LIVEdigitally

Category Archives: General

links for 2006-11-03

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Out Damned Spyware, Out!

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Things like spyware, malware, spam, viruses, and the popularity of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan (although she was Hot in Mean Girls) all completely baffle me.  I understand that everyone wants to make a buck, but I just don’t get how people can really sleep at night.  Thankfully, for as much energy as the evil people put into developing their tricks, there is a lot of goodwill being done at the same time.  Our old pal Jonas put together a roundup of several free anti-spyware tools, and it’s a good read (unless you are on the Microsoft Defender team, in which case you have some coding to do).

Technology Emmy Award Nominees/Winners Announced

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It’s amazing to read, but the same organization that only last year lauded “Everybody Loves Raymond” with “Outstanding Comedy Series” is now recognizing Sling Media, Visible World, TiVo, Moxi, Revver, and other new digital media companies with technology-related Emmys.  This is great to see, as it’s important sign that the whole industry is moving forward to embrace such technologies and services. 

Here’s the entire list:

  • The Emmy Award for Pioneering Development of On Screen Display (OSD) for Setup, Control and Configuration of Consumer Television Equipment:
    • RCA 
  • The Emmy Award for Streaming Media Architectures and Components:
    • Microsoft
    • Adobe
    • Real
    • Apple
  • The Emmy Award for Pioneering Development for Combining Multiple Transport Streams Which Are Already Encoded, Using Rate-Shaping and Statistical Re-multiplexing:
    • Terayon Communication Systems 
  • The Emmy Award for Development and Implementation of Automatically Assembled Dynamic Customized TV Advertising:
    • Visible World
    • Weather Channel 
  • The Emmy Award for Technology Advances in Serial Digital Interface Solutions, Enabling Over 20 Years of Seamless Studio and Broadcast Infrastructure migration:
    • Gennum Corporation
  • The Emmy Award for Privately Owned and Operated International Satellite Company Primarily for International Video Services:
    • Rene Anselmo, PanAmSat
  • The nominees for Outstanding Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for the Synchronous Enhancement of Original Television Content are:
    • DirecTV Interactive Sports – DirecTV
    • HSN Shop by Remote – HSN
    • NBC Olympics Now – BIAP Systems, Inc. 
  • The nominees for Outstanding Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for the Non-Synchronous Enhancement of Original Television Content are:
    • CNN Enhanced – CNN/Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
    • Fantasy Football Tracker – BIAP Systems, Inc.
    • Passions Vendetta – NBC.com
    • Sopranos:   Crime. Organized – Deep Focus
    • The Cultivated Life:  Thomas Jefferson & Wine – NetBlender
    • The-N.com Video Mixer – The N 
  • The nominees for Outstanding Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for the Creation of Non-Traditional Programs or Platforms are:
    • Entriq, Inc. Mobile Technology – Entriq, Inc.
    • Switched Broadcast is Transforming TV – Big Band Networks
    • The Slingbox – Sling Media
    • Vid-Wave – Boxx Communications 
  • The nominees for Outstanding Innovation and Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for the Best Use of Personal Media Display and Presentation Technology are:
    • Screen 3 – Hill & Knowlton/Motorola
    • Sectional Navigation Architecture – GoTV Networks
    • Xross Media Box – SONY
  • The nominees for Outstanding Innovation and Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for the Best Use of “On Demand” Technology Over Private (closed) Networks are:
    • Guided TV – ABC On Demand – Disney – ABC Television Group
    • Moxi Adelphie On Demand Browser – Digeo
    • Time Warner Cable’s Start Over – Time Warner Cable, Concurrent Computer Corp., Big Band Networks, Harmonic Inc., Scientific Atlanta. 
  • The nominees for Outstanding Innovation and Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for the Best Use of “On Demand” Technology Over the Public (open) Internet are:
    • ABC.com Full Episode Streaming Player – Disney – ABC Television Group
    • AOL Music’s Top 11 Countdown Show – AOL, LLC
    • GameTap – GameTap, Turner Broadcasting
    • Revver.com – Revver
    • Stim TV – NPOWR
    • Vongo – Starz
  • The nominees for Outstanding Innovation and Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for Best Use by Commercials in Creation and Use in Non Traditional Platforms and Technologies are:
    • ABC.com Full Episode Streaming Player – Disney-ABC Television Group
    • Ravenstoke – Turner Broadcasting Systems, Inc.
    • TiVo Interactive Advertising Platform – TiVo Inc.

