January 31, 2003
Holy smoke: Brobeck shuts down
Holy smoke: Brobeck shuts down
Good God, the 1,100-lawyer, 77-year-old firm of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, the scion of Bay Area law firms, has decided to shut down. This is a firm that represented a huge proportion of high tech companies in one way or another. I wonder if there is some hidden liability concern here. After all, times are slow for corporate work, but not that slow.
Said one of the lawyers: "I guess I'll go to Thailand and live on $200 a month" Suffice to say: That's not the last thing I'd want to hear from my lawyer.
No surprises with these IPO...
No surprises with these IPO shares
Frank Quattrone, one of the symbols of the Net bubble, will face civil charges from the National Association of Securities Dealers relating to how he doled out IPO shares to buy influence with companies, bankers and investors. Having taken the same tests Mr. Quattrone did to get a securities license, it is hard to imagine that he was unaware of the preferential treatment he was using to win business -- the NASD beats it into your head before you get your Series 7.
Never underestimate Steve Case
Never underestimate Steve Case
Dave Winer has a great piece on AOL, with the unforgettable double entendre: "AOL was the finger in the dyke of the Internet." That's one confused little Dutch boy (not you, Dave, but "dike" is the modern usage and "dyke" is currently usually used as a slang term for something else entirely).
But, more importantly, Dave's right about AOL not getting the Net. What it did get, and that was much more important to its success, was that it knew and knows it needs to be a media company.
At a party last week I met the former CEO of The Well, Maria Alioto. We talked about her experience. A total parallel to AOL. Good start, probably was necessary for the Web to get going. The core of the West Coast Web. The meeting place for the future staff of Wired and EFF. All good things. But in the mid-90s when she came on, it had no future. As AOL had no future when Time-Warner was snookered into taking their stock.
Moral of the story: Never underestimate Steve Case.
Second moral: He's like Columbo, he makes it easy for you to underestimate him.
Folks, AOL has never been about the Net. It has been about being as easy-as-TV to use and that's it. A huge portion of its users are 40+, too old to "get" the rawness of the Net, but drawn to the ease of communication provided by the Net.
We hate TV, when there's...
We hate TV, when there's other stuff on
The UCLA Center for Communication Policy has released a survey that shows Net users continue to watch less TV, that the decline in television consumption increases the longer one uses the Net, and that only TV suffers. Reading and listening in other forms is virtually unaffected by Net use.
Of those surveyed, 60.5 percent said they considered it an important or extremely important source of information -- ranking ahead of television, radio, newspapers and magazines.
But Americans regard Internet content more skeptically than what they read or hear from traditional media outlets. They've grown more critical of online content, over time. And today, one of three Internet users say they trust only half of what they read online, said Cole.
The Internet is most compelling as a communications tool. The survey found that e-mail and instant messaging remain the most popular activities -- far outstripping time spent browsing, reading news or conducting research for work or school.
Gawd, this is such a great indicator that with new kinds of programming in broadband, upstart producers can grab audiences and create communities. The report is chalk full of data goodness.
It was thus, ever and...
It was thus, ever and ever
Ian Glendinning blogs on my exchange with Dr. Weinberger about philosopher Richard Rorty, point to Richard Barrett's work:
I've blogged several times "It was ever thus" and "Nothing new under the sun" over the years, most recently in connection with US Philosopher William Barrett.
Even more interestingly, Barrett makes the very point - in the concluding chapter "The Place of the Furies" of his "Irrational Man" - that recognising that it was ever thus is as old as philosophy itself, quoting Karl Jaspers, citing an anonymous 4000 year old Egyptian philosopher and Ortega y Gasset citing the Latin Poet Horace. Current issues always look more problematic than the problems of our ancestors, but they were always pretty much the same problems.
I haven't read much Barrett, but Ortega y Gasset has long been a favorite of mine. One can find all sorts of tools for dealing with new problems in history, if only you let go of the conceit that you're inventing everything. I tell my kids this all the time, when they are banging their heads against experience that is easily borrowed and improved upon.
We'd do well to recognize we are all children in the long run. Better than just being dead, because it leaves your whole life in front of you and millennia of history to parent you through it all.
