Convergence – Page 6 – LIVEdigitally

Never Lost Shoes?

Posted on February 9, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

According to this article, for only $350 you can buy a pair of shoes with GPS built-in. Sounds like a steal, except there’s also a $19.95 monthly fee.

For shoes.

With GPS.

Hmmm.

So, part of the reason to do this? Find someone you think is lost, say an elderly relative or a child. Only catch is, the only way to activate the “find them” feature is by the wearer pushing a button on the shoe. That’s just not going to work very well is it?

There’s a lot of attention toward GPS these days. I love the technology, and I love my GPS unit, but I totally believe it’s a dying device category. A lot of next-generation mobile phones have GPS chips embedded, and that’s really the most logical place for it to exist, especially when you consider the incredibly poor in-dash receivers built-into the higher end cars. Funny how you can pay an extra $3000 for a badly built ‘option’ or save a lot of your money and buy a standalone unit.

If you really want some GPS in your life (and I don’t blame you), for about $450, you can buy my favorite GPS unit, the Nuvi 350 (amazon link), and give it to your kids. Probably more useful this way anyway.

I love my Nuvi.

I don’t want a Nuvi Shoe, but I definitely want a Nuvi phone (long before I want my Zune phone).

First attempt at embedded wireless power will miss the mark

Posted on January 18, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

Reuters photo I just read this Reuters article about the “desk of the future” in which the designer (Herman Miller) is incorporating wireless power technology from eCoupled (a competitor to WildTangent, who I saw at CES last week – more on eCoupled at Engadget). I love the concept of wireless chargers, and I love the concept of building them into existing products such as furniture and cars (the Reuters article discusses both).

What I don’t like is this part…

But no mobile devices will have eCoupled built in by that time, so Visteon customers will have to purchase an adapter from Mobility Electronics Inc., said Walter Thornton of Mobility Electronics.

Available this summer, the adapter will be able to work with Motorola phones, Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod Shuffle and other gadgets, Thornton said.

This is actually the same flaw I have with the WildTangent system – it puts too much burden on the consumer and requires too much of a behavioral change. This whole system is designed to make charging devices more convenient, not less. Here’s a quick analysis on the process after and before (intentionally in that order).

After (in other words, you bought the desk)
1. Remove cell phone from pocket (it’s not on your belt, is it? c’mon)
2. Look around cluttered desk for special charging adapter
3. Insert phone into adapter
4. Leave phone on desk until charged
5. Remove phone from adapter
6. Place adapter somewhere “you’ll remember later” (causing at least 10 minutes of searching next time you want to find it, since you inevitably place it in that one drawer you never open)

Before (in other words, today, without the desk)
1. Remove cell phone from pocket
2. Connect to charger which you have at your desk already
3. Leave phone on desk until charged
4. Remove phone from charger

In my opinion, this is a clear case of technology being released to consumers way too soon. This fits none of the bill of: faster, better, cheaper. Maybe next year this’ll actually get easy, but only once the following has come true…

Phonemakers will embed eCoupled soon after Visteon releases its product, Hazlett said.

However, Motorola would not comment and Lynch refuses to get really excited until Motorola is on board.

“I’m hoping that they do get the (device) manufacturers to buy into this so that it doesn’t fizzle out,” Lynch added.

Update: thoughts from Engadget and CrunchGear.

Sling Media shows Clip+Sling at CES2007 – CBS Keynote video

Posted on January 15, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

Long long ago (last year), in an office far, far away (San Mateo), Blake Krikorian (Sling Media CEO) had a vision wherein Slingbox owners could easily share clips from favorite TV shows with each other. We knew it was a good idea, but didn’t want to push to far forward due to industry relations, copyright issues, bandwidth issues, etc. Looks like they’ve come a long way in the few months since I left, and a lot of these issues got worked out, which is very exciting. They announced two major new things at CES 2007: SlingCatcher and Clip+Sling.

SlingCatcher coverage is fairly pervasive, and I’ll hold off on adding any commentary of my own until we get closer to product launch. Watch this video or read about it at Zatz Not Funny, Engadget, Crave UK, MobilitySite, or ShinyShiny.

For Clip+Sling I was able to attend Les Moonves’ keynote during CES, and recorded a video of the whole demonstration:

It was great to watch Blake up there, especially as Chad Hurley had been on stage as well. YouTube is definitely great for user-generated content, like the videos we all make with our cameras these days. It’s a real pain for most users, however, when it comes to TV content. Most consumers have no idea how to record video to their PC, or even worse how to edit down to the clips they want. I think Clip+Sling with a centrally hosted server launched in conjunction with CBS and other networks could be extremely disruptive in the online video space. I’m looking forward to the launch later this year.

