It’s pretty unusual to have a conversation with someone on the train, but tonight I was engaged reagrding my Dell craptop of all things… We kept it brief and the guy sitting across from me was then more easily distrated by a woman across the aisle. Since that conversation ended, he’s been gesturing and making some pretty intense facial expressions as if he’s talking to someone down the train… of course no one else is actively conversing here, it’s a purely one way transaction.
Nikon 18-200mm Vibration Reduction Lens
The VR II feature enables significantly sharper handheld images at slower shutter speeds and in a wider range of lighting conditions than previous models. Equipped with the new lens, users can take pictures at shutter speeds up to four times slower than is possible with a non-VR lens.
I’ve been looking around at lenses for my new camera and this looks pretty interesting. Have to keep browsing for reviews…
Technorati Tags: D70S, Nikon, Lens, Photography
Amazon Rocks
It looks like Amazon has quietly rolled out a new feature called Digital Wallet that allows customers to stream full digital audio from albums they have pre-ordered. No word if the service will extend to all CDs purchased through the store, specifically CDs that are currently available, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.
Amazon Rocks – literally. This was something previously discussed as an idea for iTunes as well, though instead of a stream offer physical fulfillment so you get both instant gratification and control over future formats and playback.
Premium Distributed Content from Apple?
I’ve been thinking about the iPod 5G and the video capability in iTunes and the ITMS and considering the success announced this week believe that it’s quite possible for things to accelerate much more rapidly towards a new network model.
If you think about the manner in which you subscribe to a podcast and apply that to a TV show, you can probably agree that it’s easy to see offering beyond the single pricing for programs. If you add in the rest of the networks and possibly some cable access (Comedy Central) – even consider shows from premium networks like HBO and you can see a pretty intense disruption to how we collectively understand how TV works.
The current iPod supports a doubling of the current 320×240 resolution, which is great, but not ideal yet for true home watching. It’s even better for portable viewing, but that’s about it for now. Perhaps what’s missing is some additional networking capabilities within iTunes… like Bit Torrent. As you enable a richer level of subscription content, it’s quite likely that the economics of delivering the materials could change considerably. Let’s not forget that there’s more than just licensing to deal with here and in fact the bandwidth required to deliver high resolution content on a mass level could be quite considerable. Assume Apple can nail this piece – if not Bit Torrent for political sensitivities, than perhaps Kontiki or some other more acceptable private version of P2P. I don’t want to understate the shift this would create with how iTunes works, but it could be a very good thing to consider.
If Apple cut deals with quite a few networks for content – even movies, you would not need a cable or satellite box to bring you programming you like. I’m hopeful that when the day comes, we’ll see something similar to how HBO on-demand works which is that if you choose to watch on the day, you can, but if you want the on-demand option (not recorded from DVR) you have to wait 24 hours. This is quite reasonable to me and matches how ABC is offering their shows to Apple now.
You would still probably keep traditional viewing going for “appointment TV.” Things like sports, and special live events are prime candidates, though streaming is an option as well especially as our network access speeds increase…If you still retain the basic options through your cable or satellite provider, you’ll need to pay more just for the right to have that option, unless you switch over to antenna viewing.
At $1.99 per video how much would your subscription run with Apple? Well, if I look at my own viewing habits… I watch (or try) to watch about 7-10 shows a week. It’s pretty hard currently to keep up with my DVR actually and I usually watch a few in succession on Friday or Saturday night. We record a few more shows for my wife and daughter so if I add it all up we probably consume closer to about 15 shows a week. That’s about 30 bucks a week to Apple if we could subscribe on a per show basis and 120 bucks a month which is WAY more than I currently pay for cable and for considerably fewr channels. Let’s not forgot as well that this is the current pricing for low res material and that the cost for high res (not even high def) would be more.
Clearly there are some economic issues that quickly add up with per show pricing. Admittedly I don’t have the solution here…
I do however see a future through iTunes with Front Row and what else might be planned here. Any subscribed video would be available through Front Row and as we already know this runs on machines beyond the current iMac so a small form factor box like our friend the Mac Mini makes an excellent future candidate for the living room. I’m sure though this type of machine gets even more capable when the switch to Intel takes place. Intel already has reference platforms of this size and has shown their Viiv technology running on them. Imagine the enhanced capabilities with a more powerful processor, digital audio and surround capabilities. Enhanced transcoding capabilities (PDF) will make transfer to portable devices like the iPod or multi-room viewing very attractive and allow for higher resolution content to delivered to a larger screen (whether TV or computer).
