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Apple on Intel?

ArsTechcnica and News.com are both discussing the possibility of Apple making an Intel announcement come WWDC on Monday.

I’ve only given it a bit of thought, but I find the proespect incedibly exciting. Think about it for a second (of course not counting the work required to port the OS or applications) and you’ll likely agree it would be an excellent move. For starters, the Centrino platform would enable a significant boost to both mobile and small form factor systems allowing for integrated wireless and AV capabilties right in the box. The servers could be 64 Bit right away (Itanium2) and Enterprise customers would be more likely to adopt Macs on for end users knowing there would be no issues running things as the hardware would all integrate with existing systems.

Since it’s all just speculation at this point, there’s no way to really understand the possibilities, but purely from a hardware view, it would be very good direction.

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Best Buy Home Theater

Bryan at the Home Theater Blog notes Best Buy’s launch into higher end home theater equipment and installation today. Instead of simply carrying newer equipment, Best Buy is launching a new sub-brand, Magnolia Home Theater as a store within a store. I think it’s a great addition and could potentially expand the range of the stores which have clearly served the meaty part of the technology curve.

With the explosive growth of digital and flat TV’s consumers must be looking for what to do next… I definitely have to track down the store in NYC that is doing this.

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Intel Pentium DRM

Slippery Slope… Pandora’s Box… you name it. This is a tricky bit. If you have the protection built in the premium content guys might be more likely to offer content (HD even) to a PC. Consumers of course want nothing like this inside… and then of course you factor on the MS DRM layer and well it might just get ugly.

“[The] 945g [chip set] supports DRM, it helps implement Microsoft’s DRM … but it supports DRM looking forward,” Tucker said, adding the DRM technology would not be able to be applied retrospectively to media or files that did not interoperate with the new technology.

However, Tucker ducked questions regarding technical details of how embedded DRM would work saying it was not in the interests of his company to spell out how the technology in the interests of security. [PCWorld.com]

UPDATE — Intel issued a denial on this…

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Home Media Servers

Over at The Furrygoat Experience we read of one possible future in home media management:

…the server should be the box that actually has the TV card and records video.

Think about it – with the upcoming living room war between Sony Playstation 3 and XBox 360, combined with all of the connected devices (PC’s, UPNP DVD players, Tivo’s, etc), what you really want is a central location that records programs that I can access from anywhere (inside and outside the house), remotely setup recording schedules, etc. [The Furrygoat Experience]

I totally agree with this assessment and believe that things are about to get considerably easier in this regard. Storage prices continue to head south allowing for greater storage. The trick of course is having a robust enough box at the helm, that can record and serve content to multiple points in the home and beyond even through a simple experience.

Last night my wife and I were talking about whether we wanted to have a TV in the bedroom of our new house. We have one now, but rarely watch it. Her reason for not really watching in the bedroom is that the DVR is in the living room and that’s taking care of making sure there’s something good to watch on a Friday or Saturday when TV really gets lame.

This stuff is sort of there … The UPNP (Universal Plug and Play) standard is supposed to make devices play nicely so you can pass content around but it’s far from complete. Throw in DRM and you’ve got a nice mess with content purchased from online sources or rerecorded from premium channels. The only thing that semi-easily moves around your home network is content you’ve created yourself and that can be tricky as well if you don’t have the right kind of network – either wired or wireless.

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Ch… Ch… Changes

I realize I have not posted in a while for real and thought perhaps now over the long (perhaps for you) weekend might be a good chance.

There have been quite a few changes in my life recently… new job and trying to buy a house and on top of that a car or two.

First, the job… I started a few weeks ago which is the real reason for the lack of posting. I’ve been slammed and actually not on my usual pace with personal email and posting which is actually quite cool for me given the new level of professional intensity. I think I’d been craving something like this change for a long time and feel good that even in the early days that I’ve made the right choice. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m a marketing guy and I’ve found my way into one of (if not) the largest technology global accounts. I’m very pleased with this and while it does mean my using Apple systems for work are over (ahem) it’s really all very good. I’ve also retired the Treo 650 for now and am using a new Blackberry 7100T which is far better than I would have ever thought. I’ll come back to the tech in a bit.