Radio consolidation reconsidered, again
Radio consolidation reconsidered, again
Senator Russ Feingold (D - Wisc.) has reintroduced a bill calling for more oversight of radio mergers and to outlaw payola for airplay. This would go a long way to reducing the vast grey goo that is radio today -- it all sounds the same, wherever you go.
“If you don't have the money to play in this system, you are shut out,” he said during a hearing on radio consolidation held Thursday in Washington. Feingold also took aim at Clear Channel, the biggest radio owner, for its related live concert business. He blames Clear Channel’s consolidation of the concert promotion business with the 61% price increase in concert tickets in the past six years, and said the Justice Department should investigate.
Security insurance: Vendors' responsibility
Security insurance: Vendors' responsibility
Dan Farber says vendors should pay for the damage to customers' systems and business caused by security failures. That would certainly change the beta-first-get-it-right-later approach to software distribution today.
For those of you struggling...
For those of you struggling with metadata concepts
Phil Howard of Bloor Research has one of the most straightforward articles on the difference between data and metadata I've run across lately:
"...relational databases store tables which define entities. That is all they store. They also contain details about relationships that are defined by means of such things as foreign keys. However, these relationships are not explicitly stored in the database, which is why they are called relational, because that information is implicit.
When you are manipulating metadata, however, your needs are rather different and you do actually need to store relationships because you can have relationships between relationships (dependencies for example)."
Starbucks stops Net orders
Starbucks stops Net orders
Starbucks 6,000+ stores won't take phone and Web-based orders for drinks anymore. Simple explanation, if you ask me: We want fresh coffee -- that's the small luxury that keeps people going to Starbucks, even when times are tight. Ordering in advance raises the chance that the coffee you get will be the wrong temperature (how many times have you heard an order for an "extra hot latte"?) or bitter. No, people will stand a moment or two to get fresh, and happily so, because it is a legitimate pause in a busy day. And the pre-paid card speeds the line, which means more hanging around time. It's a simple thing that feels almost like community. For the first month of 2003, revenues were up 25 percent compared to a year earlier.
January 30, 2003
How does your newspaper site...
How does your newspaper site sleep?
"Staying relevant" is the big challenge, according to one newspaper site executive. This would be the challenge for all media, the problem any Net site has is what to do when the novelty of online delivery, a few Flash animations (which turn out to be a lot more expensive than management would like) and reader polls has worn off. WashingtonPost.com CEO is more down to earth, keeping his mind on managing ad inventory to maximize the value of his inventory.
The big trick is figuring out how to integrate what you do with text into new media -- audio and video, learning titles and so forth. The Post has been very good at taking past coverage to create briefings on current events, for example. But as digital communications replace the one-way analog bandwith we've grown up with, a news organization that doesn't also produce for what we might call "radio" or "TV" today is wasting cycles that could be turned into more inventory.
Tying broadband to voice services
Tying broadband to voice services
Broadband Reports.com writes that Baby Bells are forcing DSL customers to buy their voice services. This is the definition of monopoly behavior, a practice called "tying" that an incumbent carrier, whose wires run into the home, can use to hold customers hostage if they want broadband services. Another example why the telephone business should be allowed to fail fast instead of propped up by the FCC.
Japanese file-sharing site shut down
Japanese file-sharing site shut down
MMO Japan, which hosted a file-sharing directory, called File Rogue, was shut down by the Tokyo District Court on Wednesday. In addition to the Japanese Recording Industry Association, the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers filed for an injunction against File Rogue, as well.
Calandra: Disaster ahead
Calandra: Disaster ahead
Tom Calandra: Trading in and the price of small-cap stocks indicate the small investor, still heavily invested compared to earlier eras, are ready to head for the door. This is an interesting time, one when prices will wash out big time and, at some point -- I would never deign fit to say when before it happens (hindsight being 20/20 and all) -- at some point it will be a very good time to buy. But not now.
How small stocks trade says a lot about investors' hopes and fears. During good times, small companies represent all that is hopeful about an expanding economy. During bad times, they do their Jekyll & Hyde act, becoming ravaged as disgusted investors flee the small-company landscape.