More from the official Emmy site here. Conspicuously absent are YouTube, DivX (codec and/or Stage6), MSN Soapbox, and other online plays.  Maybe next year…

Mobile Web Biz Plan Competition

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In an interesting alliance, Nokia, the government of Finland and Red Herring have come together (it’s gotta be the herring) to offer a competition to who can put together the most compelling mobile Web business plan.  This is excellent timing in my opinion (read this story at GigaOm if you don’t believe me), as the only space on a par with the excitement of Internet video is mobile technology and mobile lifestyle (with the combination of the two being at the peak of JT’s fictitious hot-meter).

The Web-2-Mobile Business Plan Competition is open to any “qualified” entrepreneur, which is an interesting choice of words – who exactly is an unqualified entrepreneur anyway?  It’s probably just to deter people like that crazy Omarosa woman from the Apprentice.

The nitty gritty is as follows…

  • Schedule
    • December 10th: applications due
    • January 2nd: finalists announced
    • January 27th: winners selected
  • Signing Up
  •  Prize/What you can win
    • Profile in Red Herring magazine
    • Invitation to Nokia labs to develop the application(s)
    • 1 year’s supply of smoked herring (prize not guaranteed) 

I hope this event encourages some of those who might be too timid to go down the scary VC route of funding a company to try something new.  I believe there is a ton of opportunity to innovate in the mobile lifestyle space.  Some ideas I’d love to see launch in the next few months/years:

  • Mobile travel lookups and booking: I don’t need all the features of Travelocity on the road, but I’d love the ability to quickly lookup and book some simple itineraries (think: “find me the next trip on United from LAX to SFO).  Throw in location-based services for hotel bookings and there’s a nice winner here (the incentive?  how about the 12 million Windows mobile phones that are likely shipping in 2006? nice market). 
  • Mobile bus/public transit routing:  While I am building my own simple interface to the Bay Area’s 511 trip planner, making a full-fledged mobile Web/SMS mechanism for finding routes is a nice idea.  Not exactly sure what the business model is here, but I’m sure some clever team can figure it out.
  • Massively Multiplayer Mobile Gaming: Is that a term?  I should probably just google it and not be so lazy (google results: the term is barely in use).  I kill a lot of time with solitaire, nethack, and sudoku.  If there was some simple multiplayer game I could jump in and out of for 10-30 minutes at a time, I’d sign up.

Ok, that made my brain tired.  Time to watch Heroes and get all happy.

links for 2006-11-01

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Slingbox for Mac now available in beta!

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I’ll start by being a little upfront about something here – I’m not a “Mac guy.”  While I don’t really identify as the “PC guy” from the commercials either (although the spoofs are great), I don’t own a Mac, and probably won’t get one any time soon.  I have no problem with the Mac folks out there, and appreciate all the ingenuity Apple brings to their products.  But I’m not a Mac guy (or an iPod guy either for that matter, but for a totally unrelated reason).

Funny enough, back when I worked at Sling Media, I was a huge proponent of enabling SlingPlayer Mac support for the Slingbox.  I believe the Mac community, as a whole, appreciates the convergence of computing and media, and tend towards early adoption of most new media technology.  I think the iTV product is more likely to succeed in the “get your home media collection from your computer to your TV” vision that so many others have failed in delivering in the past.  With any luck, Apple will help open the “digital home” marketplace for many others to come participate in, as none have shown success to date.