The house… My wife and I had been trying to find where we might consider digging in for some time and we’ve committed as I have done with the job to the NY Metro market. This left a few options from a commutation perspective, but we settled on Westchester County and are in the process of closing on our first home. It’s crazy actually but wonderful at the same time. The place is quite a few times larger than our apartment (obviously) and has a great piece of property.

As a result of the new home we need to get at least one car, though really probably two so that I can get to and from the train each day without interrupting my wife and daughter’s sleep patterns. The job has me on overdrive in a good way for now, but it makes normal hours something I can’t quite yet commit to with any sort of reliability. Since I began I’ve been operating in always-on mode spending a great deal of face time with clients locally and most recently on the west coast. Heading back again next week and a few trips are already lining up in the next few weeks… I think you probably get the idea.

Back to the tech for a sec… While I still eat, sleep and breathe the tech, I had to make a switch I figured was coming on the handheld side. The blackberry is something I ad previously scoffed at being such a long term palm user, but man it rocks. The Treo can certainly do more as far as applications and media consumption, but as good as Chatter is (and it is) the email connection from Blackberry to Exchange can’t be touched. I spend a great deal of my day away from my desk, and while there is WiFi pretty much everywhere I need to go, the battery in my current machine can’t keep up for the length of time I spend in meetings. The Blackberry goes all day and well into the night allowing constant access to messages, meetings and to-dos with ease. The keyboard, while initially a bit awkward (it’s compressed if you have not seen it) is simple to use and remarkably quick to type. The recognition capabilities are amazing and new words, whether initials, product names or people all get picked up after the first time and so the predictable filtering is just killer. Seriously, I am amazed at how easy it is to use. My recognition is far better than it was on either the Treo 600 or Treo 650 which both use a full keyboard.

Everything syncs over the air… Add a new number to an Outlook contact, save it and it’s in the Blackberry. Get a new meeting notice; accept it and it’s in your calendar without the computer live and in real-time. Beyond the basics, you can see why the Palm gets a great deal of credit. The blackberry is not perfect, but if you keep the focus on work communications (or personal I suppose) it can’t be beat. No camera and no MMS… but the Messages function maintains a single point for all SMS and emails (up to 10 accounts) allows for filing through exchange or IMAP folders and even shows you your sent messages. I was not that into the sent being there, but now really like having confirmation that I’ve dealt with things all right there.

There will be much more to discuss as I can get to it. I am psyched that I am living the tech lifestyle in my personal and professional life and have access to amazing information about what is coming down the pike. I’ll have to play it safe with what can be discussed but when it can I’ll share. For now I am focused on digital home technologies as well as mobility on the consumer side as well as a full roster of things on the business side. Enjoy the rest of your weekend… I’ll be in the office tomorrow as the ride continues!

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Sony introduces the PlayStation 3

While the PS3 won’t be tying into a Media Center it still sounds like an amazingly capable system. The Cell Processor will be able to drive up to 2 HDTVs though from the article I can’t tell whether those are both able to be 1080p – though 1080p is not exactly widely available or affordable.

The PS3 will be fully “backward compatible,” playing all existing PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games. It will come equipped with a Blu-Ray DVD drive and support the sharpest format for HDTV, 1080p. [CNN]

Microsoft is going to have a serious advantage in timing if PS3 is really a year away. Not only will they have months in market, but they will be ready in time for the holiday rush.

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Tetris on the PSP?

While this only works on the Japanese ROM it’s a great sign of how the platform can be expanded.

Hot on the heels of the news that Sony’s UMD format has been hacked comes reports of a Game Boy emulator for the PSP. For those of you with North American PSPs and version 1.5 of the firmware, you’ll just have to look longingly across the sea at those who have a Japanese PSP running a version 1.0 ROM. PSP hacker Mr. MIRAKICHI is credited with the discovery. [Ars Technica]

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iPod vending machine



iPod vending machine

Originally uploaded by sbisson.


