2P" industry, but my customers are in the video entertainment industry.
TThat's the case in many industries. Once a technology works well, the industry is no longer named after the technology. P2P technologies, once working, aren't marketed as P2P. Google uses "artificial intelligence" extensively but no sane marketer would dare call it that.
"Digital video" is a much more marketable moniker that doesn't specify a specific network transport technology, but encompasses all the ramifications of "going digital" with your media.
I'm not sure a rose by the name of "streaming media" will ever smell as sweet.
May 22, 2005 |
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| Tag: Digital Video
A few years ago, the battered industry of Internet video was dominated by the "big three" - Windows, Real, with Apple's QuickTime trailing a distant third. But in 2002 Macromedia, now part of Adobe, came out with its MX series, equipping Flash with the Spark codec, a simple codec based on H.263.
The Spark codec was nothing to write home about in terms of performance - it lagged the other major vendors in raw compression capability - but that didn't matter. What was important was that it worked well, and, notably, allowed the blending of natural video (i.e. from a video camera) and Flash animation into one seamless presentation (a feature that was supposed to be part of MPEG-4 but which never really materialized.) While it took a few years for Flash video to take hold, it has certainly done that now. The "buzz" I am hearing is that more and more video web projects are switching to Flash for their video.
Real has retreated from the Internet codec wars, morphing from a technology company into a sort of subscription services and server infrastructure vendor. Microsoft and Apple are pursuing the broadband/HD route, i.e. "Who has the best high-definition codec?"
Yet in the US and Europe, tens of millions of today's Internet viewers have low-speed "broadband" in the 128-384 kbps range, or use modems. Flash has always been the low-bandwidth leader, by focusing on what kind of good experience you could create on a modem, instead of trying force a depressingly sad excuse for video down the narrow throat of a dialup connection.
I think Macromedia will win the Web video war, for the following reasons:
1) Macromedia has style. Instead of sticking an obnoxious rectangle in the middle of a web page, Flash video blends with its web page surroundings.
Having worked extensively with Flash at my own company, I know many of its limitations. But they don't really matter, because Flash has just enough power to take over Internet video - and perhaps, if the company is clever, mobile phone video as well.
May 22, 2005 |
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| Tag: Digital Video
After all, as Doc Searls pointed out in his closing keynote at Syndicate, print carries huge, gargantuan infrastructure costs - the Times owns and leases more than 5 million square feet of space. By selling access to archives at roughly $3 a pop, the Times Online generated about $1 million in revenue. Pretty small potatoes for a company that creates $3 billion in revenues and $500 million in operating profits. So clearly they need to better and one-price-beats-all is an appealing approach. But how much value can they really extract out of old news (today's news is tomorrow's birdcage liner)? Consider that 2004 circ revenues were over $600 million and that circulation is down at the Times 1.2% from 2003. (Circ earned $87 million from their regional papers, down 1% from '03.) [Annual Report (PDF)] To see how much value the Times ascribes to digital archives compared to circulation, consider this: TimesSelect is a freebie for folks who subscribe to the printed paper. The bottom line is that by charging for the online Times, the value of the printed paper is enhanced. Why join TimesSelect for $50 when you can get the daily paper AND online access. Locking up archives and columns behind a paygate hurts the online advertising business, hurts the Times' visibility online (google doesn't archive pay-only pages), and will generate relatively modest revenue in return; even if they increase revenue 1000%, that's $10 million. By contrast, if the Times can increase circulation 10% (at least in part by the added benefit of free access to the fee-based website), that's $60 million in revenue (not profits.) A newspaper's website is an extension of the paper, not a freestanding business. There are numerous things the website can do to support the printed paper but ultimately that's what it does. That's what the Times is asking of its site whether its really knows that or not (I suspect they do). Ultimately, this is problematic because the costs of running a national printed paper are so high. Unlike Doc, I wouldn't suggest the Times charge for today's news and give the archive away. I would actually suggest that today's paper be available online not today but tomorrow and that the archive be given away for free. Everybody loves to talk about the Times, from the anti-MSM bloggers to Berkeleyites. The Times could encourage this, put itself out there as the source material for people to annotate, explore, deconstruct, etc. They could actually use technology to find ways to organize, display, link to the many ways bloggers interact with the content. They could sell advertising on all of this. They can insert references to Times content in About.com pieces. They could offer a Google Adwords-like feature to website operators (include links to Times articles based on your content). They could develop premium, for-pay content. What they are doing is something different, something ever so Old Media: they are beefing up their circulation numbers. May 19, 2005 |