More Clip+Sling coverage: Engadget, Laptop magazine, PVRWire, SlingCommunity, and Zatz Not Funny.

Disclosure: I am a former Sling Media employee and have some stock. In fact, I just found a couple of videos of me doing Slingbox demos with the nice people at BuyTV (and the Slingbox Pro too)

Also, I video’d the CBS “media” presentation during the keynote.

Netgear knocks it out of the park at CES

Posted on January 7, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

Opening disclosure: I am working on a consulting project with Netgear, but that work is unrelated to my blogging about them. I was invited to their press conference and chose to attend and got to see three new products that I was previously unaware of. This blog post is because I am genuinely amazed with a product of theirs.

Now, onto the story. Netgear had a press conference this morning and unveiled three new products which I will list and describe in ascending order of excitement and interestingness. Before the demos, Debbie Williams (Netgear’s Chief Marketing Officer) gave a brief “state of the union” for the company. Basically: 10 years old, market cap of $883M, products sold in >16K retailers, and they introduced 50 new products in 2006 (methinks about 42 of them were routers, but I guess it counts anyway, right?). She then went on to discuss how 2006 was the year of building the home network for the digital lifestyle (love that term, but I think I may have heard it before), and 2007 is the year of delivering the experience. She then introduced Vivek Pathela, Netgear’s VP of Product Marketing to do the demos (again, listed here in my order, not theirs):

Storage Central Turbo. This updates 2005’s Storage Central device by adding the capacity to expand to multiple terabytes of data as well as gigabit Ethernet. If you aren’t paying attention to the bits and bytes, it means it can store and stream HD movies around your house. This is a fairly evolutionary/logical enhancement to the product line. The MSRP is $249 (with no included hard drives, which makes sense since it’s so much cheaper for you to buy your own anyway) and the product should ship “early” this year. More pics:
Dual-Mode Cordless Phone with Skype. Now we’re seeing some interesting convergence happen. Quite a few companies introduced Skype or VoIP phones in 2006, some worked well, some didn’t. Netgear seems to have added a clever twist by incorporating a standard telephone in the same handset (aka Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS). This is a very smart combination, as it lets a consumer have just a single home phone that can work with both Skype and POTS systems. Also, you can get multiple handsets all working with the same base station (although an audience member asked a great question: can more than one handset make a simultaneous POTS call? which stumped the Netgear team – I sure hope it’s a yes). The demo went great as Vivek called Patrick Lo, Netgear’s CEO, and had a quick live call with near-excellent audio quality. MSRP $199, available now (on Amazon)!
EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD. Oh my is this one interesting. It’s a, well, “box” that hooks up to your TV and your home network connection. It then streams your music, photos, and videos from any PC or networked storage device (NAS) to your TV. It also streams from YouTube (they demoed a classic Diet Coke/Mentos video, which about 90% of the audience reacted as if they’d never seen it before – wow). It also works in high definition (up to 1080p resolution), including full upscaling/downscaling of video. It supports almost every video codec, including MPEG-4 HD, WMV HD, DivX, MPEG-2, H.264, etc etc. It also streams iTunes (including protected content if from a Windows PC, sorry Mac folks). It also has USB to locally connect a flash drive or an iPod. It also supports multiple units so you can start a video in one room, then finish it in another. It also has full PVR (TiVo-like) capabilities. And from the demo, it looks like it works very well! As a guy who has spent about 8 years designing award-winning devices just like these, I am quite impressed. Quite! MSRP $349, available early 2007.

I’ve seen a bit of other coverage already of the conference. MacUser compares it against iTV and calls the UI “uninspired” which is a fair point, but I think making comparisons against a product that’s not really been “announced” yet isn’t quite appropriate. Also, I disagree that Apple will beat the $349 price point, as I think they’d rather rip into their loyal customer base who are more willing to overpay for the Apple brand. More coverage from Ed Kohler, Eric Savitz at Barron’s, Gadgetell, and SciFi.com, but for very extensive details, here’s the Engadget transcript. I also bumped into Dave Zatz (with Sakshi Goel of Netgear), Netgear’s resident CES blogger.

So there’s my front-runner for most interesting new product of CES: the Netgear Digital Entertainer HD. We’ll see how the rest of the show pans out! More Netgear conference pics below and the whole CES collection is here.