As we step beyond single show downloads towards subscription models through syndication and P2P, TV and of course the Long Tail content we already download becomes an extremely viable source of programming through non-traditional sources. On-demand services are just beginning to deliver and will hopefully continue to grow rapidly to meet the pent up demand.
Update – I was just checking in with Memorandum and see that News.com has a piece on this worth a read.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Marketing, P2P, TV, Intel, dual core, transcode, Front Row, Kontiki, Bit Torrent, Viiv, Intel
Apple sells 1 Million Videos
“Selling 1 million videos in less than 20 days strongly suggests that there is a market for legal video downloads,” Jobs said. “Our next challenge is to broaden our content offerings so that customers can enjoy watching more videos on their computers and new iPods.”
Not quite the 4 days it took for music sales to reach 1 Million, but still quite impressive. I’d say there is a legitimate desire for video and that people are definitely comfortable on the small screen.
Invasion of the Ladybugs
So I have no idea what’s going on today, but we’ve been officially invaded by Ladybugs. There are tons of them all over…
The morning was frosty, but it got up near 70 during the day and literally hundreds (perhaps more) ladybugs appeared all over the house, baking in the sun and climbing all around.
Technorati Tags: ladybugs, Westchester, Katonah
MCE vs. TiVo??
Thomas Hawk pointed me to an interesting piece written by Alex Raiano at the TiVo Blog comparing MCE to TiVo.
First, thanks for blogging on TiVo (Alex specifically), but what the hell are you thinking with this? MCE certainly has a DVR (at least in systems that ship with TV tuners), but it’s about much more. You only do one thing! While it can be argued you do it very well, the MCE value proposition is clearly about more than just the recording of TV.
Perhaps the MS marketing department needs to be reminded that while TV is easy to grok, there are also Photos, Music, Videos (your own) and the Online Spotlight which can deliver quite a bit of additional content. Only the MS bloggers seem to actively promote this. I think actually even with 2 tuners inside MCE loses the battle on a purely DVR front since it really just comes down to money.
A $1,200 DVR is out of the question for most people. I completely agree. In fact while I could probably swing a $1000 DVR, I find it’s ridiculous to even consider when I can get a dual-tuner HDTV capable recorder for 10 bucks a month from my cable company. MCE does not even record HDTV. OTA HDTV is not good enough… I need to record premium stations like HBO, not just NBC.
Thomas immediately brings up many of the advanced features power users enjoy from a richer platform like MCE which Tivo does not even try to deal with from a feature perspective. Sure you can network your Tivo, and add additional features to it, but this is beyond the main base purpose and I believe well beyond the capabilities of most owners.
MCE gets weaker as you expand out since while it is a jack of all trades, it really (and unfortunately) is a master of none. While a fully functioning PC underneath the MCE interface is attractive
to some people, this hurts you. A PC has issues like malware, viruses
and of course device drivers and conflicts.
Tivo is probably best as an ingredient within another platform at this point – Apple Front Row perhaps?
In the end other than the DVR, which is the purpose of TiVo and a single feature of MCE, is the only comparable detail. If you look purely at that TiVo clearly wins on price and picture quality, but MCE has two tuners or more in some addvanced systems.
MCE actually makes the market more complex since while a DVR is in there, it’s about selling PCs. Speaking of which, when you get to the bunddling issue as Alex addresses … many people are starting to buy MCE devices because the software is in there, though I also wonder how much use they get from the full set of capabilities.
I started this with a point, which I think I’ve lost… Comparing the two things is a slippery slope for both sides. If I worked for MS on MCE, I would work pretty damn hard to simplify the experience so that there was a more mass appeal. Telegraph the benefits on a higher level and let the advanced users (your existing market) take care of sharing the benefits with each other – which happens today through community sites and enthusiastic bloggers. Tivo – get cracking on some bundling and adding multiple HD tuners… next year is getting closer, but how much will that cable-card capable box really cost? If around 1000 bucks, MCE creeps into mind pretty significantly.