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| Tag: Media Watch
UPDATE: Check out Richard MacManus' take at ionRSS.com: "[Google] will offer 'Universal RSS support' for the Personalized Homepage within 1-2 months, meaning users will be able to add any RSS feed onto it. Interesting that this comes out at the same time as Microsoft confirming it will integrate RSS across its MSN online services throughout the year." It's part of a new push Google calls "Fusion," which is an initiative to combine the various popular Google tools with web content at a user's fingertips. It's not quite the Google Browsers, but it's getting close! The actual change is supposed to go live some time very soon; and should you decry the loss of the classic Google homepage, you can set your preferences to keep it around. That's just one of three announcements this afternoon at the Googleplex. The second is a better version of "Keyhole" called "Google Earth," which will launch in a couple of weeks with truly astonishing satellite photo technology. And the third, as mentioned recently on SVW, is AdSense for RSS, available now. May 19, 2005 |
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| Tag: Google [GOOG]
I was delighted to find that these guys "get" this whole thing I'm calling media technologies. WaldenVC has been quietly making some very astute investments in digital media companies, leading rounds for ten companies. They've accumulated an interesting portfolio with a lot of diversity. I'm sure there is a ten-bagger in there. Maybe it's Shawn Fanning's new digital music distribution company Snowcap. Shawn, of course, is the founder/creator of Napster, the former scourge of the music industry. Now, everybody is good buddies and Hilary Rosen, his arch-nemesis when she headed the Recording Industry Association of America, is on his board. I know Alex, he's a former hack at Red Herring who joined WaldenVC in 1999, just before the dotbomb. But this is my first time meeting with Steve Eskenazi, general partner. Here's a summary of some of the conversation. Valuations of startups in the online marketing/advertising sectors are going through the ceiling. Usually, private-company valuations tend to be 40 per cent below comparable public valuations, depending on the sector. Now, valuations of private companies are at a premium over the public valuations. [Ouch.] Some startups in the online sector already have very healthy revenues and so they don't need investment capital. But the founders are taking money off the table by selling stakes to VCs. [Interesting to see such liquidity events because no IPO or sale of company was involved] Many young startup companies are seeing fantastic revenues - but they can't collect what they are owed fast enough, so they are burning precious reserves between the time they invoice and when they get paid. The VCs can provide a float. For example, with a $5m monthly revenue it's typical to take 60 days to collect payment from large companies, so it needs a float of $10m, which VCs can provide. Is that the value proposition for VCs these days - provide the float, I ask? Steve says no, it's also the expert management you get. Most of these companies are run by ad/marketing people and they need help growing the company. I say that it all sounds like an expensive way to go, taking VC money and handing over a hunk of company in order to bring in professional management. Of course Steve disagrees. I guess we will have to wait and see what happens. May 18, 2005 |
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| Tag: VC Watch
On Tuesday Google launched its public beta of AdSense for Feeds at the show, saying it would enable content producers to make money and plough that back into generating yet more quality content. Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for AdSense, called this a "virtuous cycle" that would enable the production of larger amounts of high quality content - and lead to a better society. That's a noble goal, and Google's AdSense network, which publishes content-related text ads on third-party sites, has generated more money for small publishers than anything else. Yet the modest revenues earned by most of the 200,000-plus AdSense network sites are under threat because of RSS, which allows people to read content without going to the originating web site. For many web sites using RSS, 50 to 70 percent of their readers subscribe to their RSS feeds and rarely see the web site itself. Since Google AdSense only pays if someone clicks on an ad, Google had to figure out a way to mix ads into the RSS feed and collect the clicks and usage patterns. Others, such as Pheedo, Moreover