This year, I had the chance to visit CeBit 2010 for the very first time. It was an anticlimactic experience. Being raised with reports of CESs and Macworlds, you can’t help but hope to stumble on the next big thing, but what I was confronted with what had the air of a dusty town ripped out of a Western movie after all the gold diggers left for fairer grounds. In this case, the gold drought is the recession, and the aftermath (to me) appeared as a number of very empty spaces and the remainder seemingly under-budgeted, not “2010 innovative” but 2007 innovative, and with a big sticker on their back saying: “I’m under-confident, please buy something!”

To me, the most interesting technologies were 3D and a massage chair that took me under for 20 min. The biggest news story, however, was USB 3.0, a sad state of affairs if 2010 is marked by a tiny, soon to be in every computer, plug (no matter how fast that damn thing is).

Ignoring the massage chair, which I can’t recommend enough, 3D was the hot topic, inspired by, of course, Avatar. Everybody, from Nokia to Nvidia, appeared to have something related to 3D. They mostly had excuses for it—Nokia was pimping its high bandwidth infrastructure for 3D content aimed at TV & telephone providers; Nvida was pimping its 3D shutter technology for consumer PCs; Frauenhofer Institut was pimping its glasses-less 3D technology; and more and more and more—but my end-conclusion, also after trying to explore the potential for a revolution that was Avatar, was that 3D is an excellent gimmick that will draw a crowd to your stand or cinema, but will leave you disappointed 2/3 times.

Ironically, Nokia had the most impressive display of 3D, showing it off on a 15,000 euro JVC flatscreen. When asked for details, however, all they could tell me was the price of the TV and that their bandwidth technology was not for sale to the “likes of me.” Very arrogant, those Nokia folk and it wasn’t just the 3D guy either… Nvidia’s shutter glasses also worked well and I see a real potential for 3D gaming. Frauenhofer’s glasses-less 3D-TV… pah! The problem with 3D is that it’s so easy to do it badly and 3D without glasses is far from ready. 3D with glasses is far from ready!

I don’t get the obsession with not wearing glasses either. First of all, they’re roomy, which means that you can wear them over existing glasses, they won’t make the claustrophobic more claustrophobic, and they’re disposable. Putting on glasses in the living room is kind of like turning off the light when watching TV.

Last, but not least, I liked lcReflex, which developed an interesting, if not very portable contraption, that makes applications on a computer screen three-dimensional. It involves something they call a Stereomonitor, two screens joined together at a 90 degree angle (one front-facing, one on top facing down) and a semi-transparent mirror in the middle. Put on glasses and you can manipulate an image of brain in 3 dimensions, which should be very interesting for, eh, brain-scientists and playing 3D Tetris.

What’s fairly clear is that we are very close to having 3D in our living rooms, whether it’s for playing games or for watching (selected) TV-shows and movies. But 3D has the same problem that HD-DVDs and -TVs have, which is that it’s insanely niche. You can’t play everything on it and you need some pretty expensive equipment to play it. That combination doesn’t justify much of an investment in it.

The best chances for success belong to companies like Nvidia, which produce consumer-priced solutions for consuming content. Add to this that it is (relatively speaking) fairly easy to convert digital content from 2D to 3D. I very much see the next stage of gaming to becoming 3D.

I’m much more bearish on video-media. Great that cinemas have found a new revenue stream to subsidise their troubled existence. Great that 7 out of 10 filmmakers are considering to make their next film in 3D. I don’t think cinemas have to worry about living rooms competing with them on that level anytime soon. While the need for a big screen to enjoy 3D is a myth well-worth breaking (and it soon will be in gaming), it is still a powerful way to experience a movie and something you can sell at €/$ 15 a pop. Home-entertainment still has the expensive technology problem and the fact that BluRay DVDs simply aren’t selling to anyone except Playstation 3 owners.

As mentioned, 3D’s gimmick power is strong, but that will wear off after having 3D technology in your living room and hardly any media to consume on it. It’s much better off in cinemas where the growing few pay a few bucks more to see space debris floating above their heads, or on consoles where the price of a 3D add-on is hardly more than buying a Guitar Hero guitar.

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The following is a draft I wrote prior to the announcement of the iPad, but which I didn’t publish because it was a series of hypotheses based on an as yet non-existing product. It’s a series of thoughts on how an interface of a touchscreen larger than an iPhone might look like. It is inspired by both my experiences with Macs and since recently with an iPod Touch. Here goes.