Back to the matter at hand: Sling Media made SlingPlayer for OSX available in beta today (here’s the download).  There’s already a flood of conversation on the SlingCommunity, and even a great note from Blake himself talking about the issue.  I’m thrilled to see the build come out within the adjusted schedule (here’s about 900 or so posts on the topic if you want some backstory on the issue), and I know the team back at Sling HQ must be pretty happy with the launch – way to go y’all.

As I’m not a Mac guy myself, I don’t have a review to offer up, but it’s already being mentioned on TUAW, RealTechNews, and my friend Dave Zatz managed to get a post up just before sneaking off to bed (poor East coaster).  To get an unbiased account of the software, check out the very in-depth review one of the beta testers wrote here. 

Happy downloading!

links for 2006-10-31

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Arrested Development Chicken Dance. COME ON!

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While hanging out with Steven Jones from Capable Networks tonight, we did a little A.D. reminiscing (Ron was there too, but he doesn’t watch the show, so he gets no credit). It left me a little sad and longing, and even after watching a couple of episode from my DVR with the ol’ Slingbox I still wasn’t quite ready to move on. I needed a little of GOB’s Chicken Dance, and it only took a single search on YouTube to find a perfect compilation:

links for 2006-10-28

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links for 2006-10-27

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An obvious nonacquisition

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About a year and a half ago the blogosphere was, shall we say, all-a-twitter, about a new startup called Odeo.  They were founded as a “podcasting company” and that was pretty much the last we ever heard from them (which could be because they seem to have annoyed Mike Arrington, which is apparently a curse worse than death in the Web 2.0 world).  Although if you’d ever had the chance to run into someone who worked there, you’d generally get lectured on end about how amazing they were and how much they were going to change the world.  I even recall a Stanford intern who visited my office and was choosing between working for them or for Google (my hunch is that he chose… poorly).

While doing a little research, I found a great article on GigaOm where the founder of the company, Evan Williams, espoused on some mistakes they made.  Notably absent from the list are things like “generating revenue” and “have a sales and marketing plan.”  That said, I do applaud anyone who takes the time to reflect as such, especially in a public forum.

Today Evan announced that he is now founding a new company, called Obvious Corp, and they have purchased Odeo’s assets (which is marketing-speak for “bought the chairs, desks, servers, logos, a little software, and the foosball table”).  So the question that comes to mind for me is: what is going to change?

From Evan’s blog:

The Obvious model goes something like this:

  • Build things cheaply and rapidly by keeping teams small and self-organized.
  • Leverage technology, know-how, and infrastructure across products (but brand them separately, so they’re focused and easy to understand)
  • Use the aggregate attention and user base of the network to gain traction for new services faster than they could gain awareness independentlyAs services mature, the goal is to get them to profitability with advertising and/or subscriptions, so they can add to the network (and fund more building). 

    • As Fred Wilson stated, this is, in fact, fairly obvious.  It’s the classic Idealab model, and it’s definitely a fun way to run a company.  But it’s also an extremely expensive model.  Roughly 9 in 10 startups completely fail, and then roughly 9 in 10 of the ones that “make it” have minor acquisitions that make a few people a nice chunk of change, but leave the majority of the teams involved unsatiated.  This leaves us with about 1% of companies that can “pull a Youtube” (although Idealab did start the company which eventually became Overture, which Yahoo bought, so that’s probably a pretty good win in the long term). UPDATE: I originally posted that Google acquired Overture, but Ryan pointed out it was Yahoo – thanks for the comment Ryan!

    So the question at hand is (it’s a 2-parter): how much money does Obvious have to run (and where is it coming from) and how big is the team they are building to create all these new services.  Hopefully they can spin something out fast enough to generate enough revenue to pay for the development of the rest of the services – I do like the model of aggregating all these types of resources together.  Maintaining Google Labs is a lot easier when you have an Adsense to pay the hosting fees.