The gap between the two is now closing, but it's the way the spread between big and small is closing that most interests Peter Kendall at Elliott Wave International. The shifting gains and losses of the U.S. market's smallest stocks are pointing to a likely rush to the exits by individual investors, Kendall said Thursday.
Don't forget your toothbrush
Don't forget your toothbrush
A survey by Taylor Nelson Sofres found that the toothbrush is the invention most people, adults and teens could not live without. Interent to note that younger people, however, chose PCs and mobile phones far more than adults did. Change takes generations.
IP and democracy don't always...
IP and democracy don't always go together
Dan Farber points me to an upcoming discussion of the myth of democracy spreading across open networks by authors Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor Boas:
Looking at China, Cuba, Singapore, Vietnam, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, they analyze Internet use by a range of political, economic, and social actors and examine its political impact. Their finding: the Internet is not necessarily a threat to authoritarian rule, especially in those countries where governments have been in charge of its development since the beginning.
Kalathil and Boas find that certain types of use do pose political challenges to authoritarian governments, which may contribute to future political change. Yet other uses actually reinforce authoritarian rule, and the leaders in some countries actively promote development of an Internet that serves state-defined interests rather than challenges them.
The authors will discuss their findings at an event aired LIVE on the web. Tune into www.ceip.org/live on Friday, January 31, 2003 at approximately 12:45 to listen. Audio also will be available on the web site after the event, along with excerpts and table of contents.
This is a really important point to keep in mind. As I've been ranting about the need for Americans to take up their voices, it might have been easy to mistake that as an endorsement of the idea that IP networks by their very nature are more democratic than broadcast media. They are not, unless the people using them are intent on increasing the range of discussion, including as many people and views as possible. People make democracies, not technology. The voting booth is not the reason we live in a free (albeit, less so all the time) country. The people who walk in and pull the lever are the lever of democracy.
British Telecom turning from 3G...
British Telecom turning from 3G to Wi-Fi
According to Europemedia.net, British Telecom is adopting 802.11 (Wi-Fi) hotspots as its primary approach to broadband wireless, foresaking 3G for a network it calls "Openzone" that will be placed in airports, hotels and along the motorways in Britain.
Blogging and nano-publishing on the...
Blogging and nano-publishing on the rise
Dan Gillmor points to this Guardian story about the rise of nano-publishing, which unfortunately begins by reiterating the erroneous rumor that AOL will add blogging capabilities on its site next month. Good coverage of Nick Denton and what his network of blogs is up to.
SEC Chairman-in-waiting will actually divest
SEC Chairman-in-waiting will actually divest
Announcing that William Donaldson, the Chairman-designate of the Securities and Exchange Commission, will sell his entire stock portfolio, the Bush White House radiates ethical standards -- only anyone in their right mind would have expected this in the first place. Loved this passage at the end of the Washington Post story:
Donaldson stepped down as chairman of Aetna in April 2001, a little more than a week before the company warned that its quarterly results would be "significantly lower" than had been expected. Aetna has said the suit has no merit.
Donaldson's office referred all calls yesterday to the White House.
The end of angel investor...
The end of angel investor organizations
For several years, there was so much private money that angel investors could combine efforts to act virtually the same way as early-stage venture capital funds. Now, those networks of angels are evaporating and we're getting back to the roots of individual private investing.
Right on the brink of...
Right on the brink of admitting this is still recession
The fourth quarter produced economic growth of just 0.7 percent. This is, of course, the same number that, for the two quarters of 2001, the Department of Commerce revised downward in the middle of 2002 to acknowledge we'd been in a recession. Consumer spending growth slowed to one percent and that slowdown came in the big-ticket items, which were down 7.3 percent in the fourth quarter.
The Fed, which kept rates level (how much lower can they go at 1.25 percent, anyway?), is paralyzed and hoping against hope that they won't be called on to "stimulate" the economy with easier money. By now, Chairman Greenspan and team had thought they'd be wrestling inflation, but that's no a problem with global deflationary pressures make everything less expensive.
The good news was that companies are increasing spending on computer equipment and software. This figure was 1.5 percent annualized during the fourth quarter. Tech will lead the rest of the economy out of this mess. It won't necessarily pull the rest of the economy along, because IT spending is significantly constrained compared to the mid-1990s, when business and, especially, small and medium-sized business were in the midst of their first build-out of computer systems.