and Kanoodle have beaten Google to the market, but why rush? Google can own this market because of its scale and reach. Or can it? On the panel, Lincoln Millstein, SVP and Director of Digital Media at Hearst Newspapers, said his company was looking at mixing text ads within its RSS feeds - "But we don't need Google to do that." Millstein went further, saying that Hearst has become marginalized by the aggregators and wouldn't let it happen again. "The big money is being made by the aggregators, but who wants to be one of 1,000 publishers? That's just nickels and cents. We want to play the role of the aggregator." Hearst and other publishers such as IDG (organizer of the conference) are growing increasingly protective of their content, and increasingly hostile to Google or anybody else that is making money from their content and kicking very little, if anything, back to them. It will be interesting to see if the big publishers are better able to monetize their content, or if the value of digital content is in the aggregation services as Moreover and other aggregators argue. My take is that content will be king, this time around. And being a content producer/publisher (with an online cost base) is a very good place to be, because the headline links in Google, or in a news aggregator such as Yahoo Finance, have to lead to original content. And original content is hard to produce and cannot be done by machines. May 18, 2005 |
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| Tag: Google [GOOG]
Media RSS is an extension of RSS that allows feed publishers to include rich metadata describing the media content. "It's meant to be a self-publishing tool to communicate information about your feed," explained Brad Horowitz, Yahoo's director of media search. "Podcasting is a way to include enclosures in RSS. Media RSS is the way to make your podcast findable and discoverable." Watching Yahoo has seemed a confusing endeavor. On one hand it is creating serious Hollywood relationships and setting up shop in Santa Monica; on the other hand it is building open systems and garnering serious open source cred. While this seems like a schizophrenic identity, it's becoming obvious that Yahoo means to play at both ends of the spectrum. Brad said that Yahoo's vision is "My Media" - a middle way between mass media and micro media. In Yahoo's vision, "my" means both the stuff I've selected (as in My Yahoo) and the stuff I'm creating. Yahoo's media plans are to make high-leverage deals with Hollywood, do content deals with small individual creators like Jib-Jab, and provide the tools to allow users to find and create media. Yahoo calls this FUSE - "find, use, share and expand" - and the ultimate dataset is "all human knowledge." (That's a line taken right from Google's playbook, btw.) Brad talked at some length about Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr, which is the poster child for multifaceted sharing of user-created data. By providing open APIs to its closed source system, and not trying to control how people used the system, Flickr built a most unpredictable phenomenon. Yahoo wants to try to apply Flickr's success on a much bigger scale. On the other hand, it keeps Hollywood happy by pushing traffic back to the studios' sites, rather than aggregating their content. For smaller content providers like iFilm, Yahoo media search delivers substantial traffic jumps. The company is very protective of partners' copyrights, and Hollywood execs actually use Yahoo Video Search as an "infringement search tool"; Yahoo removes infringing content as it is reported. That's somewhat at odds with the goal of turning consumers into producers. I asked Brad if they were interested in pulling the studios along to free up more content for users to remix. The answer was no; Yahoo's agenda is mostly to gain studios' confidence. So Yahoo is fighting several battles. It's competing with Apple for the loyalty of the big studios. It competes with Google for search advertising customers. Those business models are pretty well set. What seems like open territory is the so-called "long tail," the promising but unproven potential to make money off the enormous volume of content that average people are creating. Getting there means Yahoo needs to help drive the standards forward, and that it needs to so in a truly open way. May 18, 2005 |
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| Tag: RSS Watch