A couple of thoughts I had last night (written on 13.01.2010) about interfaces, the current state of development for the iPhone OS, how Apple could build a hybrid of Mac and iPhone OS, and how the company could build multi-tasking into its rumoured tablet. My thought were the following:

a. A new category: I don’t think the iTablet, if it exists, will be either a Mac or an iPhone. My super-superficial reason: it doesn’t fit in the Mac line-up depicted on the online Apple Store (see pic), but a more underlying reason is that I don’t see space for it in either a Mac-category or a Mobile phone/media player category. Which is not to say that it won’t do either well, but I think it will more fall into the class of Netbooks, though of course with the purpose of bombing those low-tech, low-innovation devices out of the water… just like Apple did with MP3 players and with Phones. Note from today: as it turns out, the iPad is depicted below the iPod, iPhone, and Mac lines, but time will tell where it will be once it’s on sale.

b. The Keyboard: I think that any 10″ screen will demand more connectivity to secondary (Apple) devices than the iPhone allows for. That means, an external keyboard and mouse, which transforms the tablet into a desktop. I have less complaints about the software-keyboard now, after working with a Touch for a while, but I still don’t see it as an alternative for longer texts, which a larger screen would warrant. Some months ago, I made a stupid mock-up of the iPhone + a keyboard (see pic), which is how I envision it looking (only better).

c. The App Store: 3 Billion Apps downloaded, Apple just reported, which also suggests a kind of lock-in. For better or worse, developers have accepted the App-store and I think it works for several reasons for both, namely more protection from pirates, more predictability for developers when developing for the black hole that is Apple, and more control by Apple, which is what Apple likes, not to mention new income streams for both. I think the App Store will continue to exist and will present new challenges when talking about a larger screen. Note from today: I don’t believe that what we will get to see in less than two months will be that what people were playing around with after the Apple keynote. iPhone apps inflated to a larger screen, come on?

d: The User Interface: I’ve written previously about Quick Look in Snow Leopard and how I also dug its slight innovation in terms of in-icon playing of media. Previously, OS X also introduced Dashboard into Tiger (I believe), whose interface, on the surface at least, resembles the iPhone. My view is that Apple will give developers the option to just keep the same resolution apps as they have offered before, though not exclusively of course. But imagine “Quick Looking” an app and still having it run inside its “Icon,” while the user does something else. For the rest, I of course think that full-screen Apps will exist, which is where Dashboard comes in, or at least a type of Dashboard. (Note: that was wrong. More below.)

e. Integration with the Mac: One of the most underused interfaces, at least on my Mac, is Dashboard, which allows people to have continuously open widgets on anything from news, to games, to radio, to system monitoring. It’s useful for those purposes, but not really something i spend more than a few minutes at a time with. Yet the first thing that came to mind when thinking of a “Tablet,” using both iPhone and Mac interface components, was Dashboard. It creates a new layer on top of a traditional desktop, allowing for user-input and information display. When I envision someone running the apps that would work on the “iTablet” also, I think of it either being that you open up a new layer on your Mac and run the very same apps on it through something like a Dashboard-like interface. Or, and the simplest solution is usually the best, through having the Tablet sync through iTunes with regular applications on the Mac.

Note from today: well, obviously this was wrong, but there have been several theories aired of having a type of Dashboard on the iPad for apps like calculator and weather, which don’t at all make sense to run in single focus on a larger screen than the iPhone.

Further thoughts from today: I do think that we will see a new OS update for both the iPhone and iPad before the release of the iPad. This will address the concerns that people have about it just being a larger iPod Touch. For the rest, to me the only downside to this device is the lack of a front-facing camera for video-calling, and some minor things. And I also think it’s the perfect “parent device!” What the Wii was to gaming, the iPad is to computing, addressing a very very blue ocean.

As previously stated, I’m still in line to get one this year, though only after trying one first.

Vincent

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This movie was one I anticipated for some time. I’m a Sci-Fi geek, a movie freak, and a Cameron disciple (ever since Terminator 2). Most important to me today however: seeing whether the world of cinema was about to change forever… or not. My review will *not* be about the story, but about a number of themes it addresses, namely the 3D experience, motion capture, and (some spoilers) it’s environmental message.

First, the 3D experience. I’m afraid I didn’t like it very much from where I was sitting. And that I learned is one of the keys to watching a 3D flick, you have to experience it just right.

A couple of thoughts on the human experience: You have to wear glasses, you have to sit in the right place, and no one can pass the screen to go to the bathroom or else all is destroyed.

