Category Archives: Tech News

Media 2.0

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One of my clients, Rocketboom will be auctioning off ad time of their show on eBay next week. The winning bidder will allow Rocketboom to create the advertisement, subject to their review.

Rocketboom receives over 130,000 views per episode. Over a few days, many posts receive over 200,000 views.

With time and place shifting, the media landscape is changing. Portability of the brand message will be critical in this new era of Media stepped in social networks and this push toward edge competencies outside of the enterprise.

Update:

Auction is now up on eBay.

Ipswitch Brunch at MacWorld

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Just before MacWorld started in San Francisco, Ipswitch invited a few Vloggers to sit down and have some fun. This video turned into the Eric Rice show, with key moments being Schlomo Audioblogging on his mobile, Eric reviewing the Tiger Electronics VCAMNOW, and the Node101 stickering of his infamous truck.

The music is “ The End of the Movie“, by one of my favorite bands, Cake. Sit back and enjoy!

Internet Video News

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AOL has acquired the video search service Truveo, The Wall Street Journal reports today. Truveo released out of beta in September of last year after two years in development. Truveo technology uses a “visual crawler” to aggregate metadata about video content, whether it is RSS enabled or not.

News Corp announced yesterday that their new acquisition, MySpace, will be adding free video downloads, a new messaging program and soon internet calling.It looks like News Corp, MS, Yahoo, AOL, and Google are are morphing into the same thing.

Last week, Google announced their agreement to allow users to download CBS shows, Getty Film Archives, Sony BMG and NBA games among others. Neat on the IPTV front, but what is more interesting to me is the underlying commerce architecture. Google’s Terms of Service includes Rights Holders that upload their video onto the service a 70% revenue with 30% to Google. Pay Per View is an option that may open up very soon for Independents.

These announcements bode well for the Videobloggers out there. Independent media should be easier to create, discover and share.

CES

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There is a ton of noise that will be coming out of Las Vegas with the Consumer Electronics Show for the next few days. I hope to weed through all of that noise and find the signal(s) that I am looking for: namely media infrastructure and mobility announcements. Here then is what I have been able to glean from day 1:

Video Cameras: Sony introduces the DCR-SR100 Handycam. Engadget reports that it has a 3 megapixel imager, 30GB harddrive, and optional bluetooth mic…nice!

Also announced today was the Sanyo VPC-HD1, a High Definition SD recording camera. Coming as early as March, this 8.3 oz, $800 camera, boosts 5.1 megapixels and a 10x optical zoom. Wow.

Mobile Video: Thomson’s LYRA X3000 PMP has a 3.6 inch 320×240 screen and 20GB HD, and is 3/4 of an inch thick. Not sure how well it does digital, but it is ready for DirecTV 2 Go’s analog signal. Nice that DirecTV is experimenting with adding Vloggers to their service already.
There has been talk of Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld format coming into the US for over a year, and it looks like 2006 may be the year for it. Crown Castle has enlisted Samsung and LG to roll out product even though no carriers have yet been confirmed.

Distribution: at&t (new lower-case branding) introduced its version of IPTV to a few hundred house holds in San Antonio Thursday according to the Wall Street Journal. Only 200 channels and no HD yet, at&t promises to expand to 1000 channels and enable subscribers to program their DVRs via their mobile as well as choose camera angles for sporting events. It is running on the MS operating system.

Intel (also freshly rebranded in the new year) is revving up it’s dual core processor video solution they have named Viiv (which I assume is a spin on 6 4) with a announcement at CES that includes on-demand news and sports, advertising and entertainment, as well as our favorite Vloggers. Morgan Freeman will be there promoting ClickStar, his company that is planning to shorten the window on movie distribution from theater to IP. This sounds alot like what Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures is scheduled to do with Soderbergh’s new movie Bubble. Bubble is scheduled to release simultaneously in theaters, on cable and DVD this January 27th.

Finally, Creative opened the doors on a riff of iTunes to support their new Zen player. Check out zencast.com

yahoo.icio.us

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Yahoo! acquires Del.icio.us today. Now with Flickr, Yahoo! has two of the most prominent tagging sites on the web.