The Berkeley Blog reports the evening better than I will attempt to do here so I'll pull out a few choice excerpts from their report. But the gist of the argument is that exporting technology is exporting consumerism and destroying local cultures. My argument, which I didn't really get a chance to make (although I fared better than others on the panel), was that by building up tech skills, production skills, and know-how, people in these places will have a chance to control the means of production and will have a voice in deciding what kind of media they want. To sit in Berkeley and sip lattes while bemoaning the MTV-ization of the world is merely to guarantee how it will go down. So, here are some choice excerpts from the Berkeley Blog report: Many of the questions and challenges had an incredibly patronizing undertone of the wealthy (white) do-gooders trying to protect the poor (colored) noble savages from the ravages of western technology, following which the do-gooders would get into their Volvos and drive back to their homes in Berkeley with electricity, clean running water, telephones, and fast Internet connections and write in their blogs on their i-Macs about the horrors of technology for the third world. Both people of color in the room picked up on the tone and commented on it, but nobody responded directly to their comments. It was Berkeley at its most superficial and most stereotypical. Along with the bizarre in-your-face with sophomoric challenge moderating style, it also seemed like such an unproductive dichotomy to draw, like a bourgeois church club in 1820's Manchester England resolving that England should spare India the pollution and working conditions (and power) of the satanic mills of the industrial revolutions. It was disappointing that the discussion was so unproductive and superficial, because there are serious issues worth working on nearby. Technology and western culture are coming to the developing world, and anyone who has lived or traveled extensively in the developing world is aware of the deep hunger for both. The more interesting and actionable question is how can we empower people in the developing world to be producers of culture, and users of technology for their own benefit, as opposed to being just consumers of monopoly culture, and objects of technology. That's a discussion that I'd like to engage in with some of Berkeley's many technologically literate and socially conscious residents, but it wasn't to be had during tonight's the Berkeley CyberSalon, which is too bad. May 17, 2005 |
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| Tag: Tech Watch
Monday, the New York Times announced [press release] that columnists and Op-Ed essays would no longer be available for free online but would be part of a $50 offering called TimesSelect. The service includes full access to the Times archive back to 1980. In his keynote speech at Syndicate conference, Martin Nisenholtz (senior VP of digital operations for the Times) floated an idea for an Amazon-like affiliate program, essentially where websites and bloggers would earn a kickback for converting users to TimesSelect customers. "That could be a new revenue stream for people down the tail who can use New York Times information as a way into an affiliate program," he said. And it needn't be NYT only. "There could be an information affiliate program across a variety of content providers." He also talked about the Times' acquisition of About.com on March 18 for $400 million. He noted that 80% of About's traffic comes from web searches while 85% of the Times' traffic comes through the home page. About, then, is a "long tail" product, the kind of site where Adsense ads work particularly well. The Times, of course, is not a long tail business. Nisenholtz sees the two as "highly complementary. ... The New York Times can learn a lot from About," he said. Nisenholtz also emphasized the growth in RSS at the Times. "Something like the top 15% of RSS feeds on My Yahoo come from the Times. We have gotten RSS out there - we've gone from 500,000 page views to 7 million - its the fastest growing distribution channel we have. As more people use RSS, it's becoming the way that a lot of people are accessing the Times' content." As a result of this increasing RSS use, the percentage of Times online visitors accessing the site by the front door will shrink from the current 85%. "This has real ramifications," he said. "The Times as a newspaper considers itself an organizing principle for the world - all newspapers feel that way. There's an editorial sensibility that print publications bring that organizes the world. As we see the content become unbundled from the organizing principle, what's the new organizing principle? The standard answer is the individual, but I'm not sure that the right answer. There's a demand also for a shared sensibility with the rest of the world and serendipity," as well as user-filtered content. An audience member asked Nisenholtz when the Times would start adding hyperlinks to their stories. It's not easy to do, he said, because the editorial management system doesn't support that. The Times' solution is to create a system in which there are 10,000 topic pages under the content. "What will start to happen as we layer in these topic pages is that the content will start to light up. It will be a much more random reading experience." May 17, 2005 |
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| Tag: Media Watch