• The glasses: there are generally 2 types of glasses used in 3D cinema, active ones with shutter technology, and passive ones, which are just like regular, slightly over-sized sunglasses. I used the latter. Having biked for 30 min. at full speed just to get to the cinema on time (that’s how geeky I am about this), I found that sweat really didn’t agree with these glasses. The cinema provided me with one of those alcohol drenched tissues, but that definitely didn’t last me through the two+ hour movie. For the rest, I found them a little dark and the image without them was a lot clearer, though of course not meant for regular 2D viewing.
• Sitting just right: so I arrived to a packed cinema, meaning that I had to sit bottom-center-right and also that I have to try to see the movie again in a more empty cinema. To me the viewing experience definitely seemed sub-par and I will have to research optimal placement prior to seeing my next 3D movie.
• Other people’s bladders: so a couple of things disrupted the experience: my seating position, the subtitles, and people passing the 3D screen to go to the bathroom. The latter seemed to disrupt the image physically with the light of the entire image actually changing, and my thought is that they must have disrupted the beamer in some way. And while the subtitles seemed to float as much as the rest of the objects (see next paragraphs), they took away from the illusion of staring into a wonderful 3D world at times.

Generally, I think that Avatar should actually be viewed in an IMAX theater, which has a far larger screen and is designed for 3D, and not a regular cinema converted to 3D, which seems to be all the rage these days. And while dubbed movies kind of suck, I think it may be a better choice for people like me residing in a non-English country.

THE BIG QUESTION: So how was the actual 3D? Apart from the qualms I mentioned, actually pretty interesting! A few years ago, I watched Superman Returns at an IMAX, which required me to put and take my 3D glasses on and off as a green or red symbol appeared on screen and that sucked. But for Avatar, I could keep the glasses on all the time.

The 3D itself wasn’t the pop-out kind either, rather it was like you were looking into a window at 3D objects. In one scene, Sam Worthington’s character was exploring the alien jungle and looking at some exquisite flowers and it felt to me like I was standing opposite him looking at the same objects, which was nothing short of amazing!

I liked 3D a lot in slow scenes like this, but fast scenes such as battles were a little harder to follow. Cameron tells one hell of a story though, which drew you into the picture regardless.

Topic 2: Motion capture
The actual revolution that this movie is supposed to herald is the new kind of motion capture used, called performance capture. As far as I understand it, it allows for a few innovations in film making: accurately capturing face movement, having real characters interact realistically with virtual ones, and, for the camera person, seeing in realtime the result of the performance capture through the camera’s viewfinder.

THE BIG QUESTION: did it work? Hell yes!!! You notice it first with the female antagonist, Neytiri played by Zoe Saldaña (I had no idea!), who is completely “performance captured,” and whom you fall in love with within a few minutes. Her face shows an amazing range of emotions, from anger to joy, that demands an emotional response from the viewer. The last time I found myself infatuated with a virtual character was in King Kong, where I felt real sympathy with this fantastical character that Peter Jackson brought to screen.

Topic 3: the environmental message (limited spoilers ahead!)
Yes, one of the strongest themes of this movie was preserving a planet, respecting it’s inhabitants, both plant and creature. It was very powerful, I thought, but some people may consider it as preachy.

The problem with this message is that following it would require us to abandon 99% of our technology and return to a lifestyle more connected with nature and I’m very sceptical that this could ever happen, certainly not in time for this century’s crisis.

What Avatar manages to show is that the human race, through it’s relentless need for progress and profit, will always end up destroying that which exists in order to create something new. Avatar condemns our race to a “dying planet” and it can’t send a sadder message than that.

In Conclusion:
Above all, Avatar is an Action and Sci-Fi flick, and a good one at that, but it also makes you think, which many of Cameron’s movie seem to do. Definitely a re-watch for me, both on the silver and the small screen.

Rating: 7/10

Vincent
(p.s. minus the added formatting and picture just now, this post was written on an iPod Touch, forever dispelling my notion that typing on a touch screen is impossible. It did lead to some typos & grammar errors, mostly caused by it’s 95% useful predictive spelling engine.)

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I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible.

Sarah Lacy writes about SMSONE, a ultra-local news provider in India similar to Outside.IN, a Union Square Ventures funded US-only company that provides news updates via the web. SMSONE does it, as the name suggests, via SMS. And it spreads through a franchising model, working with local entrepreneurs that pay a franchise fee and also collect a share of the advertising revenue from locally focussed businesses. It is able to do this because of something that apparently doesn’t exist in the US (but does in Europe): receiving an SMS in India doesn’t cost the recipient anything.

