On Tuesday, October 28, I will be participating in a roundtable discussion on the state of online video pulled together by Beet.TV impresario Andy Plesser, with executives from AOL, MySpace, Yahoo, MSNBC, CNN, Microsoft, Akamai, The Washington Post, Dow Jones and several other companies. Tune into the live Webcast at 9:00 AM EST.
On this week's EIC Squared podcast ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss Dell's ambitions to get into the crowded music player industry, Microsoft's interesting focus group with Vista and how the broadband wars are shaking out.
Dell might make another attempt at bringing a music player to market. With DRM unraveling, Dell doesn't need to beat iTunes, just offer a relatively cool and cost effective listening device that accesses multiple music services via Wi-Fi. Microsoft has a perception problem with it comes to Vista. That is well known, but it may not be because the operating system is lacking. Microsoft conducted focus groups for an operating system called Mojave (which was really Vista) for non-Vista users. Turns out the focus group overwhelmingly liked Mojave, which makes you wonder what caused Vista to have so many detractors at its inception in the market.
Larry offers his take on the battles among Comcast, Verizon and AT&T to win over each others' customers. With three major players, they can compete and divide up the spoils amongst themselves...like the oil companies.
On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss this week's big stories. It was a busy week on the search front. Adobe is providing Google and Yahoo with Flash Player technology that allows their search engine crawlers to find and index SWF content, including Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus and self-contained Flash Web sites. It's good to make more information accessible via search engines. However, Microsoft has been silent on whether Live Search would index Flash content.
In addition, Microsoft bought Powerset for about $100 million to enhance its search platforms. It's not a substitute for acquiring market share via Yahoo Search, but it provides a foundation for making the search experience far more compelling and precise in fewer clicks.
Of course, the Microhoo drama continues this week with the latest rumors. Larry is ready for this opera to be finished.
Finally, we discuss a judge's ruling in Viacom's $1 billion copyright infringement suit against Google and YouTube.
U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton ruled that records of every video watched by YouTube users, including login names and IP addresses, should be given to Viacom's lawyers. Larry said it was like combining the worst aspects of a fishing expedition and a witch hunt. Viacom is maintaining that it won't look at personal data and Google is asking for time to anonymize the information. If Judge Stanton's ruling stands, the last shreds of personal privacy on the Web could be thrown out the window.
Nick Carr has come up with good thought food in an Atlantic Monthly article titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" While the title is excessively tantalizing (Carr also penned the supercharged "IT Doesn't Matter" for the Harvard Business Review in 2003), with "Google" and "stupid" separated by a few words, Carr explores how the flood of data flowing across the network is wreaking havoc with media consumption habits:
And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
In his CNET blog "Technically Incorrect," Chris Matyszczyk has some advice for Carr--a 10-step program to save Nick Carr's brain that has five steps to help avoid becoming a "pancake person," spread too wide and thin by the Internet firehose.
Google and other services excel in the machine processing of billions of bits of data at high speed. The human brain is a high-speed processing organ, and the intersection with the Net is altering neural patterns.
The generation brought up on the Web communicates in short bursts, with instant messaging and SMS, continuously multitasks and consumes information in smaller chunks. The capability to read or write narratives longer than a typical e-mail message is diminishing. Information processing for humans is becoming more machine-like, processing massive amounts of loosely coupled data bits, as machines start to mimic some of the brain's more sophisticated pattern recognition features.
Now imagine reading "Moby Dick" in 140-character chunks while you are talking on the phone and glancing at YouTube videos.
As Matyszczyk suggests, spending a day each week unhooked from the Web could be liberating.
On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss the celebrity interviews at the D6 conference, hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Unfortunately, I called in from the San Diego airport United Airlines gate area, so you'll hear crying children and the ticker taker coaxing me to get on the plane. Larry gives the lowdown on Dell's earnings and the most recent security issues, patches from Apple, and the Comcast hack.
CARLSBAD, Calif.--Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos kicked off the morning proceedings here at D6 after a night of polite carousing by industry luminaries. During the interview with D co-host Walt Mossberg, Bezos announced a streaming-video service and explained his foray into hardware with the Kindle e-book reader.