Originally published on ionRSS.com "The biggest request I've received from FeedDemon users is the ability to synchronize feeds between different computers. I had done limited integration with NewsGator and Bloglines but really limited. I realized I would need to partner with someone, because synchronization really has to be server-based." Nick said he wasn't really familiar with NewsGator's strategy until he read Greg Reinacker's post on NewsGator's platform roadmap. He remembers telling his wife that on the basis of that blog entry, he was "really impressed" with NewsGator. It was only a few days later that Nick received email from Greg suggesting they talk about acquisition. "If I hadn't read that post, I probably would have turned it down." Nick noted the NewsGator wasn't the first offer he's had - but it's the first that allows FeedDemon to grow as a product, rather than being stripped down for parts to be added to someone else's. Nick showed me a pre-alpha version of a version of FeedDemon that is integrated with NewsGator. The integrated version lets you move back and forth between FeedDemon, NewsGator's Outlook plug-in and NewsGator's web-based aggregator. All three apps know which feeds you're subscribed to and which posts are read and unread. In this scenario, FeedDemon is a UI on top of NewsGator. You're reading feeds in FeedDemon but they're coming through NewsGator, a scenario that allows for the cross-app awareness of subscriptions and read entries. While Nick concedes he's not really an enterprise kinda guy, he's excited about the chance to build FeedDemon into the app he wants it to be, and NewsGator's server-side approach makes that possible. Indeed the deal means "FeedDemon will be around for a long time," he said. In the more distant future, Nick said that RSS aggregators will let you discover feeds and items you're not already subscribed to, and inform you about items that people are discussing. May 17, 2005 |
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| Tag: RSS Watch
Reported originally on ionRSS.com Newsgator confirmed today that it has acquired Bradbury Software [Business 2.0], the creators of the popular Windows-based FeedDemon RSS aggregator. FeedDemon is a desktop application, so it's complimentary to Newsgator's existing Outlook-based product line and its enterprise server edition. Newsgator is positioning itself as "the leading RSS aggregation platform company" these days - and the FeedDemon acquisition firmly entrenches it on the Windows platform. Recently I had an email conversation with Charlie Wood, VP of enterprise solutions at Newsgator. According to Charlie's research and discussions with companies, the biggest barriers to enterprise-wide adoption of RSS are "client software deployment and management, single sign-on, and user training." Charlie said that enterprise-size companies may be looking for an RSS aggregation service to scale up to tens of thousands of users. Such companies want RSS to be "deployed and managed inside the corporate datacenter, integrate with their existing AAA systems [authentication, authorization and accounting], and require zero training for users." May 16, 2005 |
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| Tag: RSS Watch
I like this company - and there's nothing in our contract that forces me to say that. I like the culture, and I like the people. Tibco is very much old school Silicon Valley, calm, collegiate, an engineering culture. This time, we're talking about Vivek's book project on the "Predictive Enterprise" a concept that describes Tibco's approach, and technologies that allow large companies to foresee business swings and take appropriate action. Predictive technologies can flag forthcoming drops in inventories for example, so companies can scale back manufacturing. The cherry on the cake is that the predictive technologies are linked tightly to a company's supporting IT infrastructure. This means more efficient IT management because loads on IT resources become predictable. This enables telcos, for example, to meet service level agreements they have with large customers. Vivek and I also chat about the valley and the executive changes going on. I ask him where he thinks the next generation of Silicon Valley business leaders will come from. He says Silicon Valley still has the same group of roughly 200 movers and shakers it has had for many years. And he doesn't know where the next generation of business leaders will come from. I can't point to more than a handful myself. In the long term, that could be a problem. May 16, 2005 |
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| Tag: Silicon Valley
With today's limited preview release of a breakthrough health management program, startup SimoSoftware is really proving the "NewRules enterprise." The product, SimoHealth, is a hybrid software combining a desktop client application with an online component. It's also the first client application built on top of the open source Firefox browser. Download a free preview version from the SimoHealth website (Windows only) Created by a pair of former AOL executives and with a programming staff of five, SimoHealth is a personal health management app that is interesting both for how it tackles complex health transactions and how the software was built. The company was born because Lash found himself "completely bogged down in trying to get the best care and managing expenses" for his son Simon, who suffers from developmental apraxia. "I realized there were no tools out there to help families manage their healthcare and advocate for the best care," Todd told me when I visited him at his Oakland home. He took the idea to Marty Fisher, former AOL president of technology