Technorati Tags: MediaCenter, FrontRow, Tivo, DVR, marketing
Mobile Bloglines Enhancements
Do you often find yourself reading Bloglines on your mobile phone with too many feeds and too little time? Well, we’ve got great news. No, we’re not selling you gecko lizard insurance. But we have made it easy for you to create an abbreviated mobile version of your feed list so you don’t have to scroll past dozens of feeds to get to those you have time to read.
To create your mobile feed list, click the Edit link while in the web version, check which subscriptions you want or don’t want displayed in your mobile view and then select your option in the dropdown menu. You can also change this setting by clicking on the Edit Subscription link while viewing any of your feeds.
Another useful option for dealing with a lot of subscriptions is to have Bloglines only display subscriptions that have unread articles. Click on your Account link and look under Feed Options for the setting to show only updated feeds. This applies to both web and mobile versions.
All good stuff… works great on the blackberry in transit.
Katonah Sunset
Right from my backyard dinner time tonight…
Digg gets financed
Congrats to Kevin Rose and team! I really like the Diggnation pod / vid cast and enjoy using the site as well. I’d describe it as Slashdot 2.0 (ala Web 2.0), and you’ll find a good mix of stories – though mainly tech.
Digg, a new San Francisco Internet start-up, seeks to rank news items by letting people choose which stories they like anywhere on the Web.And it just received $2.8 million in venture capital from some big-name investors, including Omidyar Network, the outfit led by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Greylock partners.
MercuryNews.com | 10/28/2005 | Tagging the news you want to use
Technorati Tags: Digg, Venture Finance, Marketing, Social Bookmarking, Kevin Rose
Nano returns!
My Nano returned today from Apple which is most excellent as I was seriously missing my commuting partner. Apple replaced my previous model with a brand new replacement — certainly the right move in my book. I was actually suprised by the DHL delivery which just arrived as I was not expecting things until Monday at the earliest. I guess Apple allowed for Saturday delivery, which also is great in my book!
College Life, Powered by Google
You spend your life dealing with information. A lot of it is academic, a lot more is personal, it all matters, and you can probably use better tools for handling it effectively. On this page, we’d like to introduce you to a few of them.
College life, powered by Google
This is just a smart thing to do. Not that college kids don’t know about Google, but this page does a nice concise job positioning some solid tools.
Proprietary web applications kill openess and standards development
At work, I use Flock like I do at home and before Flock I was using Firefox since I have a basic disdain for IE. This is fine for my basic needs, but frequently – and I mean frequently I am forced to switch over the IE in order to use our world-wide extranet which is based on SharePoint.
It’s not worth reading a rant on SharePoint (I can assure you it would be long) but what I don’t get – is why (for legitimate reasons) I need to use IE. If this is the era of Web 2.0 the browser of your choise (assuming it supports standards) should be more than acceptable for any mission you choose. Instead, what I find is that browsers do not work, or don’t work well with quite a few sites.
CNet recently ran a story talking about job seekers running into company job application sites which won’t work on the Mac, again based on only working on Windows IE. This would not only frustrate me (I ran into this myself in my last round of job seeking), but I just find it ignorant more than anything.
To me, and I’m not a developer, this is just laziness. If I choose to login to my company webmail from home on one on my Macs, I have to enter my credentials at least 3 times sometimes 4 to have them accepted by Exchange. If I use IE for Mac, it works on the first time. Our time entry system is the same thing… if you use anything but IE, you don’t even see some of the menus – assuming you can successfully login.
I’m certainly not switching to IE for my main use, but find that I run it as if it’s Word or Excel in order to access certain things… instead of just opening another tab in my existing browser. Gotta love how this forces addditional system resources to be deployed for a rather limited purpose. I’d yet to run the task manager to compare, my dell crap-top certainly feels the pain when I start opening a second browser adding to it’s burden of trying to keep up with me.