When reading about this, I was immediately reminded of a similar business model employed by a Dutch entrepreneur in Russia, Ms. Annemarie van Gaal, founder of Independent Media, a company that distributed Russian versions of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire en Good Housekeeping (source). When she spoke at the Star entrepreneurial seminar in Rotterdam a year ago, she told us about how she differentiated herself from the competition (paraphrased as I haven’t got my notes with me):

The trouble with getting your magazines distributed in Russia was that you had to pay quite a lot of money (some would call it bribes) to companies that would then take care of it… badly. Instead van Gaal decided to do it differently. She would hire street kids to distribute her magazines, similar to the gold days of newspapers: the newspaper boy.

If you read Sarah Lacy’s account on Techcrunch, you’ll see that SMSONE does it similarly, hiring local kids, often without much education, to take care of distribution. Doing it via official channels is likely a nightmare over there, and centralising distribution kind of defeats the purpose of micro-news.

It’s a different way of thinking, which many of us westerners don’t have. I mean, would you entrust your products to a beggar on the street or to a street musician? Not only is it probably against the law (except if the government does it), we pride ourselves on our super-organised infrastructure, where anything from temp-workers to interns are there to provide companies with a flexible workforce, and anything from printing presses to mobile internet exists to produce and distribute your stuff.

Of course, I wouldn’t just leave you with these two examples. In the beginning of 2008, Boston Consulting Group published a study of “local dynamos”— domestically focussed companies, which use creative business models to capture value from emerging markets that are filled with challenges, like lacking infrastructure and low-income consumers. The map below shows how widespread these companies are.

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

• Shanda, a Chinese gaming-company, that, in order to combat software-piracy, focusses on providing interactive services through gaming, services that are impossible to pirate. And to overcome a lack of a financial infrastructure to pay for online services, they work with pre-paid cards.
• Indian CavinKare, which sells cheap sachets of shampoo through small local retailers, while using educational marketing to teach customers how to use their products.
• Goodbaby, which targets the many 1-child families in China, who are both willing to spend more on their child than multi-child families would, but are also in need of education.
• Amul, an Indian food-and-beverage-marketing-organisation, which collects and pays for milk locally, while tracking all operations via satellite and uses ERP solutions to make analysis based on the data and gauge whether future supply needs to be increased or decreased.
• Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods (Russia), which works extensively with local partners, and has devised leasing schemes for expensive machinery to boost their production and is able to serve 280 million consumers nation-wide.

The BCG, of course, takes the stance of its customers, Western companies, and the study is mainly aimed at how multinational companies (MNCs) can replicate 6 of these dynamo’s advantages, in order to compete with them. They are:

1. Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
2. Devising innovative business models that overcome local challenges – a logical follow-up to the last point, how to make money from the info you gained.
3. Leveraging the latest technologies – meaning that these emerging economies are less burdened with traditional infrastructure and quicker on the uptake of more affordable, newer, and easier-to-spread technology, e.g. mobiles.
4. Benefiting from low-cost labor and overcoming shortages of skilled labor – there’s two ways to look at this; a local workforce will be better equipped to interact on a local level, a highly-trained workforce will be better equipped to run a business. Tough call.
5. Scaling up fast – Russia, India, China, Brazil, etc. are all giants with the promise of huge rewards when you capture them. Many of these dynamos grow quickly through both through acquisitions and building up their network of suppliers and distributors.
6. Sustaining long-term hypergrowth without imploding – this kind of follows on to the last point

Some of the Western companies mentioned, which have managed to compete on a local level, include:

• General Motors, which has adapted its luxury-liners to meet the demands of its Chinese customers, who are usually sitting in the back;
• LG, in China, which has learned that the audio-quality of its televisions is more valued by its customers, who often reside in noisy environments;
• Carrefour, which has started to work with local municipal governments in China, as these don’t meddle in their operations like local dept. stores would, and are able to provide access to prime locations;
• Perfetti Van Melle, in India, a candle/chewing-gum manufacturer, which has found local means to advertise, interacts frequently with local partners, and has adapted its products to local tastes;
• and Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut and KFC, and has adapted its menus to meet local Chinese tastes, started a new food-chain aimed specifically at the market, and uses its international expertise to integrate IT, lean supply chains, and a higher level of food standards into their offering.

It shows the value of out of the box thinking in terms of reaching people, and I believe that traditional “Western” thinking should long ago have been thrown out the door anyway, particularly in light of the troubles that media-, automotive, and financial industries are going through. We are in the flux of disruptive innovation and only those quickest to grasp new technologies and ways of thinking are able to survive another day.