Mediabolic Memories 1999-2004

Posted on January 4, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

While this certainly doesn’t capture all the company memories, it reflects many of mine (or at least the ones I took pictures of, with my old Kodak DC210 single-megapixel digital camera)…

2000-2001: the early years
Sure the company was founded in 1999, but it was in a different office and we were really beyond tiny back then (and were called even channelDOT for a few weeks). We established worldwide HQ at 1525 Union Street, a convenient block from my apartment at the time.

Back in these days, while we were pitching the vision of the “connected home” we were really up against a lot of negativity. We had to explain why consumers would likely network their homes in the next few years (we were right) and why they would, in turn, have networked media devices in the same timeframe (not so right). I remember listening to a major consumer electronics manufacturer share their vision of the future: embed SD cards into every device instead of a network port. Wow.

Also at the time we developed on a “ready to go” embedded Linux platform using chips from National Semiconductor (ah, the trusty Geode). At the time, virtually every company seeking to bring new products, features, or services to the TV were using the exact same box. I have a hunch more were used by developers and demos than were ever brought to market (although Pioneer sure came close!).

CES 2001 was the first year we demonstrated at a trade show. We had a suite at the Venetian and spent about 48 hours prior to the beginning of the show transforming it into our demo home. We wired a network (under the carpets mind you), took over the TV sets, and hung our own posterboards instead of the hotel’s artwork. The bathroom became the storage “cluster” and the whole thing was topped off with a bowl of blue M&M’s. For the branding, of course.

While CES was the first show for the year, it was Comdex 2001 (you remember Comdex, right?) where we got out into the public eye (a little bit). As partners with National Semiconductor, we had a kiosk in their booth. Both Woody Deguchi (the VP of Asian Sales – also the Asian VP of Sales, but that’s a bit of an inside joke for Woody and myself) and myself had TV appearances, and I even demoed to Paul Allen and his gang (no joke, he was surrouded by about 12-15 people at all times).

2002-2003: real products

It’s one thing to demonstrate a vision of the future. It’s another thing to showcase products that are en route to the consumer marketplace. Pioneer worked with us on the Digital Library, a “media server for the living room” along with it’s companion “media client” for other rooms of the house. At CES 2003 I actually got on stage with Pioneer’s hired talent (yes, I was invited) to help explain the product, as it was so new to both the company and the consumers.

We also had deals with HP, Fujitsu, and Creative Labs (and a few others to boot), all interested in the networked home and networked entertainment products. In fact, there was such interest in our platform, we ended up hosting an Interoperability Forum in Japan, and had over 15 different manufacturers send senior engineers to come listen and learn from us. We were concerned that UPnP, the de facto standard for device-to-device interoperability simply wasn’t strong enough to provide a useful value proposition for consumers. We were right on that one, but the “M1 standard” wasn’t really the right strategy for the company to pursue either, and was eventually shelved.

During this phase we achieved partnerships with other technology and infrastructure companies, including Intel (a relationship that blossomed for several years). We attended trade shows around the world (I was unfortunately introduced to CeBIT) and it was my first year as a United 1K member. Again, a blessing and a curse.

2004: best of show
I’ll never forget CES 2004. We were in development of a series of products with Denon Electronics, including the flagship NS-S100. This device was a networked DVR with dual tuners and a removable hard drive. It could do just about anything you’d ever want a DVR to do. Best of all, you could very easily start watching a show (or live TV) in one room and pick it up in another room. It did everything. And it did it all really really well.

A team of judges from TechTV (read: two guys slightly less geeky than me) came by to see the product. They liked it (heck, most people liked it). They came back with a film crew, took a bunch of footage and told us when they’d announce finalists, which we were in the “home media device” category. They returned for more footage. After asking me three times if I was sure we’d have someone there, I had a little bit of a good feeling about things. It also helped that, at the time, there weren’t any other major new or exciting products in the same space. Brad Dietrich (cofounder and CTO and coworker of mine since we both went to CMU in Pittsburgh!) and I went to the award ceremonies. When we won in our category, I was thrilled. When, less than 10 minutes later, we won the Best Overall for CES award, well, there were no words for the joy I felt. I was practically in tears and called my then-girlfriend (now wife) then my parents. I’ll never forget the moment, and once I find which backup drive it’s on, I’ll put up a little video on YouTube.

I left Mediabolic in June of 2004 to join Sling Media as VP of Product Management. It was a difficult decision at many levels, but was the right one for me. The experiences learned and connections made at Mediabolic helped prepare me for my next career move, and are really the foundations of much of what I do professionally. Needless to say, they carried the torch quite well in my absence, hired some great talent, and now, with the Macrovision acquisition have the opportunity to bring excellence in networked entertainment to the masses.

Thanks Dan & co for all the great times and great memories, and congratulations once more.