I’d love to boycott systems and companies that force this type of usage, but instead it’s the developing community that needs the wake up. This type of limiting work is a dead end in what should be the new, new world of Web 2.0. The browser is a conduit and with simple standards, it would be accessible to anyone. Let’s not mess that up more than we already have now.
Technorati Tags: Flock, IE, Firefox, Browsers, Standards, windows, Dell, Web 2.0, Sharepoint, Mac, Exchange
Viagra iPod Spam
Simultaneously Releasing Movies
The idea of a movie being available on DVD or VOD the same day it’s released in a theater is very attractive to me. There have been plenty of times in the past few years when I was not able to get to a movie for whatever reason and have simply waited for Netflix or my cable VOD service to get access…
With a simultaneous release (even at a higher price for non-theater viewing) I’d be able to enjoy the same film, on my terms. This is a great addition to the Home Theater experience, or the HTPC experience if delivered over IP.
Clearly the plans being developed by Mark Cuban, Morgan Freeman’s Clickstar and now the Independent Film Channel are cause for some controversy:
In an interview before his speech, Shyamalan said he planned to ask theater owners at ShowEast’s Final Night Banquet and Award Ceremony “for zero tolerance on this — to say, ‘If you’re gonna release a movie in another medium, then you’re not going to get into our theaters’ — because at the end of the day, they hold all the cards.”
Shyamalan: Day-and-date ‘life or death to me’
I really hope it does not come to this and that perhaps as a consession, the DVD release is pushed. On-Demand though would really make things considerably more available. Please charge more money…I’d definitely pay for the convenience.
Technorati Tags: movies, marketing, Mark Cuban, Clickstar, DVD, VOD
On Aperture
I mostly run it on my 15-inch PowerBook. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the refreshing wind-blowing-through-my-hair feeling when I sit down in front of a G5 running Aperture. But a PowerBook is fine for what a lot of photographers do in the field with their laptops: browse images quickly and step through the thumbnails. Maybe tag the images they like, maybe zoom in closely on one. The photo edit stage. For that, a PowerBook does take a speed hit, but it’s totally usable.This is where our scheme of loading a proxy image comes in — the 1024 proxy is often all I need to see at this stage. Depending on how many megabytes each image is, Aperture on a G5 can load the full Raw image in less than a second. On my PowerBook, that same image may take three to four seconds to load fully.
creativepro.com – Stripping Raw Naked
I am so pumped to give this application a try and now that it should run reasonably well on my powerbook I am even more excited. From what I can tell, Aperture will be my ideal application for photo management and editing. I don’t have too many needs on the compositing side of life and Aperture seems to leave that work for Photoshop.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Aperture, RAW, Nikon, Photography, Software
Can Adult Content drive adoption of yet another consumer technology?
Matt Goyer reports on a adult VOD service available for MCE users … It worked for VHS and DVD.
Technorati Tags: Porn, Marketing, technology, DVD, VHS
Riya – Facial Recognition
Riya looks like it will be a killer, killer application for digital image management. What is it? A facial recognition system for your pictures that lets you tag things (people, place etc) and it seems to learn based on what you input so you can get a very serious read on who and what is in your pics.
Since I was not exactly diligent in tagging my roughly 6000 (and growing) photos since purchasing my first digital camera pre-2000, I’ve got quite a bit of work to do if I want to find anything that’s lurking within. Riya looks like it could be the answer.
What I really like (having yet to test it) is that it looks like you can import photos and info from MANY sources so you can maximize the tag value. I’ve already emailed and gotten a reply (nice!) that iPhoto support is on the list…
Technorati Tags: Riya, Photos, Tags, facial recognition
Akismet
Installed!
Automattic Kismet (Akismet for
short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a
non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry
about spam again.
Stop Comment Spam and Trackback Spam « Akismet
Technorati Tags: spam, wordpress, automattic, trackback
Flickr Prints!
Finally!!!
Flickr has implemented printing on an official basis — if you are in the US. For now, you can order prints and have them fulfilled through Target. You can either pick them up the store or have them delivered to your home.
The best part is that you can control who can order prints based on your contacts. My family and friends can finally get off my back on why I use Flickr when they can’t order any pics.
Technorati Tags: Flickr, Prints, Sharing, Photography, Family, Target