No shortage of lessons on that from entrepreneurs in emerging economies…

Vincent out

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Hi, Vincent here. I have neither the intent, nor the talent to develop this application, but it was a thought/pain I experienced at a museum today and an iTunes search didn’t reveal an app like it.

A brief background. I’m pretty a-cultural, but I find audio-tours in museums generally a must, which means I usually spend the 5 or 10 euros extra to get one of those players to walk around the exhibition with headphones on. A little anti-social, but it helped me discover the lives of some amazing artists, like Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. And my favourite nation of artists: Japan!

Yesterday, I was an an exhibition of “That Scream Guy” Edvard Munch. I was there with my sister and it seemed a little wasteful (it was only 3 rooms of lithographies), not to mention anti-social, to get an audio-guide. Still, it helps tremendously to get just a little background on a picture, really adding to the experience.

Here’s the iPhone app I would like to see.

1. Point the phone at a painting (an immediate weakness there),
2. image recognition happens (how?),
3. it hooks into a source of info about it (preferably in an audio-format) such as Wikipedia,
4. and you get to hear or see a description of the painting you are seeing.

It’s nothing genius and apart from perhaps the image recognition part, it seems fairly cheap/easy to produce.

The one weakness: cameras in museums aren’t always allowed. I would guess this means that you have to work together with museums to get things going (which sucks!).

Well, this is just something I want to throw out there, a la the much underused twitter hashtag #freeideasiwanttoseehappen

So if someone is looking for a creative challenge, you have your first customer right here!

/Vincent

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There is a really disturbing trend about environmental issues, outright self-deception that it might not actually exist. People do have this strange tendency, once things go complex, to make up stories that explain why things are how they are. This, in a way, explains why, in this age of reason and science, people choose to believe in things like make-believe medications, which they, in an effort to legitimize them, call “alternative” medicine.

An utterly insignificant little blue-green planet in the unfashionable part of the galaxy

This morning at the gym, I overheard people talking about the recent e-mail leak from UK’s Climatic Research Unit. Paraphrasing, the discussion went something like this. “…I read from the news that they have exaggerated the numbers.” “Yeah, I never could believe that the sea levels could rise by so many meters.” And off they went talking about heatwaves in the Middle Ages and other stuff, probably trying to assure each other that everything is just fine.

Ars Technica does a good job, as always, explaining how the e-mail leak means probably nothing. And anyway, the scientific community has ways routing around fraud  – which, you have to keep in mind, is not the case here.

At another occasion, before the e-mail leak, in a bus an older woman wondered “how can they measure that the sea-levels have risen by a fraction of a millimeter. It’s so tiny.” I almost wanted to tell her about the DNA, carbon nanotubes, integrated circuits and other wonders of science in an effort to explain that, yes, “they” can measure things even if they are really small.

I’m seriously worried that these people secretly wish that the whole climate change is just a bad dream, and that they have a confirmation bias to believe all evidence that disproves that our planet is in peril – that status quo will prevail.

Yes, I’d also like if the whole climate issue was just a bad dream. But no e-mail leak or even a group of fraudulent scientist (which, once again, isn’t the case here) does not disprove the massive amount of evidence that we have for an accelerating climate change. What’s going on is a good example of our cognitive dissonance at work. Maybe it’s easier to justify why you’re not doing anything to counter the problem, if the problem doesn’t exist in the first place.

Unfortunately, the newspapers and TV news aren’t really helping, going for flashy headlines instead. True, the scientific community has a bad track record trying to explain things to laypeople, but sometimes things are a bit difficult – especially when they are as complex as the climate of a planet.

In fact, it seems that television can make things worse, as this video from a Sarah Palin’s book-signing shows (see 7:00 for the kicker). People, instead of trying to even rationalize their arguments themselves, just throw catchphrases to explain their position. My favourite? How polar bears must be removed from endangered species list so it would be easier to drill for oil in Alaska.

I’m really, really worried.

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Hi ! it’s Cecil here.

Just uploaded this Enterprise-2.0 presentation. Title : Enterprise 2.0 : leveraging collaboration platforms to foster knowledge, innovation and productivity.

Best to see full screen

Target audience is upper management.

The objective is to address key issues faced by organizations built around knowledge : management of not only knowledge but also innovation and productivity. First to see the current limitations with the tools and processes in place and then to see how collaborative platform and enterprise 2.0 approach can offer competitive advantages to the company.

I have not been really convinced by the material available on the topic. Mostly too buzzwordy and flashy, this often scares upper management out. Most of them then subsequently relate E2.0 to consultant-dollarmaking-vaporware material, hence the dedicated section in the presentation.