Macrovision acquires Mediabolic for $43 Million

Posted on January 3, 2007 by Jeremy Toeman

Mediabolic logo For the most diligent of my readers, you may recall Mediabolic, the company I cofounded back in 1999 with Dan Putterman and Brad Dietrich (the CEO and CTO, respectively). It’s a very exciting day as they were just acquired by Macrovision for $43 million US (official press release, SVSJ mention, reuters, SJ Merc, or find more at Google News). Congratulations to everyone at Mediabolic!

Macrovision logo For more details on the acquisition, you can read this letter (PDF format) from the CEOs of both companies. This is the kind of deal that seems to make a lot of sense for both parties. Macrovision already has technology inside many consumer electronics devices (for example, all VCRs and DVD players). Mediabolic has a suite of digital home technologies (more about this topic at WSJ today) that are clearly a part of the future of consumer electronics. Win-win.

I guess this means today was the day I became a serial entrepreneur! Just kidding, I actually don’t like that term at all, but it sure does feel great to see a company that I cofounded have a nice exit. It’s not exactly a “life-changing event” but it is certainly a great event nonetheless!

I’ll put up a little photolog from the 5 years I was there later today to share a few memories.

Video entertainment options are all over the place

Posted on December 1, 2006 by Jeremy Toeman

Cinemanow and Movielink made the first huge strides in Internet-delivery of movies with their offerings several years ago, albeit not to much success. In the past 2 years we’ve seen things move in leaps and bounds.

Here is my list of some of the most prevalent/important things going on right now:

Multi-tuner high definition DVRs are commonly available. DVRs (HD and SD) are in about 15-20 million homes in the US today. Timeshifting is no fad.
Sling Media sold over 100K Slingboxes in the first year, and now have 3 different models on the market and are in 9 countries. Placeshifting is the new black.
Over 40 million HDTV sets are expected to be sold in the US by the end of the year (cumulative). HDTV is important.
IPTV set-top boxes (like a cable box, but hooked up to your DSL) are in millions of homes worldwide. It might not be a slam-dunk in the US, but many people are watching TV streaming over the Internet.
YouTube. 100 million videos a day. I don’t care if it’s long-tail or short-tail or rat-tail. I don’t care if it’s user-generated content or all clips from SNL and the Daily Show. People are comfortable watching video on Web sites, regardless of quality.
Moviebeam (love the concept, but the movie selection is so lackluster these days – I’ll post more soon), Applie’s iTV, Akimbo, SAT+GO, ITVN, Xbox Movie Downloads, and a slew of other companies have boxes, products, or services that are all providing alternatives to the traditional cable/satellite TV offerings. I don’t know how any of these options will fare, but they all seem to either be very niche-y or not compelling. But there’s a lot more to come. I have seen the future, and I can’t name the company, but it’s coming next year, and it’s going to rock.
Wal-mart’s online DVD offering (details here) sounds completely off the mark. Jonas wrote a good piece about it, and I think it’s simply an offering with no market appeal. If I buy the DVD, why do I need a download? If I download it, why do I need a DVD? Greed begetting greed.
Regal Entertainment is giving moviegoers a “panic button” in case they see someone on a cell phone and are unable to confront them directly. That’s just weird.
Saturday Night Live is debating allowing live viewing of rehearsals online. There’s a near little coincidence, as I personally attribute ALL the success of YouTube as originating with the spread of the “Lazy Sunday” clip from SNL last season (which they, at the time, vehemently protested).
The NFL is looking into streaming live games online, and the NHL has some archives online (which is about as much as we’re gonna get, since Bettman doesn’t really care about the fans anyway).
Mobile mobile mobile.

Phew, I’m exhausted. Did I miss anything?

Did DVRs kill the watercooler chat?

Posted on November 27, 2006 by Jeremy Toeman

I received my first TiVo back in 1999. It was a 14-hour unit, made by Philips. It changed my life. Now I don’t even mean that in that lighthearted way – it really did change my life. Prior to owning a TiVo I watched about 2 hours of TV a week, total. Since then, my hours have climbed to a staggering 10-15 hours per week! This is still significantly lower than the 4 hours per day of the average 2-person US household (unbelievable, ain’t it? it climbs to 8 per day when you include all US homes!), but it’s much higher than I’d really like. I’d blame it on Heroes, but there’s enough other stuff I watch that I have to accept responsibility for my actions.