This is not breaking news in the blogosphere, but I thought I’d post this for archive’s sake. This is what happens when you are in meetings all day, you miss the scoops…

Wired has a great interview with Steven Soderbergh.

Questions include: “Have you thought about making a mash-up?” with the followup of: “Give me one idea for a video mash-up.”

Good stuff!

Endorphin and MeasureMap

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I just got back from spending all day down in Pacific Grove with Endorphin. Had a chance to meet Jonathan, Glenn, and Jean, and catch up with Bob. They are just about ready to roll out an ongoing stream of HD video content! Expect to see an RSS feed on their site in the next week or so. They have a very robust studio with sound stage, theater, and 4 editing rooms. Looks like I may be collaborating with them on a project or two.

I finally got an invite into Adaptive Path’s MeasureMap! I am very excited to see how the analytics are displayed on site visits, links in and out et al. I also just upgraded WordPress to 1.5.2 so I hope it doesn’t give the site hiccups….

Tipping Point

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Reuters is reporting that AOL will launch Internet Television in Spring of 2006. In2TV will introduce 100 TimeWarner shows including Welcome Back Kotter, Growing Pains and Kung Fu…

Saul Hansel at the NY Times also reports that In2TV will use peer-to-peer to distribute media in an enhanced version.

I have not received confirmation, but I understand that In2TV will be running Kontiki platform. The founders are former Netscape/AOL employees that got together to launch Kontiki in 2001. Public television is using Kontiki’s grid to make their content available online as well via the Online Media Network.

In other related news, Hasbro announced today that they will provide Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network $2.99 downloads on their new portable media player (VuGo) from their Tiger Electronics division.

Make Media

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Today, I turned on Make Media, and Make Media must have sent you here!

What is Make Media:

MakeMedia.org is a group of Networking Creators extending the ideas behind the Personal Media Revolution.

What’s making the Revolution:

  • The birth of a literate “Create and Consume” culture;
  • “Time-shifting” our entertainment choices is now an option;
  • The ubiquitous power of networks has finally arrived;
  • Tools for all of the above are getting easier, and easier, to use.

The site will open on December 21th. Please share your thoughts on where you think it is going. What do you enjoy most about these times of change?

What does it mean to Make Media? Please let me know what it means to you.

Cascading Events

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Today Yahoo and Tivo announced consumers will be able to schedule recordings of TV shows on their TiVo box from a special Yahoo portal.

This just in: Wall Street Journal Online (subscription required) is reporting that CBS and NBC, have agreed with Comcast and DirecTV, respectively, to allow their viewers to watch popular shows anytime they want. You should be able to read the full story in tomorrow’s paper.

Shows include “Survivor” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”. the price? 99 cents! What started with Tivo and was naturally extended with iPod, it appears that time shifting is here to stay.

NBC Nightly News is now online, starting this evening.

From their website: “For the first time in the history of NBC Nightly News, tonight’s airing of the broadcast will be the FIRST and not the LAST and ONLY airing of the evening. Beginning tonight at 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT, the NBC Nightly News Netcast will be available.”

The most amazing thing is, this is only audio, which suprised me. Update: it actually is a truncated video, but requires IE and Windows Media Player.

Regardless, iPod Video looks to have been the tipping point. The damn has burst; the wall has come down; describe it as you will. With accelerating adopting of packeted information, what changes are in store for media, both commercial AND personal in the next few years?

To share the momentum of Personal Media (Consumption AND Creation), I bring you this TechCrunch link from yesterday. It is a good starting thread comparing the Flickrs of Video. Make sure you read through the comments to find a dozen more sites that they failed to see on the first pass!

Live Music and Pizza by the Slice

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Since 1967, The Cheeseboard Collective in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto has been baking some really great food in addition to their deep selection of cheeses. One of the nice pleasures of waiting for a slice of delicious pizza is getting some tasty live music too!

Enric from Cirne.com was over in Berkeley too, vlogging another culinary experience: Geek Dinner at Fellini. He bumps into several notable folks including Matt Mullenweg, one of the creators of Word Press. Great to hear Word Press is working on support for vloggers in the next release!

By the way, check out Matt’s new product called Akismet. It hopes to end comment spam on blogs. I’ve just downloaded the API, and will give it a spin.