Ladies and gentlemen, A List Apart 3.0. The magazine has been redesigned from front to back. It features three XML feeds and three new articles by three of our favorite writers: Joe Clark on Facts and Opinion About Fahrner Image Replacement; Douglas Bowman on Sliding Doors of CSS; Dan Benjamin on Random Image Rotation. Much more. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]
Catching Up With The Connectors
Meet the hypernetworked nodes who secretly run the world. By Jeff Howe from Wired magazine. [Wired News]
This is a cool article from the latest issue…
Sony to ship PSX for $750
Just I need… a third DVR and a second PS2! Recordable DVD is very attractive…
Sony will offer its PSX PlayStation-cum-personal video recorder for under $800, the consumer electronics giant said yesterday.
Two models will ship later this year in Japan, one with a 160GB hard drive, the other with 250GB of hard disk storage – the latter enough to hold 13 and a half days’ worth of TV programming, and both larger than the 120GB capacity originally planned for the machine. As yet Sony has not said which of these will be offered to overseas markets – or when.
The Japanese models – dubbed the DESR-5000 and DESR-7000, respectively – will be priced at a US equivalent of $750 and $907. In addition to TiVO-style features, the machines contain PlayStation 2, which also provides PlayStation 1 compatibility.
Programmes recorded on the hard drive can be transferred to DVD using the machines’ built in DVD-R/RW drive. A DVD+RW version will be coming further down the line, Sony said. Current machines also provide a Memory Stick slot and a USB port for peripherals. [The Register]
How to beat the 419 scammers
Some of us are all too familiar with those emails in which an alleged former dignitary of the Nigerian government proposes to set up a bank account where millions of dollars – often a fallen dictator’s ill-gained fortune – can be kept safely. In return, you’ll get a percentage of the stash.
Most people laugh at these pleas. Some read them out loud at parties. At least a half a dozen web scam bait sites poke fun at these get-rich-quick schemes, and engage in often hilarious dialogues with the scamsters.
Regrettably, victims fork over enough money to sustain an industry that ranks in Nigeria’s Top five. Officials estimate that Britons alone lose £150 million a year to such frauds. Globally, experts put the annual take at a staggering $1.5 billion, money that is often used to finance heroin smuggling and other criminal activities. [The Register]
Get Unwired…
Intel launched their database for WiFi Hot Spots… looks pretty good
Digital TV Ain’t Gonna Be Free.
Reuters: Digital TV Ain’t Gonna Be Free. I think this article is actually optimistic; if the broadcast flag passes, you just won’t be able to record HDTV at all, because products that meet the robustness requirements would be so crippled they’d be unprofitable. [Hack the Planet]
The trick will be to get a set-top with HD-DVR capabilities and built-in DVD recording. Assuming they are allowed. I am currently experimenting… trying to capture video from my Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000… so far no dice. Just discovered it’s encrypted… even if I could reach it I would not be able to read it.
More on Digital TV from Werbach…
I don’t know where to start. The idea that digital TV adoption has been slow because of piracy fears is just plain silly. If we’d had the broadcast flag earlier, people would have rushed out to buy multi-thousand dollar sets so they could watch two or three channels of digital programming (which most cable operators just started offering in the last year)? Spare me. And the comment about new technology always being non-backward-compatible is a bad joke. It’s instructive that this is the attitude. Users shouldn’t expect that consumer electronics products they buy will work; the content industry reserves the right to blow them if it feels threatened. Ain’t progress grand?