and development. "Marty's reaction was, 'Oh, my god, this is huge. I can't believe this hasn't been done.' " Todd, Marty and Marty's son Todd Fisher, a software architect, joined forces to cofound SimoSoftware, named after young Simon Lash. Markets don't get much hotter than the elephant-in-the-python aging babyboomer market, and it seems like the health sector is getting lousy with ex-AOLers. Just last month, Steve Case launched Revolution [site | Wash. Post story], a venture firm investing in health-related businesses. And WebMD [site] has brought in longtime AOL product marketing chief David Gang as COO and co-chief exec. As SimoSoftware president Todd Lash says, "The market for healthcare is essentially everybody. People in their 40s and 50s are worrying about their kids and their parents." And there other pressures besides the ravages of time. "Consumer-driven healthcare" is the industry buzzword for pushing costs onto consumers. "But there are no tools to help consumers manage their healthcare," Lash says. Enter SimoHealth. SimoHealth really is a breakthrough product in this space. It offers what I think is an unparalled ability to break down and track complex medical transactions that goes far beyond the checkbook approach of apps from major players. A medical transaction is a complex affair. "The transaction may take 90 days to transpire - if there are no problems," Lash says. "If there are problems, it could take six months." SimoHealth tackles this by allowing users to enter data from both the provider invoice and insurance company's explanation of benefits, matching payments, copays and deductible against basic plan information, and alerting users when a bill should be paid and when it's still waiting for insurance payments. What's really cool from a product development view is that SimoHealth is developed right on top of Firefox, which means that the client app is inherently also a browser. Users can click on web resources or (in the future) download their "continuity of care" records (much like downloading an online bank statement) and the online information will display directly in the app. SimoHealth calls for a hybrid approach because health information is sensitive data, which should be kept locally, yet there's a need to access online information, both in the form of websites and, soon, XML files that contain patient data. The current app uses the open source database Firebird to handle local data. In the early going, developers struggled to create a UI that would allow seamless integration of patient data with online resources. In the end, they decided to consider the first nine months of work a prototype and to build the actual app on Firefox. That decision offered numerous advantages, said Fisher, COO of SimoSoftware and the former president of technology and development at AOL. "The architecture allows us to embed networking capabilities seamlessly into the product. We were able to easily customize the look and feel of the browser to make it look like our own application. It's much easier to develop in JavaScript than in C/C++. We had faster development time and more internal component usability." In other words, the browser, not the operating system, is the platform. A crucial part of the story is the open source aspect. "We were tapping into a lot of people around the world for help. We were in the IRC channels talking to Mozilla folks. There is a large number of people available to help you. You get scale by using open source," Fisher said. That's a huge contrast with the old-style development models at AOL, said Fisher, who managed 3,500 people there. "One of the tragedies of AOL was that they refused to move forward from silo-built software. SimoHealth was built by five engineers. At AOL it would have been 40." Larger companies naturally have bigger management footprints than virtual startups. But the NewRules company is showing that very small teams can write better products with more features, faster and with less complexity than the big guys. To Fisher, this open source approach looks like a major new model in software development. "Outsourcing is one solution to reducing development costs but it's not necessarily the best solution. This just works." May 15, 2005 |
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| Tag: New Rules
Here's the topic: On my flight out I was speaking to someone on the airplane, and they asked what i was going to be lecturing on. I said "streaming media" and they said "what's streaming". But when I said "video on the Internet" it was much clearer. I had always suspected that "streaming" was a weak word, and indeed, not only does it fail to conjure up anything for the uninitiated, even the experts argue on what it means (i.e. is a partially downloaded file that you preview immediately "streaming"? or is it "download"?) May 15, 2005 |
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| Tag: Digital Video
15 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $49
30 Mbps down /5 Mbps up = $199
I'm still trying to figure out how to use my friend as my new ISP. He's in a canyon about 10 miles from me, so wireless won't work. Maybe he'll let me put my servers in his tool shed...