The New TIA
The New TIA
President Bush renamed the much-criticized Total Information Awareness program during the State of the Union address. Now that the TIA was effectively shut down by Senate action, the president said he will create a Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), which is effectively the same function the TIA was designed for: domestic surveillance. This came in close proximity to Bush's bizarre hint that assassination is part of the war on America's enemies.
Expect the Administration to continue to use the TIA to distract the public debate from the TTIC. TIA hasn't been completely killed and can serve as a convenient whipping boy while TTIC grows.
Since its founding, the United States has struggled to prevent domestic surveillance and, with exceptions like the domestic persecution of dissent during World War I and the Hoover years at the FBI, it has done a pretty good job.
Why write about this on a business, technology and investing site? Because the freedom to speak and communicate without fear of persecution is one of the main reasons the U.S. economy has prospered and given rise to so many new ideas.
January 29, 2003
Ben Bagdikian on media consolidation
Ben Bagdikian on media consolidation
He wrote the definitive book on media consolidation. Ben Bagdikian, former dean of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism says that if the FCC revokes ownership limits it will harm the public discourse. But look at the first sentence of his comment and think about what is happening with blogging:
"When you get a new technology, you want new, young, smaller groups that are quicker on their feet and able to come up with new ideas. Whereas the few existing giant corporations want to control the change, limit it as much as possible so they minimize their costs of conversion. They control the way it's going to their advantage and not the public's advantage."
Content is prince regent, distribution...
Content is prince regent, distribution king?
The Street's George Mannes says cable companies could choke off the profit from content. I think he misses the point, because he seems to think that video-on-demand is the future. There's no reason to even think of the cable company as a gate-keeper when you can download video over an IP network. The idea that cable network fees could shift to pay-for-performance is ridiculous, since they this will ultimately drive content providers to alternate channels.
China becomes the number one...
China becomes the number one importer to Japan
Japan now imports more from China than it exports. This is one of small moments in history with wide-ranging repercussions. China had already out-exported Japan in shipments to the U.S. to the tune of 2002 China-U.S. trade deficit of $10.45 billion compared to 2002 Japan-U.S. trade deficit of $6.49 billion. This is all about low cost manufacturing and deflation.
Snap up a publication staff
Snap up a publication staff
JD reports that CNET's ZD Net Tech Update is up for sale or, rather, was listed on eBay until it was pulled down and reposted with the name changed to "Z---- T--- U
Congrats the Eric, Bryan and...
Congrats the Eric, Bryan and Andre, now let's mess with things
Eric Norlin, Bryan Field-Elliot and Andre Durand announces the PingID Network is up and running, as well as an investment from Nokia.
Ping Identity is the founder and sponsor of the PingID Network (www.pingid.com), a member-owned identity network, the first of its kind, providing businesses with the legal framework and business services necessary for enabling wide-scale identity federation. Both initiatives are unique in their focus and scope - and designed to accelerate the rapidly developing identity marketplace.
Member-owned is corporate-owned, but this is an important step forward. I'd like to suggest that a group get together and incorporate as a consumer's union that will control their identities in the "federated identity" systems Ping ID facilitates. And using those identities, that we start to take control of the legal framework for our relationships with companies.
Augmented reality and moblogging
Augmented reality and moblogging
Ross Mayfield and Adina Levin have a good thread going on the uses of augmented reality, which Greg and I were trading thoughts about yesterday, partly in response to Harold.
The future is a wave of whispers going on within, around and just beyond our experience of conversation and events. I think the addition of virtual reality to reality will be a terrible distraction, but the use of enhanced conversation and the constant recording of history by individuals has tremendous promise as the basis for examining life from a variety of perspectives.
UPDATE: Bryan Field-Elliot, also of Ping-ID, will be talking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference about "the Coming Ubiquity of Geospatial Annotation." Interesting interesting stuff. "Geoblogging" is a great term.