In the early 2000’s I was still a (very) early adopter of the DVR (digital video recorder, the ‘generic’ category for what a TiVo is), always preaching its virtues to friends, colleagues, and strangers on the bus. I remember many times when someone would start talking about a TV show and I’d have to just walk away, not wanting to hear the details for a show I hadn’t yet watched. Worse yet, during the 2003 playoffs (hockey, of course), not one, but two games’ endings were spoiled by eager relatives calling while I was still an hour or two behind on the game. In each incident, I’d always exclaim “haven’t seen it yet – don’t say anything!!!” and then proceed to explain the DVR.

Nowadays, TiVos are fairly well-known in the mainstream (if you are reading this and thinking to yourself “what’s he talking about, everyone has a DVR!” you are very out of touch with the masses. DVRs are in roughly 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 of US households, that’s it.) and you see references in TV shows and movies (and even Sprite commercials). My Mom has a TiVo (she calls it Mister TiVo), my wife uses it, my in-laws have a DVR, my Dad doesn’t have one but knows all about it, etc. In fact, timeshifting (using your DVR) is so prevalent, it’s being tracked by Nielsen – who recently reported that DVRs are actually boosting show ratings.

Recently, however, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot less chatting about the shows themselves. While some are musing that TV viewership is down (the stats simply disprove this theory), others think that watching behaviors are changing. I agree more with the latter than the former. I believe the combination of timeshifting, TV shows on DVD, and online video is causing more of a social impact than a viewership one.

Today, when you watch a show and start talking about it, you hear responses that range from “I’ve got it in my Netflix queue” to “I haven’t watched it yet, it’s on my DVR” to “I’ll download it from iTunes tonight” and more. People seem a lot more prone to saving entire seasons for future viewing, so you can’t talk about Entourage when your friends are waiting for it to arrive from Amazon. Heck, I don’t even read many pop culture blogs or Web sites, for fear they’ll have divulged events from this week’s Heroes, which I just didn’t get around to watching.

I don’t agree at all that people are watching less television. I think they may watch it with less enthusiasm than they once did. I think they watch it with more distractions than they once did. They watch it at different times (and places) than in the past. They watch it on different devices.

My feeling is that social culture is changing to de-emphasize an episode of a show as something worth talking about. I haven’t quite figured out what’s filling that void, just as long as nobody ruins another show for me.

Europeans can now watch Slingbox on their mobiles

Posted on November 16, 2006 by Jeremy Toeman

When it comes to mobile technology, it seems that major carriers and phone manufacturers around the world have a common mantra: “they do it in Japan and Korea, therefore …” The statement applies when trying to convince other industry players that a given service/feature will have huge adoption rates in the US or other countries. The phrases sound like this: “The Japanese play 3 hours of video games a day on their handsets, and spend $1023 per month for social networking services and content, so we need to bring this to the US as soon as possible!” For the most part, it’s a lot of malarky (is that really a word?). Why? Well, if let’s say you have one country/culture in which 2-4 hours per day of train-based travel is the norm. And you have another one in which the average commute is done by car and is under an hour. Sounds like you don’t have much of a match, doesn’t it? So a few years back when the discussions of mobile TV first started blossoming in the US, I was personally a bit of a skeptic. And then I helped design and build SlingPlayer Mobile, and I saw the light.

I’ve used SPM (as we were known to call it) to kill time on the tarmac. I’ve programmed my DVR from the long lines at Starbucks. I even watched some of the NHL Playoffs last year on my commutes home (yes, my wife drove, I’m not that bad). Funny thing is, I was once quoted as saying “Nobody’s going to watch the entire Super Bowl on a cell phone.” And while I stand by that statement, for this year’s game I did have my PPC6700 showing the game live in the bathroom so nobody would have to miss a minute’s action (go Stillers!).

As was announced today, Europeans (starting in the UK, spreading outwards in 2006) can soon have the same joy. Instead of Heroes they’ll be watching Eastenders. Instead of the Superbowl, they’ll do the World Cup (in a few years). Instead of The Office, they’ll do.. oh. well… The Office. Hmm.

In an interesting twist, Sling Media launched SlingPlayer Mobile in Europe with a mobile operator, 3. Now 3 is going for some kind of quintuple or octuple-play by bundling a few other options and services with their new X-Series offering (live Webcast tomorrow), and you can read more details about it over at the SlingCommunity site (or Unwired or Gadgetell) . Seems like an interesting play, but I’ve gotten spoiled I guess, since I’m a Windows Mobile user, and the extra services are all available to me on the 6700 I use.

The other interesting element here is this is the first time the Slingbox is viewable from a non-Windows Mobile device. The handsets for the launch are the Nokia N73 and the Sony Ericsson W950i. I think it’ll be interesting to see the performance comparisons as more and more users adopt the service.