Besides, in my view, these presentations usually go from the existing social applications (and their many exciting features) into the enterprise. In order to convince management, they should rather go the other way round : from enterprise real problems to how they can be addressed by social software platforms.

Mostly influenced by this excellent presentation by Mr Enteprise 2.0 : Andrew McAfee at PARC (link). Also by many of the videos, books, articles, blog posts refererred to in TechItEasy and Heavy Mental.

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When Leopard (10.5) came out, I could mention a laundry list of features that were pretty great. When its spawn/sibling/relative(?) came out in the form of Snow Leopard, I was struck with a serious case of reviewer’s block. There is very little to say about something that really only innovates under the hood and at the fringes.

So, my review today will be short, so short that I won’t talk about more than one feature. And that feature may disappoint you, I know it. But, in the greater picture of things, I think it’s pretty cool.

Stepping over from Windows half a decade ago, I had to adopt a new behaviour. I was forced to use iTunes, which meant that I had to import my whole library into it to make full use of this software and it’s ability to organise music. The iPod also affected this, which, prior to the iPhone/Touch, delegated its entire user-interface to iTunes also, allowing people to create intricate smart- and playlists, download podcasts, etc. in the software, whilst letting the hardware be controlled by one button only.

My musical behaviour on the computer had become somewhat bloated, less spontaneous than before. Leopard (10.5) innovated on this a little, by introducing Quicklook, which, through the space bar, allows for the quick previewing of most files, which is especially nice for movies and occasionally nice with music as well. The problem with the latter is that when you shift the focus to another app, as ADD-affected/music-listening people tend to do frequently, the music stops… quite literally. So it wasn’t a perfect solution.

Snow Leopard (10.6) introduced an improvement to that feature, one that is already affecting the way I listen to music on my Mac. Quicklook still works the way it always did, but what’s new is that you can quick look within an icon. By hovering over a music file on your desktop and changing the display in the finder to large enough icons (they need to be made a certain size (64×64 on my Macbook) for this to work), you will see a play button on the icon, which, when clicking, plays the track or video. And you can keep playing it while you do your other stuff, such as me typing this blog post.

Pretty awesome, if you ask me. No need to fire up iTunes just for that one file and my need to ADD has been satisfied.

/End Review.

Vincent

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A few months ago, I wrote to you about an experiment I was conducting regarding collecting videos from people that could not make it to a reunion I was organising for my high school. Out of the ca. 300 people that signed up to our Facebook group, only ca. 100 can make it in the end (this weekend). Many of them live all over the world, hence it made sense to try and involve them in some way.

Just like you guys couldn’t offer me much of a suggestion regarding how to arrange this distributed video system, people were fairly unresponsive to my request to send me greetings by video or audio. Even pictures from the good old days were apparently too much to ask for–us “oldsters” used analogue cameras back in the day and no Flickr in sight.

This all changed however just last week when we decided to focus on what I call the lowest common denominator in organised activities like this reunion and also business. Focussing on the simplest possible solution to solve a collaborative problem.

We asked everyone that couldn’t make it to send a short text to say hi, etc. And the responses came rolling in. Within 2 days, we already had 30 and they keep coming.

It just shows you 2 things: 1. really K.I.S.S. (keep it simple & stupid) is the best way to deal with most problems. And 2. we are really not ready for a video-based messaging system. Sure, there’s Youtube and more, but you also need to record, you need to look good on the recording, you need to convert it to flash, you need to upload it, the receiver needs to convert it back, edit it (a super-big hassle!), and then present it in a usable way. Far from K.I.S.S.!

Vincent

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I’m thinking about getting a HD projector and a Playstation 3 Slim. Talking about it Facebook, one of my friends wrote that it’s nothing short of a paradigm shift to get a Projector for your media consumption, and I’m already thinking about buying a portable projector, e.g. the Optoma HD700X DLP, and hooking that up to my laptop + taking it with me whenever I need it.

But what I’d really love is: a laptop with a projector built-in.

Apple changed my life when it introduced the in-built camera in the laptop. It changed many people’s lives from all demographics, I imagine, who starting thinking about the possibilities for collaboration through Skype or otherwise.

The one thing that I miss from my laptop (occasionally) is the lack of big screen-size. It doesn’t make a difference for writing or surfing, but it most certainly does for graphic work, media-consumption, or gaming. I would love for it to be super-simple to enlarge the screen, simply by having a type of projector built in.

Of course, I realise that projectors run hot and because of that cannot perhaps be compressed to a very small size. I don’t know what the model no. is for the ASUS depicted above and how it makes it work, but I’d love for this to become a standard.