Very cool… Too bad you need to charge these units before you can really get much use from them.

I’d imagine the next step would be to include your .Mac ID and purchase some music as well – or perhaps a pre-filled iPod by genre.

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The Treo and Bluetooth

I can’t imagine I am alone in finding some frustration with the Treo 650 and the Bluetooth support. My device is unlocked so no carrier got to mess with what’s on the inside…. before you even ask.

I’ve had limited success utilizing dial-up networking. It works, though can take many connection attempts in order to get online with my PowerBook. My Sony Ericsson T610 simply worked.

Both bluetooth headsets I’ve tried – the Treo Headset and a Jabra BT200 have had mixed success. The Treo headset seems to function better (you’d hope right?) but still has quite a few flaws. The default behavior is for the headset, once paired, to receive all call activity. This is great if you want to always use the headset, but not so great if you just want to quickly answer the phone as it rings from the main unit. Transfers back and forth from headset to Treo have simply not worked for me. While I can pull a call from the headset back to the Treo using the Treo’s on-screen button within the Phone application, but I have never gotten a call patched back to the headset. An interesting (and sucky) twist with with this process is that once I’ve taken the call back to the Treo, I usually have to reconnect the headset (through pairing or a power-cycle) in order to get calls back to the headset.

Answering calls has been OK… but not great. Even when I think the devices are paired and choose to answer a call using the Treo, rather than the button on the headset, the call might still drop to the Treo making me feel like an idiot with two telephony devices on my head trying to figure out which one is active. Pressing the button on the headset does not always pick up the call so I am pretty stuck without a good solution at this point since I must use the Treo to answer the phone.

When I was using the SE T610, bluetooth seemed like a more natural extension of the phone. If I chose to answer the phone on my headset it was there and If I chose the phone it was there. If I wanted the call on my headset after answering the phone on my phone, I could just press the button on the headset for a second or two and pick it up.

Not sure what the deal is with the Treo…

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Verizon Wireless expands “IN” to messaging

Great news for Verizon customers… let’s hope other carriers follow. In network free calling already exists for all the majors making messaging a logical next step. Perhaps this is just what is needed in the US to push messaging (SMS and MMS) into the mainstream…

Verizon Wireless has expanded its popular “IN” calling plan (free calls to every other Verizon Wireless customer) to messaging. For $5 a month customers can have unlimited text, picture and video messaging to other Verizon Wireless users. A plan costing $39.99 or higher per month and 1 or 2 year contract is needed to sign up for Unlimited IN messaging. [ MobileTracker]

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First DVD/UMD package announced

Good news on the buying content front… one package, multiple formats.

Bandai Visual allows almost every PSP user to breathe a sigh of relief as they announce the release of the first DVD title to come packaged with a UMD of the same contents. Or at least I was relieved…

“Eureka Project” (sorry, didn’t bother looking up the English name) is the anime series that will be available in this dual media package beginning in July (in Japan).

As with anything related to UMD-Video, however, the price point becomes key. Put your fears to rest, though, as the version including a UMD-Video costs only 1,200 yen more (about $12 USD) than the version without. As our recent poll results show, this $12 figure is well in the price range of a large portion of PSP owners/future owners. [PSP-Vault]

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‘Sesame Street’ by Cellphone

This is not the vidcasting I discussed last week, but it’s certainly a nod in the right direction and with content positioned for a target I suggested would be an easy one to reach… parents.

On the French Riviera last week, television executives from around the world crowded into a mobile television seminar to gaze at a giant screen view of the late Ray Charles serenading Ernie of Sesame Street from the frame of a mobile phone.

J. Paul Marcum, Sesame Street’s general manager for its interactive group, came to the annual MIPTV international television conference in Cannes as part of a vanguard of producers to trade information about a format so new that no one is sure how business models will evolve.

Sesame Street, he said, is one of the first children’s entertainment companies to start offering phone fare, through an alliance struck in March with Verizon in the United States to offer some of its classics through a $15-a-month wireless broadband service called V Cast.