Good thing the Internet rumor mill didn’t go too far after Blake mentioned something about a mobile carrier at last week’s Web 2.0 show. Check out speculation at Unwired, MocoNews, and Engadget. It doesn’t take too many hops in the blogosphere to go from “idle comment” to “solid fact” these days. Either way, congrats to Sling and 3 for putting together a great relationship that brings smart value-added services to their customer bases.

Well, time for me to get back to playing 3D interactive multiplayer video games on my mobile phone with built-in GPS, DVR, MP3, and waffle-making capabilities. I’ve got a long way to go to get to Akihabara.

Gartenberg's tips to build better music phones

Posted on November 9, 2006 by Jeremy Toeman

For those of you who don’t know Michael Gartenberg, he covers the consumer electronics space (and a whole lot more, sorry if I’ve oversimplified Michael) for Jupiter. More importantly, he gets it. Lots of people in this industry are good at marketing, or good at engineering, or good at products. Not all of them get it when it comes to making outstanding products that consumers love. Read his “three laws of consumer electronics” before you go on.

I know Michael gets the chance to play with most new/unreleased phones (yes, even before me!), and I have a hunch he was recently trying out some new “music phone” and had a lousy experience. Probably one of those cases where the company pitched him on this unbelievable sound quality, “replace your iPod”, etc etc. And it didn’t. At all. And if I know Michael, it got him a little riled up. Riled up enough to write a blog post on “how to make a music phone good enough to use.”

While I agree with all his sentiments, the one that struck me the most was #1: real headphone jacks. Unless Shure or Bose starts building wireless headsets with the exact same sound quality of their current lineup, there is no way mass consumers will drop their Nanos.

I’m going to add a few thoughts of my own to his list:

Integrated music. All my MP3s/WMAs should also be ringtones, alarms, etc.
Simple album art. This is a “frilly” feature, but if I had a flip phone with top-panel playback control buttons and the outer LCD screen showed the album art, it would nicely round out the experience. Remember: the goal is to make a great experience, not one that is worse than the Shuffle!
Easy USB synch. Michael mentions WMP and iTunes, I’d probably add that it should also appear to Windows as USB mass storage. Furthermore, the USB part must be standard mini-USB, not a proprietary connector (getting that, Moto?)
Smart power management. Give me plenty of notice before I run out of juice while listening to music. Put in an option that auto-stops music playback with a certain amount of talk time left.
Internet radio services. Whether it’s Pandora, Last.FM, Rhapsody, or anything else, since it’s pretty likely this new phone has 3G support, give it some Internet radio access as well.

The key thing about both mine and Michael’s tips is this: none of them require significant engineering work by the manufacturers. That’s right, you could make a Chocolate 2.0 without a major redesign. In the meantime, I’ll stick with the chocolate I love right now.

My So-Called Digital Life

Posted on October 15, 2006 by Jeremy Toeman

Finally! I’ve wanted to use that subject line since I started the blog (yeah, I know others have used it too, but I discovered that after the fact)! Well, I made it to the Digital Life show in New York City this week, took a few pics, and here’s the report…

The show opened on Thursday, and even before the doors opened, a huge line built for people who really wanted to get in. This topic will come up a few times, but I think a lot of industry people miss the fact that this is an exciting show for consumers. Quite a few of my colleagues mentioned to me they didn’t see anything new, or there wasn’t much exciting gadgetry on display, but they forget that the average person out there does not see nearly the same stuff people like me get to see. Show someone an HTC Excalibur (T-Mobile Dash) and they typically ask what is that??? I’ve read about it for months, and started using one weeks ago. That’s what makes Digital Life fun – you get to see consumers’ reactions to the same technology that’s become almost mundane for us industry types.

That said, I personally wasn’t over-the-top excited as Barry Myers (the big brains behind the show) wished Sonic the Hedgehog a “Happy 15th Birthday” but a lot of the kids around sure got a kick out of it. Sonic’s aging well, by the way, doesn’t look a day over 12.

The show was large (not CEDIA-large, but large enough), about 2/3 of the floor was dedicated to booths, the other 1/3 for gaming tournaments. Looked like the kids were really enjoying the gaming, again my assumption is that this was one of the first times most people actually got to play Xbox 360 in high-def (well, other than those in debt of course) or see the PS3 in person. I even saw an area for “amateur” gaming, but judging by my ridiculously poor performance in Halo 2 against my 11-year-old cousin, I ran for the hills.