Open Content Network
Open Content Network
This may be the new Napster. The Open Content Network is a peer-to-peer system for delivering large files (read: media, such as audio and video) using a technology called "Content-Addressable Web" that mimics the edge services provided by Akamai and other content delivery networks. The idea with edge services is to get content as close to end-users as possible and through multiple routes. In a P2P architecture, a single PC could be pulling parts of a file from several different PCs in the Open Content Network.
Interesting. Worth watching. As broadband proliferates, this will improve the delivery of content between individuals -- but since most "broadband" services are only fast on the downstream side, there is still an unnatural monopoly on the carrier's part because they can choke off edge servers they don't own and claim they provide better quality of service. Likewise, I suspect that the RIAA will be watching carefully for signs of "abuse" of copyright.
Refit complete
Refit complete
The write-down of $45.4 billion in value of America Online and the departure of Ted Turner marks the end of the transition at AOL Time Warner. Just as the Time Inc. and Warner Bros. merger ended with a complete housecleaning and reorientation of business efforts, this is the final chapter. Turner's leaving indicates that the resulting company is settling in on a business model, one not bold enough for Turner. Remember, Steve Case is still on the board and heading the strategy committee. It's a nice balance.
Revenue was up seven percent to $41.1 billion and earnings were up before the write-down of AOL's value. The revenue figure is a substantial gain over the $36 billion they generated separately before the merger. AOL accounted for increased revenues. This is the proverbial corner in this story, but the stock will be down tomorrow.
Of course Yahoo! will ditch...
Of course Yahoo! will ditch Overture
Tim Cadogan, formerly of Overture, has joined Yahoo! to lead its search unit and, in the words of this InternetNews.com report, "caused speculation that Yahoo! would end its relationship with Overture when their contract expires in 2005." Duh! When they bought Intomi, that was clear.
Having proved paid placement is profitable, Overture's market is going to be picked apart by its former partners. I'd be surprised if Yahoo! doesn't buy its way out the contract sometime in the third or fourth quarter of this year. Google, because it has worked constantly to extend the range of services its facilitates is in a much better position, because it is worming its way into the infrastructure of the Net. Overture found a novel business model by didn't innovate much after that.
Yahoo! goes to paid radio
Yahoo! goes to paid radio
If you can't get your commercial free music via satellite, why not the most popular portal on the Web? Yahoo! has introduced a 50-channel music service for $3.99 a month. Now, if only they need news and other entertainment, because not everyone wants to listen to music all day.
Sorry, but day-part programming, which fills the clock with programs, is the dinosaur of media and we need to get to a place where content is mixed and matched for us based on our needs -- in the car, where's the traffic report when I want it? What about the news I care about? What about a good joke?
A lazy press. A subservient...
A lazy press. A subservient press
Dana Blankenhorn and Nick Denton are trading criticisms of the U.S. press in a column by Dana and a blog posting by Nick. For a long time, I've been saying that the press should return to its roots, so that when we read a report we knew ahead of time it was coming from a particular perspective and not a purportedly "objective" source. That means that the perspective should be informed and well-argued, not that it simply be ideological.
If you think it's just a few bloggers who are sick of the media's staid professionalism, listen to a media veteran, Janeane Garofolo, who says her anti-war position has led her to be treated like a child by the press. That condescension extends to the audience, as well.
Dana writes: "...instead of thinking of your audience as consisting of people who live near you, how about thinking of it as people who think like you? This is what 19th century journalism was all about....It was only in the 20th century, with the rise of vast chains, that the American reporter became a 'professional,' someone whose job was to play things straight down the line, with inverted pyramids, an unbiased viewpoint…an officer of the people’s court."
I concur, professionalism takes all the fun out of the press, which is what Nick is saying when he writes: "Heaven forbid that any article be interesting enough to offend some readers. Even private correspondence is enough to get a journalist into trouble. Bill Cotterell, a political columnist, was suspended from the Tallahassee Democrat for sending a rude email in response to a reader."