“It’s certainly not like we’re advocating selling phones to preschoolers,” Mr. Marcum said. “But you can’t ignore the convenience factor when people are in motion. A parent can pass back a telephone to the kids in the back of the car. And it’s a device that families are going to carry with them everywhere.” [NYT]

I can’t speak to the quality of the VCast service having no experience with it as a Cingular customer, but my wife got a Sesame Street demo from one of the doormen in our building who has the service and she noted how compelling it was.

Cingular does offer MobiTV, but of course not for the Treo… or my wife’s new phone so I guess we won’t be sampling this first-hand anytime soon. For us, it’s actually easier and quicker to create either segments or full programs and movies from our digitized library. The immediacy and reliability of content saved locally is a key point missed my offering streaming only access… especially since the networks are still being deployed – even if I can hear you now, there might not be EV-DO service handy. Queue time can be killer when you need something like this and what if it skips or even worse you run out of range…

Vidcasting is really the way to go. I can easily carry several episodes or movies on an SD card and hand a Palm device (hmmm… actually I have quite a few laying around) running The Core Media Player or even a PSP. Of course now the trick becomes do I really want my child handling my gadgets? The cheap portable DVD player we have seems more likely to sustain the abuse, though prices will continue to drop on Palm and other multimedia capable units.

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Profiles for Palm OS

Profiles is a very cool app for your Treo (or any other Palm device) which lets you define settings and the appropriate options you might like to control. You can set sound levels, screen brightness, your radio and even the color scheme. I’ve just gone through and defined an indoor, outdoor, nighttime reading and meeting mode for my Treo. It’s free and very small. You’ll find it in your preferences after you install which is actually the only bummer as you can’t easily launch it in order to quickly switch modes. Though you can actually utilize your datebook or a simple time mode to switch profiles which is very cool.

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The Core Pocket Media Player

Tcmp-1

Treonauts gave an exciting review to the open source The Core Pocket Media Player (tcmp) for Palm OS today and I just gave it a quick whirl. It’s VERY cool. The UI is a touch rough and does not support the 5-way for browsing but it does work just fine during playback for volume and stop / play. That’s minor though… the video playback quality is excellent!!

The best part as noted by Andrew is that you don’t have to convert anything to MP4 or use Kinoma to convert for use on your device. You can use pretty much whatever file you happen to have ready to watch which is enormously helpful considering conversion time is a killer on ease of use. The screen shot above is a 131.4MB DIVX AVI file encoded at 512 x384 with MP3 sound. I noticed a few skips, but sound is in sync which can be the trickiest bit to nail down.

tmcp is up to v. 0.63, but it’s very solid. If you have 1MB to spare on your Palm OS device and want to be able to watch video while on the go, this is a great option and it seems to just be the beginning…

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Amazon acquires Mobipocket

According to BizJournals, Amazon has just acquired Mobipocket:

Franklin Electronic Publishers Inc. sold its shares in a French software company to Amazon.com Inc. and retired 29 percent of its outstanding preferred stock.

The Burlington City, N.J., publisher of electronic books sold its 16,765 ordinary shares in MobiPocket.com SA to Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) in connection with Amazon’s purchase of all MobiPocket’s outstanding shares.

I’ve read much more through eReader on my Palms, but I suppose those days are numbered with Amazon in the game.

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H2G2

The BBC has produced a mobile Hitchhiker’s Guide… H2G2. Works great on my Treo and I would imagine it works great on pretty much any connected device.

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Might I borrow a cup of bandwidth please? I’m baking a wireless array!

I, Cringely’s latest column, A Cup of Bandwidth is very cool. He describes how he created an wireless array borrowing 3 wi-fi connections from neighbors (who knew) and the use of Sveasoft’s firmware for the linksys WRT54G routers he owns. If nothing else it’s pretty cool.

I decided to conduct an experiment, seeing how I could create an inherently reliable wireless Internet service through the use of multiple unreliable wireless Internet connections. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME (unless you want to). Remember, I am a professional.