Many larger companies had booths, including Intel, Microsoft, HP, Alienware, Toshiba, Best Buy, etc. It’s interesting to watch these companies try to learn and react to Digital Life in their attempts to build the right booths. Toshiba’s booth looked like the same thing they use for CES, with the addition of a “Deal or No Deal” game (called “Mobile or No Mobile”), and Intel’s booth was all about futuristic tech. AMD had The Quadfather (ugh – come on AMD, we like you and root for you, but nobody wants puns!), and HP had some medley of printers, displays, and pink stuff. I think Microsoft did a great job at showing off the two things the average show attendee was likely most interested in: XBox and Vista. Sure they had some other demos incorporated as well, but the messaging was clearly consumer-driven. Good job there.

Some of my booth/visit highlights:

WowWee (the makers of the Robosapien product line) had a simple booth showing the robots in all their AI glory. I really like this company, and am looking forward to seeing how they expand their product line next year.
White Box Robotics was located in the Ziff-Davis “digital lounge” where they were showing their $5000 “PC-BOT.” My friend Steven Jones (from TechLore/Capable) thinks it’s a wonderful idea, but I’m mixed. There’s clearly no consumer application here, so we’ve got to look at it as an industrial device. I just don’t see why I need a “robot” that is really a computer on wheels with some sensors when I can diversify that into one computer (or even more than one) and distributed sensors and networked cameras. With the “robot” approach, I have a very expensive thing to fix when it breaks, when it’s diversified I can cheaply and easily replace broken modules. But maybe I’m not seeing the bigger picture here, any comments on this from the peeps out there?
UT Starcom was, unfortunately, not showing the SMT5800, but they did have this waterproof cell phone instead. Meh. I guess it’s good for all those people who keep dropping their phones in the toilet, or maybe my friend Ben who thinks his phone is a good baby chew toy…
Slappa showed all their awesome CD/DVD cases and laptop bags. I really like this company and think they make some of the best products in both categories. Got a chance to talk to them, nice people. Check out their latest entry, a CD case specifically designed for DJ’s (not 100% sure if that link is right). Want to know why it’s smart/cool? They worked with DJ’s to design it. It’s super easy to design products in a vacuum (Sony Network Walkman, hello?), and I respect the smart companies who understand their customers and target markets.
Mio Technology showed a few of their “Digital Walkers” – GPS systems with a few extra frills. I like the user interface and the well-done integration with Windows Mobile, but (as I mentioned to their reps), I really want to see them throw the whole phone integration in place. Even as an unlocked GPRS phone, they could get a lot of traction in an HTC/Imate-like approach to the world. Keep an eye on em (although since I still haven’t played with one, my Garmin Nuvi 350 is still my personal pick).

My personal “best in show” pick absolutely goes to the Sony Reader product. Now I’m not saying to rush out and buy one yet, as I haven’t used it personally, but it is just soooo pretty. Their user interface is a bit clunky (which, being a Sony product, might be a little redundant), and the buttons don’t feel right, but the size and screen are otherwise perfect. It’s light-weight enough to hold comfortably, but I would love to see them add a simple strap on the back to easily keep it in your hand (would be very helpful for the people I know who fall asleep while reading). Most important is the screen – it looks like paper. It might be a generation or two until the product really works as it should (tbd), but it’s an amazing thing to see.

My last batch of pictures are all a little more personal… First, Michael Gartenberg gets interviewed where he is most likely prognosticating on gadgets, gizmos, and whatnots. I didn’t see the taping, but I’ve got to assume he received no fewer than 7 calls on his 3 phones during the 5 minute shoot.

Next there were a couple of Slingbox demos. First, we had the Slingbox PRO on display in the ZD digital lounge (hooked up to a new Digeo Moxi box). Also I spent some time with Matt Whitlock (from SlingCommunity and TechLore) who interviewed Brian Jaquet (Sling Media’s Director of PR) about the upcoming SlingPlayer Mac software.

I also got to walk around with Dave Zatz for a bit (read his moblog of the show here). Highlight moment was goign to the iBloks booth, where we watched a couple of go-go dancers shaking their stuff. I perched in front of the booth while Mr. Z walked into the middle, and we snapped a fantastic pic of the dancers trying to figure out what the heck he was doing there. CLASSIC!

Lastly, my Dad happened to be in New York at the same time, so I had him come by the show for an hour or so and we walked the floor together. This was especially fun for me, as I rarely get the opportunity to really show him anything about my industry. Sure he knows what a Slingbox is, and he gets that a lot is afoot in the digital media space, but this was his first tech trade show. He was genuinely interested in walking around and seeing new stuff, and that experience was really insightful for me to watch.