Vincent

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babies + coolness + humor + timeless style = top of mind

it has good momentum to spread virally (one of the most watched in bing and this is how i found out ) and i am checking if and how often i will stumble over it

basically I blog …water, being in hiatus mode  as well

enjoy

Georgia

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I’m no lawyer, my only exposure extends to our company law activities at my workplace and past legal battles regarding farming ground and such—did you know that as a farmer you can let you cows graze on someone else’s lawn and if he doesn’t object, you can argue that you are the owner? At least in the Netherlands, this happened to my family once.

I think there is a certain danger here, if Apple doesn’t fight it, which it does, while Palm Pre continues to try and gain access anyway. It seems very shady on Palm’s side, but doe sit have a case here? I will discuss the strategic implications, as far as I can identify them.

Apple, as we all know, is a very interesting company. It is very vertically integrated, building hardware, software, and has a large influence on the connection between them (e.g. mobile internet), as well as the content provided on them (e.g. music, movies, the app store). Some would call this a monopolistic situation and it seems strange that it gets away with this, while Microsoft, with something that is, for now, as trivial as a browser, does not (in the EU at least).

iTunes is a powerhouse for media and mobile software, but this can be segmented into different areas and different phases. The iPod was released at the beginning of this decade (phase 0), shortly after iTunes, which then built up a power-position for music (phase 1). As the iPods became mobile computing devices, more content was being shipped via iTunes, such as video and those little games (phase 2). Finally, 2 years ago, the iPhone was released, with about a year later, the App Store (phase 3).

Music, phase 1 of ITunes’ power play, is the area which the Palm Pre (to my understanding) is impeding upon. You could easily see Video being the next thing to sync, though I’m not sure if this is possible now. Unless the iPhone takes a step back towards a more web-app-based approach, I don’t see the Palm Pre being a threat to Apple on the App Store front.

Apart from a phase-based perspective, there is also the matter of the lowest common denominator (LCD). Why do people buy mobile Apple products? I would argue that nearly everyone buys an iPod, because of playing music (and not so much video), while a growing niche segment buys the iPod Touch and iPhone for applications and games, as well as media. The LCD is music and it continues to be of strategic relevance to Apple, even with the hyping of their App Store, where Apple will continue to stay entrenched indefinitely.

So, from a strategic perspective, Palm Pre does not stand a chance. Apple will continue to make iTunes incompatible with each future version. Legally, on the other hand, I am not nearly qualified enough to make that assessment, though I think the “cow argument” may apply. If Palm Pre keeps trying hard enough, and continues to get a user-base that desires this link, there may be a legal argument towards loosening Apple’s grip on mobile media.

Since iTunes isn’t very profitable for Apple, I’m not sure what the implications will be for it, but I expect them to fight ’till the last breath.

Vincent
(Picture has no relation to this topic, but is of a cool movie nevertheless)

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Yesterday evening I was cheerfully chatting with a friend, arranging meeting-up.

- Friend : blah blah blah;

- Georgia: blah blah blah;

… when I saw my self posting a thing I couldn’t recognise having thought of. Neither remembering having thought in a previous conversation. chilllll.

- Friend : are you nuts? why are you saying this?

-Georgia : (confused) ehhh, because it must have been this or that or the other thing.

-Georgia : but I am telling you that the place has changed blah blah blah

Ecstatic I was watching myself from a certain distance. crazy uh? It happens a lot to push back thoughts but it was the first time I experienced doing it at real time. It felt like dreaming !

As tech-savvy TIE readers you realize that this is actually a particularity that this this lovely peer-to-peer program has and lets your profile being simultaneously active with different IPs. All it takes to experience this chilling story is having logged in from a different pc. (DIY)

So what’s the blog deal?

Well, it had never occured to me to experience  how older people might feel with technology, sometimes. Understand in theory yes, but live it never.
There it goes, now I can discuss with myself on skype and with mom in real life.

no comments please, I am moved.

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From the European FT this weekend:

“Blackberry owners will soon be able to download music wireless tracks to an application that will help the smartphone compete with those made by Apple and Nokia. … Most tracks will not have copy protection software, which restricts how many devices the music can be moved to.”

It’s the word “most,” which has triggered today’s rant on PR, technology, media, and more. First of, what kind of statement is that most tracks will not have copy protection? Why not all, why not none?

Looking at the past, we all know that copy protection, aka DRM, has plenty of negative associations attached to it. And, as with most negatively perceived technologies, it has been hacked so often that the word “protected” has just become a PR term. Copy protection is not a feature, it’s a handicap, but clearly most songs on the Blackberry platform will not be handicapped, which is… a feature??