Hell, let's get the rhetorical blood flow in the streets. Let's rumble in the columns of newspapers and blogs. Let's make a difference. Otherwise, hang up the professional hat and retire to a nice farm where they'll feed you through a tube and eventually recycle your body as soylent green--our brains will be long gone. Nick is right when he points to Michael Wolff's comment that “It’s just that being anti-Democrat, anti-Clinton, anti-yuppie, anti-wonk turns out to be great television.” Liberals need to recognize George W. Bush is a veritable Freddy Kreuger that could be lambasted daily for his monumental attacks on individual freedom, his hypocrisy, and the fawning loyalty he demands of the people.
So, let's embrace our differences and make them the foundation of the people's reporting of their world. Participatory journalism should be partisan in the sense that if you were going to attend a good debate (when was the last time an American even thought about listening to an argument as entertainment?), you'd expect the winner to have fully documented their case.
I write from my perspective, which is that of an liberal entrepreneur angry about where this government is taking my country and the marketplace for ideas and information. If the Democrats can't do any better, I'll criticize them for their lack of details, their just-so-careful lack of rhetoric (I did in my blogging of the State of the Union last night, asking for more specifics from Gary Locke.) Let's think about being American in all our media. Let's think about being successful business people in our business media. Let's think and argue about everything under the sun.
I'm with Dana (although my J-school prof told me to leave after one class and get a job, saying I already knew how to be a good reporter and writer -- best advice I ever got, and I later helped him start a Web company that made him rich):
Throw out the NPA. And while you’re at it, let’s forget everything we were taught at Columbia, the Poynter school, even at my alma mater of Northwestern University’s Medill School.
We are not professionals. We are not doctors, we are not lawyers. We’re writers, hacks, entertainers, sweaty ink-stained wretches. Journalism is a trade, like cooking in a restaurant. It’s a harsh, nasty competitive business. Work hard, get drunk, and do it again.
Compete and win is the only way.
January 28, 2003
I'll be blogging impressions of...
I'll be blogging impressions of the State of the Union
Over at my Social & Political Blog.
Interactive create mode
Interactive create mode
Greg Elin has a very articulate deconstruction of his recent dinner with Fred Ritchin of PixelPress. I love the idea of a second mode of interactivity (in addition to interactive display), the interactive create mode. This relates to Harold's idea, blogged below, and to my discussion of the writing systems that add intelligence.
In the too fantastic to...
In the too fantastic to believe, yet true department....
LawMeme points to this story about a Russian law firm that is suing the animators of the house elf Dobby in the recent Harry Potter movie. Why? Because he looks too much like Vladimir Putin. I hope this doesn't lead to another declaration of war in the State of the Union address tonight -- because, you know, W. and Vlady are close.
Yeah, I can see it. Can't you? Definite grounds for war.
BlogArt
BlogArt
Harold Gilchrist has a great suggestion for a sort of community of practice that would be facilitated by better multimedia support in blog tools, which he calls BlogArt:
I starting thinking this week about "personal multimedia clip art" and how we will use it, re-use it and share it in the next phase of blogging, blogging 2G.
Just like we don't publish everything we write, we also won't publish everything we shoot with a camera or camcorder or say into a digital voice recorder. As we move to the next phase of blogging that includes integrating multimedia easily into blogs, the art we publish will based on the context of the communication, specifically the subject of the post or the story. This is not to say that the multimedia art we didn't publish today won't get used tomorrow or by someone else in a totally different context in the future.
I am asking all blog tool publishing vendors to start thinking about features that will give their customers ways to share their BlogArt. Just as we can share each others posts and links today we will need to able to share our multimedia BlogArt and the ability to subscribe to others multimedia BlogArt galleries.
With this kind of tool, events would become the focal point for image and text stories recorded by the participants. Then, the question becomes how do we make our BlogArt meaningful to others? The great thing about blogging (and blogging as the foundation of new collaboration tools) is that users are always telling designers what they want.
Listen to Jimmy Thudpucker
Listen to Jimmy Thudpucker
Garry Trudeau's aging rock legend explains the future of music in four frames:
New York Times Digital revenues...
New York Times Digital revenues up 18.5 percent
Continuting the trend, The New York Times' digital division saw revenues grow faster than print segments of the company. Advertising was up 6.5 percent in the fourth quarter while digital revenues grew 18.5 percent to $19.7 million, "primarily due to an increase in advertising revenues." Broadcast revenues were up 25 percent. The message: people want information on a screen.