I’ll reiterate what I said at the beginning of this post: DigitalLife is a great consumer show. If you are an industry guy or gal, it’s not going to show you new tech. Instead, you’ll see your customers’ reactions to the products you build. And that, my dear readers, is truly priceless.

iRiver Clix review: sure it clicks, but does it click?

Posted on September 3, 2006 by Jeremy Toeman

No there isn’t a typo in the headline for my review of the 2GB iRiver Clix, another portable media player trying to take a small bite out of the amazingly large pie that is otherwise known as Apple’s MP3 player market. I must say, whenever I get a new device to try out, I start off with some kind of desperate hope that it will be good enough to at least compete with the juggernaut that is iPod. For what I’ve seen to date, the Clix is close.

For a quick definition: the iRiver Clix is either a “portable media player” or an MP3 player capable of showing photos and videos (take your pick for which you prefer). It’s small (fits in the palm of your hand) and has a gorgeous screen. The most novel thing about the Clix is the fact that the screen itself is “clickable” – if you want to navigate up a list of MP3s, you actually click on the upper screen region. Sean Alexander has a video of using the Clix that really shows off the usage, graphical user interface (GUI), buttons, etc. One of my favorite ‘little touches’ of the Clix is the ‘hold’ button actually prevents the directional screen from being clickable while locked. Excellent touch.

Pictured above is the Clix in its standard carrying case, which is small enough to easily fit in any pocket. I really like the size and feel of the Clix, and also like the weight. In fact, it has the feel as if they intentionally made the device heavier than is needed, which I think is a good thing. I find the iPod way too heavy, and the Nano is way too light – the Clix is about the right size and right weight to do the job.

iRiver did take a few packaging cues from Apple. When you open the main box, every little piece inside comes in its own smaller box. Then, inside each box is an individually wrapped cable. While everything is recyclable, I’d really like to see a few companies take an environmentally conscious step ahead of the design curve and have a whole lot less plastic and paper inside.

The Clix did work extremely well “out of the box” and the first time I connected it to my PC, it immediately started charging and Windows recognized it as a “Clix” (even with a cute little icon). In fact, there wasn’t any plug & pray at all, it really worked exactly as expected. I had already upgraded to Windows Media Player 11 (now in second beta), so as soon as I selected to synchronize files, WMP appeared, all set to transfer media files.

Moving music and photos onto the Clix was quite easy. Drag and drop inside Windows Media Player, or for those who don’t feel like installing it (yet), you can also find your Clix as a drive inside My Computer (for the technospeak – it appears as a USB mass storage device).

When it comes to moving video files, the Clix wasn’t nearly as graceful. This is actually my biggest disappointment with the device and probably the only thing that prevents it from being a head-on competitor to the iPod. The device natively supports a few video formats, which didn’t include Windows Media Video, which is a must-have for me (see the specifications for the list of formats it does support). The company referred me to try a third-party (open source) software called iriverter. It too, unfortunately, didn’t work.

Once the files were moved over, I have to say using the Clix is a mostly satisfying experience. The GUI is very easy to use. I’ve tried handing it to multiple people tasking them to “play some music” and everyone figured it out on the first try. In fact, it’s almost fun to use it, even when you aren’t watching/listening to media. Without diving into too many details, the Clix media playback features are all the ones you’d want or expect, including queueing, playlists, rating, etc.

During the transfer, Windows Media Player automatically converted my photos into the right size (320×240) and created a folder structure on the Clix based on the photo folder hierarchy on my PC. So “My Photos > Wedding pix” was perfectly replicated on the Clix. This has a slight drawback in that it isn’t configurable in any way, so when I dragged in a folder deep into my My Photos directories, the entire hierarchy appeared as well.

In addition to media playback, the Clix also supports text browsing, Flash games (you can browse more to download here), has an alarm clock, FM radio, and a suite of other supplemental features. While 2GB might only hold a small portion of your media, I must say everything about using the Clix itself once media is tranferred is really a great experience. The only other drawback I had for the product is somehow the internal database in the unit I was using got corrupted. I actually had to do a whole ‘reformatting’ of the internal memory before I could use it again. This was an isolated experience, and easy enough to fix, but might have caused me more pause had I bought/unlocked a lot of music on the device.

For another detailed review, check this at Gearlive, or you can go to Engadget for a series of reviews. The size is right, the price is right, the product is good, the screen is great. My only caution is if you really want the product primarily for video playback, you may have to jump through a bunch of hurdles to get your files transferred properly. If you are looking for a really good iPod nano alternative, and your focus is more music/photos than video, I heartily recommend trying the Clix. Plus all the cool kids over at MTV are using it.

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