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Streaming media is not a real industry
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Flash Über Alles
2) Macromedia players work. Macromedia puts Flash through a much slower quality test procedure than other products, and only incorporates features when they are very mature. Case in point: The company didn't add any video capabilities until a majority of viewers would be able to enjoy them.
3) Macromedia understands that content creators want to push their brand, not the Flash brand. Flash doesn't pop up and ask you to go Pro (QuickTime), ask you to subscribe (Real) or even worse, minimize to the bottom corner of Internet Explorer (Windows Media) or pop out into its own browser.
4) Macromedia (now Adobe) is not threatening - people aren't worried about the consequences of using Macromedia technology as they are with technology from Apple, Real, or Microsoft. People are less concerned that by using Flash, they'll somehow violate some alliance their parent company has made with the other technology giants. This Switzerland-like neutrality serves Macromedia well on the Web, and hopefully will get the company into more industries as well.
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May 19, 2005
Perspective: TimesSelect is all about the print model, not digital media
I've had a few days to chew over the Times' announcement that they'll be charging $50 a year for TimesSelect, which offers access to the archive back to 1980 as well as to op-ed and columnists. Here's my off the wall assessment: This is not a move to make the online nytimes.com profitable so much as it is an effort to shore up circulation figures for the print paper.
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Google Personalized Home Page Launches
It's evidently a cold day in hell, as Google's venerably simplistic home page will be supplanted (not forcibly replaced, mind you) by the new "Personalized Homepage". Here's a sneak preview.
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May 18, 2005
One of San Francisco's last venture capital firms quietly bets on the next generation of media tech companies
I've often discussed how best to fund development of new media technologies - and I've said that I believe many new companies will use private funding, rather than venture capital. So it was interesting to talk recently with Alex Gove and Steve Eskenazi from WaldenVC, one of the last VC firms in San Francisco.
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Live from Syndicate: Red sky in the morning - Hearst News puts Google and news aggregators on notice
The "RSS and Advertising" panel at Syndicate was fascinating because this has become such a hot topic issue. Internet guru Dave Winer has recently been advocating ad-free RSS feeds and urging boycotts of publishers that pollute their feeds with ads. Google, Yahoo, Moreover and others are paying no attention - on the contrary, they are rubbing their hands with glee at the fat cash cow they see in mixing ads into RSS feeds.
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Yahoo unveils Media RSS spec and elaborates on its schizophrenic strategy
Yesterday at the Syndicate conference in New York, Yahoo unveiled its Media RSS 1.0 spec and announced support from OurMedia, a nonprofit site that allows users to upload and share multimedia creations, and from blog tools like FeedBurner and blogdigger.
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May 17, 2005
Latte sippers face off with technologists working in the third world
I participated in a truly mind-boggling panel Sunday in which I joined awesome people like Lee Felsenstein and Greg Brown to discuss whether bringing technology to the developing world was a "boon or bane". Lee, inventor of the Osborne, the first portable PC, and of the pedal-powered PC intended for use in Laos, went first. He had barely introduced the pedal-powered PC concept when the moderator, one Sylvia, who appeared to be channeling Sally Jesse Raphael or some such TV host, accused him of using child labor (kids pedal the bike to power the PC in powerless rural Laos), pulled in her teenage son to opine whether he would like to pedal for internet access, and generally was rude and dismissive of most everyone on the panel.
Next up was Greg Brown, an extremely personable entrepreneur who was involved in bringing satellite TV to Africa. Once again, he got part-way through his talk when Sylvia started berating him, this time about bringing MTV to the developing countries, and what a terrible thing it was. Greg seemed more comfortable challenging Sylvia than Lee was, and he pointed out that while cultures can lose local identity when you bring technology in, they also need the ability to voice their own concerns to the wider world, which broadcast gives. Unfortunately, no one wanted to discuss the empowering part of offering choice and the possibility of talking back to the Western World using the West's own technology, the moderator and the audience just wanted to blame Greg for importing the wasteland of current American popular culture to the developing world.