[Werblog]
Web Sites: Now, Built for Leads
Lead generation is edging out e-commerce as the raison d’etre of corporate Web sites, according to a survey by analytics provider WebTrends. Marketers, meanwhile, are taking over control of that Web site from the IT department. But as the mantle of power shifts from IT to Marketing, it’s up to marketers to optimize the site and to turn visitors into customers. [CyberAtlas]
Longhorn delay has Windows users considering OS X
Microsoft Watch has posted a number of e-mails from readers who say they are considering switching to Mac OS X due to the delay of Longhorn, Microsoft’s next major version of Windows… [MacMinute]
Amazing what can happen when you take advantage of user error…
Fumbling fingers drive VeriSign traffic surge
The company soars into the top 50 most visited U.S. Internet properties in September, a substantial improvement from its 135th ranking the previous month, according to a report. [CNET News.com]
Treo 600 reviews roundup
As promised, here’s a roundup of all the reviews we could find of the new Treo 600 … [Gizmodo]
I just held one here at the office and it is a veery impressive unit. Smaller than my Tungsten C which was surprising. Totally want one!!
Buck a Song, or Buccaneer?
Now that it is open to Windows customers, Apple’s iTunes Music Store will spell doom for file-sharing networks — at least, that’s how Apple tells it. Others are more skeptical. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]
AOL’s Mystro PVR brewing
Earlier this year, the New York Times carried an article about AOL/Time Warner’s plans to enter the PVR market, both with the DVR box for Time Warner customers, and with a new service called MystroTV.
A few months later, details about the Mystro service began to leak out. It may be pay per view video-on-demand plus Television DVR functionality in addition to broadcast TV on demand. That last one’s a new feature. Imagine a system with every major network show from the past few days stored on your box and ready to go at the touch of a button. It’d be like having the ability to TiVo everything over a shorter time frame.
Whatever Mystro may turn out to be, it sounds like the wheels are in motion. Time Warner is advertising a few openings on the Mystro marketing and development team as they gear up for test marketing in Green Bay.
It’ll be interesting to see what a huge company that owns multiple channels, the largest internet service provider on earth, music labels, and studio assets can do with a magical box sitting in your living room.
[PVRblog]
I also picked up on the NYT story when it ran… I wonder what they will do with this box. The Explorer 8000 box is rolling out pretty strong now as a Time Warner Cable device and service, but how will the MystroTV box compete? If it’s the way cable modem service is sold, you can expect to choose the Mystro option or the TWC (Explorer 8000) when selecting your service. I hope that the additional features like email and web surfing become available to both boxes. You know just to have… I like the idea of connectivity options.
TiVo Out, Scientific Atlanta new PVR king
With all the hoopla around TiVO, many might have overlooked this little bit of information!
Scientific-Atlanta shipped 387 thousand Explorer 8000 home entertainment servers in the fiscal year 2003, including 158 thousand in the fourth quarter.
That is more than total DvRs shipped by TiVo and others combined. Explorer 8000 does all sorts of neat thing including email, web-surfing and of course digital video recording. Scientific Atlanta has 13 percent of the total market, after Echostar and Tivo, according to new Red Herring.
It would be nice if those things the box can do would be turned on by Time Warner Cable here in NYC…
‘Metrosexuals’ Just Good Old Gentlemen
Razor Magazine Publisher Richard Botto, in perhaps one of the best comments on the current “metrosexual” craze, sets the record straight and says a “metrosexual” is simply a new fangled term for what has always been known as a gentleman. [Adrants]
A New Way to Stream…
I discovered that I can stream my home iTunes music to myself while at work… I’ve previously mentioned the SliMP3 which I still love and use both at home and on the go, but today I discovered I can stream my existing iTunes library.
A bit about the home setup…Our home iMac is set up to handle some sharing tasks so I can serve the occasional web page and share the external firewire drives we have connected. That connects over Airport which is then connected to a Linksys router. Our net connection is a cable modem.
There are two users on the iMac (me and my wife) and I set up a symbolic link from the usual location for iTunes music – ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music to an external Firewire drive. This allows each user to import music and for the other to automatically see that new music when iTunes is open on either account. There did not seem to be a way for this to work any other way. We have way too much music for me to carry it around on my laptop so I have a copy of the iTunes Library on my PowerBook which also refers back to the external firewire drive. This allows me to mount the home machine and drives and have access to stuff when I want on my laptop. It also allows my iPod to sync over the home network, something I rarely do since it takes much longer that simply connecting to the home computer.
