LIVEdigitally

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.

    I Dugg something: Borat is the new Mahir!

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    Jason Calacanis wrote a simple post with a picture of Mahir, and it reminded me how much the “Mahir craze” had me going.  I had Mahir wallpaper, burned a Mahir CD, and even had a Mahir lunchbox.  No, not really on the last one, but I did think it was utterly hysterical and recall laughing to the point of crying over and over again.  Thanks for the reminder, Jason.

    ps – this is my second foray at Digging something.  Am I a Top Digger yet?

    pps – was I supposed to use Netscape instead of Digg?  Does it matter?

    links for 2006-10-26

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    Gadget Search: Testing Google Co-op

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    For those of you who live in caves, up on trees, or under rocks, Google launched a Custom Search feature this past week (lots more coverage here). The basic concept is this: anyone can go to Google co-op, login, and create a new custom search with their own favorite sites and some predefined search categories (called refinements).  So here’s the LD Gadget Search:

    Try searching for some kind of, well, gadget.  Go ahead, it won’t hurt.

    Ok, if you don’t want to do so, I’ve gone ahead and done some searches to try it out.

    For my first test, I tried PPC as my search term.  In gadgetland, we know PPC means PocketPC (search results here), but check out if you search for PPC in all of Google.  Pilgrims Pride??

    Second try, searching for the Slingbox.  LD Gadget vs Google general.  Well, in this case the search sites are basically news/reviews/blogs/pricing sites, and don’t include any manufacturers, so my custom search did not outperform the generic one.

    Third test, searching for iPod prices.  I used the ‘Prices’ refinement (which I built with a few comparison and shopping sites) to get these results, versus searching for ipod prices on Google.  I think my customization here gave significantly worse results, and will need to go see if its something I should do different (bad grammar out of courtesy to the Apple marketing department).

    Fourth up, looking for Zune news.  I figured I’d try a hot term, and built a ‘news’ refinement (results here) to compare against Google.  Now these results are quite interesting, as the generic search surfaced the dozens of new Zune news sites which have popped up.  Personally, I prefered the custom results, as I am more interested in Engadget’s update than I am in adding ZuneNation to my news sources (no offense or anything to that site, I just don’t feel like adding more sites to my already overlong bookmarks and links lists).

    I’ll keep working on the LD Gadget Search to see if I can make it a really useful resource over time.  In the meantime, please feel free to add any suggestions to the implementation.  Also, in the very nature of the “co-op” it’s easy to have additional folks come in and edit the sites and settings, so come on in, the water’s fine!

    links for 2006-10-25

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    Do you Need HDTV? Absofreakinglutely!

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    I was perusing Dave Zatz’ site this morning and noticed his new contributor Mari (congrats!) mused on HDTV with the post “Does Mari Need HD?”

    I’ve had a DVR for five years now, but I still haven’t picked up an HDTV. Honestly, I have trouble believing I need it and trouble believing it will make that much of a difference in my TV-watching career. Which is why Dave Winer’s recent commentary got my attention: He didn’t offer any great new analysis, but he proclaimed HD is “a life-changer.”

    JT HDTV (4)I couldn’t agree more.  But I somewhat understand Mari here, because I feel there’s a big “my living room effect” that needs to occur before you can really understand how much you need it.  Especially as all the HD tech can be confusing – plasma or DLP or LCD?  HDMI or Component video?  Cable vs OTA vs Satellite – blech, that’s a lot to learn about and even then you have to go throw down about $1500 to really get started.  I did write a post to help explain HDTV technology, but I acknowledge the buying process is still much more painful than it should be.I’ve watched HDTV demos at shows like CES and CEDIA for the past 7 or 8 years.  Cool.  Beautiful looking.  I’ve been to the headquarters of companies such as Sony and Pioneer in Japan, saw the state of the art displays and sound demonstrations.  Awe-inspiring stuff.  I’ve walked the aisles of Best Buy seeing all the maxed-out brightness on display.  Very very nice.

    And then I had a moment where I was able to get a 32″ LCD extremely cheaply, and I took the plunge.  A week later and I’m watching my Syntax Olevia set connected to my Motorola DCT 6412 dual-tuner HDTV DVR.  And I’m transported into a new state of TV. During hockey, I can see all the game.  The nature shows on Discover HD are unbelievable.  Regular dramas look like movies.  Here are some of my quick pictures of my setup, and here are a few from my friend Dave.

    To be clear: ALL HDTV looks better than ALL REGULAR DVDs (and HD-DVD/BluRay look about equivalent).  So when ABC aired Pirates of the Caribbean a few weeks ago, it looked better than the picture of the DVD, even on my upscaling Samsung DVD player.

    The entire quality of the experience is so much better that standard definition TV is becoming harder and harder to watch.  I actually started dropping shows from my DVR’s subscription list just because they weren’t broadcast in HD!  I have about 20 channels today, of which 3 were added in the past few months, and I’ve been told more are coming soon.  Also, HD is going to be one of those driving factors as to why TV still has a bit of a pulse, as opposed to those who think it’s dead.

    JT HDTV (2)Watching HDTV is like putting on glasses when you need them.  Would you take your glasses off while driving down the street?  Doubtful, but you might not have realized you need to wear them.Ultimately, I think the biggest way people get won over to HD is not by reading posts like this, but by being in someone’s house and watching it.  Not just that it’s on the in background, but watched.  So Mari (and other nonbelievers), pick your favorite “mainstream” show (CSI, Grey’s, Heroes, etc) and for the next two weeks, try to find a friend who has HDTV and watch it with them. 

    That just might help you find the need for the glasses.