If I was going to be serious about this borrowing a cup of Internet, then I’d need multiple connections — something that is harder to do than you might guess. Most computers, for example, are connected to only one network at a time. It isn’t so much the fact that there can’t be multiple active connections, but that some of the housekeeping issues like DNS and SMTP servers get complex.

My home office is on the third floor under a mansard tin roof. I’m amazed that my neighbors’ wireless signals can even get through to me but they do, though weakly. If I was going to reach out and touch a bunch of strangers, I’d need an external high-gain antenna — probably several of them.

So I climbed out the window and found a place to attach a vertical length of pipe, atop of which I mounted three 8 dB patch antennas I had sitting around from my earlier experiment in aerial WiFi. The patches were clamped to the pipe, one atop another. I chose to use three because that would give me one each for channels 1, 6, and 11, giving maximal legal coverage.

It would be great if you could just plug three WiFi adapter cards into your PC, remove the pigtail antennas and attach a length of LMR400 cable, but I don’t think it would work. Instead, I used three Linksys WRT54G 802.11g routers, re-flashed with Sveasoft firmware. My plan was to use each router as an Ethernet-to-Ethernet bridge, but actually acting as a client. An easier technique would be to use any of a number of WiFi gaming adapters, but I already had the WRT54Gs and figured that having the ability to increase their power might come in handy.

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VOD / VidCasting

I think it’s time for broadcasters to consider VOD through VidCasting (aka podcasting). I know that recently Cringely described his vision for how his employer PBS would be able to offer an on demand selection of 10,0000 titles. I agree though don’t know it needs to be built entirely through affiliate stations though that might help defray some distribution / bandwidth costs.

While PBS certainly has a nice selection of content, much of it would not be watched yet… as much as I believe in the Long Tail. Yes that’s a key point of the Long Tail notion, but I think initially we’ll need to see some popular downloads and availability in addition to simply providing deep catalog access.

There are a few key audiences for this… Business Travelers, Technology Early Adopters, and Parents with young kids. I think the last group (of which I am a part) is actually the most important for mass adoption. You’ll always have the first two groups buy in at some level for new technologies, either “because they can” or because it makes travel easier and more fun. Parents though have different needs and making content available and portable would be a fantastic opportunity.

In many way ways children programming is ideal for on-demand options as well as portable players. If you’ve watched any program recently, you’ve probably noticed that there are few if any commercials (perhaps a sponsor spot at the beginning and end and then just pure 20+ minutes of programming. Noggin does a great job packaging their shows in this way and even includes a few “extras” to fill the half-hour slot with a song or activity (not a commercial) making it pretty likely that even in the age of the DVR you don’t really fast forward that much as their is not much to skip.

We’ve noticed already how Hannah (our just about 17 month old daughter) understands that things can be queued on demand from the DVR or from our DVD archive. She totally gets that we can rewind or fast forward to a favorite song with Barney and Blue or skip over a part on Sesame Street. Hannah actually asks that we skip or rewind… Growing up, we did not have a VCR when I was Hannah’s age, let alone cable TV. All that came later… kids today have very different expectations for how their edutainment is delivered…

In my perfect world, the content would be available to either come directly to a DVR or a computer in my choice of format so that it could be taken on the road for family car trips (always an adventure). I see DRM-Free MPEG-2 coming through my cable box (much more than is currently available through the on-demand selection of Time Warner) and an option of formats (MPEG-2 or MPEG-4) for my computer so that shows could easily be taken on the road by portable DVD player or portable media player.

I think this could go through a podcasting (RSS with Enclosures) system, utilizing Bit Torrent to properly credit speed back to those households sharing back to make it easy and accessible for more people. You’d simply subscribe to a show and let RSS deliver the goods to your torrent system.

This does not have to be laden with DRM as there is currently not much of an illegal supply of kids programming online… There’s a reason for this. Parents don’t want to rip off the providers of good stuff for their kids. Make it available, make it easy. There’s no need for us to edit the commercials (as there are none), just deliver it in the current form.