We all know that optimally, no producer (or organisation associated with music production) would allow music to be released DRM-free. But the very fact that protection means Zilch, means that actually there is no point to implementing any kind of DRM-system, except on the request of the owner(s) of particular songs (which probably happened here). So, instead of all or none, we get “most,” which is just BS. I already predict that this new initiative is going to fail, by the sheer indecisiveness of the PR message alone, which is a reflection of how little thought-out the business strategy must be.

My point in all of this, infused by a single expression of vagueness, is that somehow technology has spun out of control. There is a system of checks and balances in place, there is a self-correcting mechanism at play, but no one has the complete overview of how it works and when it will work. In the case of the recession, for example, things will balance themselves out again. And hopefully we will get a system in place, the more open the better, that will regulate what is happening. But there will very likely be many casualties of war.

In the case of media and profiting from it, it looks bad, very bad. The word “most” perfectly reflects the uncertainty of where it is all heading, but anyone can see that with production and distribution becoming cheaper and more decentralised, there is hardly any need for centralised music companies, except to build systems that track what is out there and rate it (e.g. CBS/Last.fm, Hypemachine) or to fund the more expensive part of the formula: getting on TV/radio (which will also disappear at some point) or setting up a concert (which will hopefully never disappear, but is hopefully self-sufficient).

Sadly, the only solution I see to saving “the industry” is to silo everything off, which is arguable already happening when you look at the behaviour of businesses like Pandora, CBS/Last.fm, and Hulu) and sue the crap out of anyone infringing. That would make everything nice and predictable again, but only if you could make it impossible to go from one side to the other. Star wars.

Some systems where this is the case, more or less, would be gaming consoles, and you would need the same for audio and video content. But because the light and the dark side (traditional media vs. new media vs. piracy) are not separated, you will continue to see a shift towards freeing everything until the only thing predictable will be that there is no money to be made from media, just from the products (e.g. merchandising) and services (e.g. concerts) around it.

Yes, I continue to be very down on traditional media. Feel free to lift my spirits in this area.

Vincent

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I’ve long been an anti-fanboy of online video, for some reasons that I already mentioned. As such, I did not expect a strong response on my recent request for collaborative video recording ideas. Similarly, other efforts at discussing online video production, a topic that I personally find interesting, on Friendfeed and with friends, have been met with little enthusiasm.

So, I have come to the personal conclusion that online video is something that people simply don’t care about (very much). Here are a few reasons why:

1. No success-story on the web: Youtube was acquired by Google, which does not prove its business-model; Loic LeMeur (yes, that LeWeb ‘08 guy) abandoned his video-idea, pretty much; The promising Stage6 by the DivX people was abandoned due to, I believe, excessive illegal content being posted on it, etc. etc. OK, the French Dailymotion is no. 1 on Techcrunch’s new Ranking of European hot startups, but even that service isn’t what I would call the perfect implementation of a video service. As a matter of fact, the only thing that seems to work out is television, Hulu (basically television and US only), and Piracy.
2. Bandwidth: even though bandwidth is clearly increasing, it is still, for any business that wants to set up its own video service, a dramatic weight to carry, at least compared to other content on the web. And what if you want to upload your own video? Prepare to have to wait for a while.
3. Does not speak our language: as I mentioned in my previous “hate-post”, the web is largely text-based and the often non-indexability of video means that it does not interoperate with the most-used web-application: Search.
4. Unforgivingly immersive: I listen to audio-podcasts and music all the time, because it’s compatible with the rest of my lifestyle, e.g. travelling/communiting or doing exercise. You have to give all your attention to video, which I consider a barrier to entry for our A.D.D.-infested society.
5. Expensive to produce video (?): a question-mark there because obviously hardware-costs are falling. But still expensive, as it’s complicated and requires both expensive (in terms of time and money) training, patience (a time-cost) while editing, and the ability to work with specialised (and often expensive) video-editing software.
6. Unforgivingly intrusive: It took me a long time to adopt a webcam, until it was basically built into my laptop. I still don’t like to have to dress (up) and make up my hair just to have a conversation, and all that, even though now I will rarely Skype without it. But I am a, tongue in cheek, modern man, which I can’t say for many of my peers.

These and more reasons is why I suspect that Online Video is not a hot topic and might perhaps never be. If you’re in the midst of an online video startup, I don’t know what to tell you, except I hope it radically improves on what has come before.

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of The Guardian)

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