Anyway…quite a bit of background to get to today. I used AFP (Apple File Protocol) to connect to my home system. I use a dynamic dns service (no-ip.org) which makes this easier that having to recall what your IP number is assuming it changes. Once the usual drives are connected I can open use my iTunes library as I would normally expect to… all my music is available and can easily stream.
Not sure why I did not try this earlier… it totally works! There is the occasional hiccup as to be expected in any streaming situation, but for the most part completely enables my music on the go.
Zinio rocks
“Zinio makes money through three different sources, and really only two of them matter,” explains Bruce. “Primarily our money comes from deliveries. Every time we send a copy of BusinessWeek or whatever, we get a fee for that. That’s our primary business. Our secondary business, which will become much more important over time, is revenue from sourcing new subscriptions. We bring a new subscriber, and we get some remit on a percentage of the subscription.”
Bruce adds that the company also has production services, wherein it charges a basic price to convert the magazine to the digital format. “We add all the enhancements such as links and rich media,” he says. “We just charge to cover our cost for that, though, and the fees are very low.”
Because of the two main ways Zinio makes money, its four-person marketing department (out of a total staff of 45) has a dual role. “We’re pretty neutral on how strong our brand is or isn’t with the consumer, because they’re buying the publisher’s brand,” Bruce explains. “It only becomes important for them to know the Zinio brand when they’re using the software or getting customer service. On the other hand, making Zinio a known place to get digital magazines is important. Ultimately, our brand is an agent, and whatever helps more people read more digital magazines is the right answer.”
I rediscovered Zinio right before getting my new computer and think it really is a great way to read many magazines if you already like reading on your computer screen.
Big problems with the Treo 600?
Rumors continue to spread that there is a serious bug with the GSM version of the Treo 600 (at least in the US) and that it could be as late as early December before they become available. No one seems to know precisely what’s really going on. Meanwhile, Sprint’s CDMA version of the Treo 600 (pictured at right) has been out for almost a couple of weeks now, prompting a few people to suggest some sort of sinister conspiracy between Handspring and Sprint to get people to switch carriers just to get their hands on the new Treo. Which is just crazy. Read… [Gizmodo]
The Pending Wallet Phone
i-mode is currently the world’s most popular platform for mobile Internet and e-mail. Launched in February 1999 in Japan, it currently has a subscriber base of nearly 40 million.
Outlining the aim of the wallet phone, Mr Hisashi Hamada of the company told Business Line that using this, a subscriber of i-mode services could “consolidate all his smart cards that he carries in his wallet such as credit cards, club membership cards or bus/train passes into a single chip in the mobile phone.”
Explaining its features, Mr Hamada said: “The smart card details such as club membership cards or credit cards of a subscriber of I-mode service are first embedded and stored on an IC chip on the mobile phone.’ [The Hindu Business Line]
Palm Releases WebPro Update and Sale
Palm has released a update to the WebPro browser, that ships with the Tungsten T3. The update makes a number of fixes and speeds up performance. Palm is also now selling a stand alone version of the browser for other handhelds. [PalmInfocenter]
Since the download was there I tried to install on my Tungsten C… no dice. It says I am not authorized to run the program which sucks. This seems like a much more robust browser than the one that came with my device but no way is it worth $34.99.
Seems ridiculous that Palm is releasing versions of software for certain Tungsten devices and not making this stuff more generally available for existing users of certainly compatible units.
Replacing the Checkout Line
Yet the Shopping Buddy does far more than ring up purchases. You can use its touch screen to order items from the supermarket deli; when your pastrami’s ready, the computer tells you to go pick it up. The Shopping Buddy automatically displays which aisle you’re in, what’s on sale there, and what you bought the last time you strolled through. If you can’t find an item, punch in its name on the touch screen and the Shopping Buddy will point you to the correct aisle. It’ll even display a “you are here” map that tracks you through the store like a homing device from a James Bond film. [Boston.com]