Last up was Richard Koman, who had been part of the Internet Archive's Bookmobile in Uganda project, and who talked about the reception the bookmobile got in Uganda (and painted a far less encouraging picture than Brewster Kahle has when I have heard him describe it). Richard got interrupted as well, in his case by questions from the audience like "Why didn't you use African books?" (they did have a few primers written in African languages, but Ugandans wanted English books, and African books published in English are generally copyrighted) and "Why didn't you go to Oakland" (the need is much greater in Uganda).
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NYT exec Nisenholtz discusses the Gray Lady's premium content move, About acquisition and growth in RSS
Sitting in the front row, Marc Canter asked whether this meant the Times would be a "publisher or a pimp" - that is, would the Times be "hustling me to make money off of me." Suffice to say, Nisenholtz didn't care for that characterization; he said several times that the Amazon model seems like a strong way for the Times to go but that the idea was not fully baked.
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A chat with FeedDemon developer Nick Bradbury about his company's acquisition by NewsGator
At the Syndicate conference this morning, I sat down with Nick Bradbury to talk about NewsGator's acquisition of his company, Bradbury Software, which makes the popular FeedDemon desktop RSS aggregator. I asked him why he made this deal.
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May 16, 2005
Enterprise RSS-oriented Newsgator acquires maker of FeedDemon, popular Windows-based desktop reader
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Predictive technologies help companies and systems cope with swings in business, says Tibco CEO
I try to visit my founding sponsors on a regular basis to catch up with what's going on, and to chat about the industry. So recently I went down to Palo Alto for a meeting with Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadive and his right hand man Ram Menon, senior vice president, Worldwide Marketing. Tibco has been a stalwart supporter of SiliconValleyWatcher from the beginning.
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May 15, 2005
SimoHealth, a breakthrough health management app built on Firefox, launches
Built on Firefox, SimoHealth is equal parts client app and browser
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Streaming Media East - Conference
SVW's Damien Stolarz is delivering an all-day Windows Media tutorial on May 16 in New York at Streaming Media East (http://www.streamingmedia.com/east/workshops.asp). Microsoft's Windows Media is possibly the most complete streaming media toolset available today. Windows Media provides interoperability across a wide variety of devices, which is essential when the streaming landscape encompasses PCs, handhelds, mobile phones, and high-definition TVs. Microsoft's Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies are gradually gaining trust with the major movie studios, and the next-generation DVDs are all slated to support Microsoft's video codecs. This workshop begins with a panoramic view of the Windows Media tools, and then zooms in on how to do specific tasks such as multi-bitrate encoding, server setup and capacity planning, Web casting, and using the digital rights management tools. The workshop will be packed with lots of practical tips and techniques to satisfy a wide range of audience skill levels.
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May 13, 2005
IBM is preparing to launch a massive corporate wide blogging initiative as it seeks to extend its expertise online
Updated
IBM is planning to introduce what could be the largest corporate blogging initiative so far, in a bid to encourage any of its 320,000 staff to become more active in online tech communities.
The world's largest computer company has prepared a broad range of programs and online materials that staff can access to find out how they can start to blog. The move would help establish IBM's "thought leadership" in global IT markets.
The IT industry continues to suffer from lower levels of corporate spending following the boom years of the late 1990s. IBM's most recent quarterly financial report missed Wall Street expectations and led to announced layoffs of 15,000, with more than 13,000 of those lost jobs in Europe.
The company said that the blogging initiative was not related to its recent cost cutting measures and had been planned for several months.
IBM employees will be guided on what is appropriate blogging content. There have been a small number of incidents in which bloggers have lost their jobs because they published inappropriate content.
IBM used wiki, a simple technology that allows groups to collaborate on projects and share knowledge, to help produce the guidelines for its corporate bloggers.
Wikis are not as sophisticated as IBM's Notes collaborative software, but they are making some inroads into corporate departments where they sometimes displace the use of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for small applications.
IBM