Operating profit [for NYT Digital] increased to $3.3 million in the fourth quarter from $1.4 million in the 2001 fourth quarter, primarily as a result of higher advertising revenues. NYTD had an operating profit of $8.3 million for the full-year of 2002, an improvement of $15.6 million.
Audio and video in the...
Audio and video in the digital home
In-Stat/MDR reports that moving multimedia around the home will result in the first commercially popular bridges between the data and entertainment devices in the house.
... the introduction of audio and video promises to create a new market for multimedia home networking technology, with the number of multimedia home network households, worldwide, projected to increase by a CAGR of 210.7 % from 2001 to 2006....
In terms of devices, it is unclear at this point whether the PC or consumer electronics cluster will take the leading role in the unfolding market for multimedia home networking.
In 2003, DVD players that access the PC for video content to be played over the television will be the first mass market products that enable video-based home networking. Companies such as Oak Technology and Digital 5 are offering solutions that will be available in name brand DVD players in 2003.
The emergence of digital television, particularly high definition television, is expected to be a multimedia home networking driver, particularly in the later years of In-Stat/MDR’s forecast (2001-2006). Just as data-based home networking was boosted by the need to share an expensive broadband connection, so multimedia home networking will be boosted by the need to share expensive digital and high definition television content.
Selling multimedia home networks will require substantial consumer education and marketing. Solutions will have to be simple enough for average consumers to install, or networking companies will have to work with service providers for installation.
In the near term, because of bandwidth and Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints, it is expected that only compressed video, such as MPEG 2 and MPEG 4, will be networked.
Paid search listings, are they...
Paid search listings, are they worth it?
I've been running an Google AdWords campaign for a client for about six months and it is of mixed value. The the whole problem is that you must conduct a long series of tests to identify what keywords work, then what offers work in conjunction with those keywords, if you ask me. According to MediaDailyNews:
As marketers grapple with jargon like keyword density and struggle to devise bidding strategies, many may not be aware that some paid search results are being driven by user behavior and perceived relevance as opposed to strict keyword matching.
This focuses primarily on the cost of a click-through, which is important, but only one factor in the whole process of capturing a potential customer's attention and converting them to a regular customer.
January 27, 2003
The democracy thread, redux
The democracy thread, redux
Britt Blaser has a really great summary of the follow-up to my posting about The Age of Connection last week, including some of the email exchanges that were going on. Great read and he makes very good points about how the move to take back the country is going on already.
My caveat, which I would also add to Dave's comments, is that we only recognize leaders in retrospect. My nine-year-old asked me the other day who Rosa Parks was, mostly to see if dad is as smart as him. The answer is, just as it was with Gandhi or any other leader or pot-stirrer, was that Rosa Parks was a person who just got tired of the way thing were, the injustice she and her people experienced every day. And all she did was refuse to comply with the injustice and viola, she was a leader. Gandhi made salt. Other speak the truth when no one will. Every one of us has that within themselves.
P2P RSS and your information
P2P RSS and your information
Via Dave Winer: Adam Curry writes a great piece about the combination of RSS and encapsulated MP3s and other files to update users' data and alert them to the changes. Everyone has been talking about PointCast lately, the long lost "push" technology that was just not quite right at a time when online time was still metered or slow or both. We're getting very close to personal data services that really make a difference in people's lives.
Writing systems that add intelligence
Writing systems that add intelligence
The discussions of semantic Web applications are always interesting, but mostly a nice dream. Steven Garrity writes that when writing on the Web, that is via a Web application or a blog, the whole mark-up process needs to be transparent to the user. He's talking mostly about formatting, and I've got that with Radio, except for the spell-checker.
But we need to go further if this is going to be additive to human interaction, to a kind of interface that adds information, as well, such as links to the dictionary/glossary sources we rely so that the words we use are clearly understood, relationships between the newly entered content and what one has written before, options for linking to various friends and colleagues, and so forth. There are a variety of ways to use LDAP and other directory infrastructures to make some of this stuff happen, but there is a constant struggle between the goals of participants in the process of building the Web -- commercial, personal, government, cultural, and so on -- that the kind of omniscience we like to talk about is almost impossible. Cory Doctorow covers some of the reasons, but the really important issue he describes is that schemas are not neutral; so, everything becomes political. There's no win-win, to use that fabulous phrase from the 90s.
What we need to recognize is that as a platform for thinking together, simple inputting of text is not the end of the process, but only the start. The more we can automate our memory, the more freely we might think collectively. However, we could also fall back on that automation and stop thinking completely, and that's the biggest danger of all. Everyone will find links that "prove" what they are saying, but those links might be to Mein Kampf or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and simply by linking to those horrid works people lend them the appearance of veracity.
I'd like to see a semantic Web evolve, but we're going to need to take a long time to get it right.
British market headed south, south,...
British market headed south, south, south
Eleven straight down days and a one-day loss of 3.4 percent has British investors asking the government, the Bank of England and regulators to intervene to stop the economic bleed-out. This is partly war and partly the decline in fortunes of large cap companies -- the FTSE reached a 50 percent decline from its all-time highs of 1999 during the day on Monday.
Did You Know: Israeli interest...
Did You Know: Israeli interest rates are 8.9 percent
Talk about an economy at the other end of the spectrum from the United States, Israel's inflation rate is expected to be 13 percent and its central bank has set short-term rates at 8.9 percent. Israel's economic isolation keeps local prices high while its heavy defense spending drives deficits and, by extension, the price of money.
FCC leaning toward line-sharing on...
FCC leaning toward line-sharing on existing networks
According to an FCC document, the commission is leaning toward continuing to require regional Bell operating companies to share their existing lines with competitors based on wholesale pricing. However, the FCC is going to remove the obligation for new networks, which seems to include local broadband connections that are already in place using copper networks.
The whole system is doomed as long as carriers think of themselves as owning the last mile, because they layer lots of "smart services" on what should be a stupid network that just carries data regardless of where it is going and what it is doing for the user. Listen to the Sage of Isen.com, who left AT&T after realizing that stupid networks are the future.
When they know about broadband,...
When they know about broadband, they want broadband
The Register reports: Broadband awareness soars. Eight out of 10 Britons who are Internet users are now familiar with broadband services and more than 30,000 a week are signing up for the services; Oftel, the British telecommunications regulator reports:
- 67% of all SMEs have Internet access;
- 61% SMEs with Internet access use unmetered packages (74% medium and 60% small);
- 86% satisfied with overall quality of service;
- 26% of SMEs with Internet now using ISDN, 13% use DSL/cable modem; and
- 42% of SMEs aware of SDSL;
- Switching from metered narrowband to unmetered is significantly more evident than switching away from unmetered – 33% switched to unmetered compared to 2% switching back to metered.
In the "Making everything digital"...
In the "Making everything digital" department
Marc points to this very cool development in home and studio digitization: 
Gibson to Embed Guitars with Ethernet [Slashdot] He also points out some troubling elements of the licensing, which suggest that after having encouraged adoption of Wi-Fi and Category 5 connectivity in musical instruments, Gibson may start charging for using these physical layers of the network.
"But what we didn't expect was that by solving all these problems for the music industry, we'd develop a technology that would revolutionize the way video, home automation and a host of other applications. Audio is just the tip of the iceberg."
This is more than digital pickups and transport of audio signals. Gibson is pitching this as a general purpose standard for audio, video and data. They think Home Automation is a target market as well. They claim they have 'plug-n-play', system config and setup, device control, data transport and have solved many issues of streaming hi-res video over ethernet (which means WiFi as well.)
"Our goal is to establish this standard in the markletplace and to allow smart and creative people - to run with it."
But wait - they say they're giving away a 10-year royalty free license. What happens after 10 years?
It's one thing to say Gibson will make a WiFi Les Paul. But somebody should tell them they can't have an open standard for everyone to use - but put a 10 year limit on the license! Here's the ver. 2.8 spec. It says it's patent pending. Oh boy.
As sophisticated as Gibson's technological solution is to bring time-locked transport of media to ethernet, it's a little naive to think that the entire world of multimedia is going to lock step to their patented standard. I can think of at least 2 companys - Apple and Microsoft - which won't necessarily like that.