On the subject of video and music delivery, Bezos said, "We are working on a new version of video-on-demand, a for-pay streaming service we will release in the next couple of weeks. The streaming service will start instantly, and it's a la carte, for pay."
Regarding competing with Apple's iTunes services, Bezos said it is clearly in the self-interest of music companies to have competitors.
Walt Mossberg asks Jeff Bezos about the Amazon Kindle.
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)The Kindle is clearly a passion for Bezos. It follows on his love for selling books online, which was the origin of Amazon, and developing a new market for digital content delivered over wireless networks.
"We base our strategy on customer needs instead of what our skills are...Customers will eventually need things that you don't have skills for, so (you) need to renew yourself with new skills," Bezos said. If Amazon doesn't extend into new product categories, the company will get outmoded, he said.
Bezos wouldn't disclose Kindle sales. "On a title-by-title basis, with 125,000 titles for Kindle, and you look at Amazon's physical sale of the same books, Kindle sales are more than 6 percent of the universe of 125,000 titles," he said. Amazon reduced the price of the $399 Kindle by 10 percent this week.
While Bezos said he was happy with the sales of the Kindle, the price cut and the heavy promotion of the device on Amazon's site could mean sales aren't spectacular. The Kindle could be a meaningful financial component in Amazon's business, Bezos said, but he didn't put a figure on the Kindle's contribution to annual revenue.
Regarding the fate of physical books, Bezos said the vast majority of books will be read electronically. Just as horses haven't gone away, books will be around, he quipped. "We see Kindle as an effort to improve the book, even though it hasn't changed in 500 years," he added.
"You can't ever outbook the book, so you have to do things that you can't do with a book, such as in-stream dictionary lookup, changing fonts, and wireless delivery of content in 60 seconds," Bezos said. "We have to build something better than a physical book."
Bezos said he did research into the smell of the book--glue, ink, and mildew. "We can never capture that," he said, adding that the container is not important; the narrative is. He wants to make long-form reading more frictionless so that people read more.
Mossberg asked Bezos about adding new features to the Kindle and its utility as a Web browser.
"There are things that fit into the Kindle form factor and don't interfere with the purpose of the device. But the device is not a cell phone or bunch of things. It should be able to browse the Web," he said. "If you were trying to build the perfect Web-browsing device, you wouldn't use electronic ink. It's not the right display technology for high-quality Web browsing."
"You might say the Web is the most important book in the world," he added, but that's not something the Kindle is designed to read as well as other devices.
Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.
Loren Feldman of 1938 Media is bringing his lampooning brand of humor to Web 2.0 land. It's as if Lenny Bruce landed in 21st century Silicon Valley instead of at Carnegie Hall in 1961.
His humorous and sometimes viciously cutting video interviews and rants, often with a sock puppet named for PR guru and blogger Shel Israel, are becoming cult favorites, sending waves of laughter and shock throughout office buildings and living rooms. In the video interview below I ask Loren about the origins of his recent work and what gives with the Shel Israel puppet.
Check out one of Loren's videos below, where his puppet persona interviews Kara Swisher of All Things D:
Editor's note: News.com's Dan Farber reported Young's keynote speech and a follow-up Q&A live from JavaOne.
SAN FRANCISCO--At JavaOne here, Neil Young showed off his multimedia project that chronicles his music career and uses Java to do so.
Neil Young and Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)Young said he tried to do the project on DVD, but users couldn't watch the high-resolution video and listen to the music at the same time. With Java and Blu-ray, the content can be updated and offer the best viewing and listening experience, as well as great navigation and design. "Storage is the only limit," Young said, and recommended the Sony's PlayStation 3 as the best way to view his project.
Users will be able to download any archival materials, which are automatically assigned to their place in a chronological time line, Young said.
In a meeting with a few press members following the JavaOne keynote, Young talked about the Archive project, which goes back to the late 1980s. The first stage, he said, was collecting the materials.
"I am kind of a pack rat," he said, adding that over the years he's accumulated a lot of unreleased material. "I only give the record company what I want people to hear at the time. So I have a lot of unreleased material. Putting it all together tells a much different story than just what has been produced (for public consumption)."
The compilation of the unpublished clips helps show Young's musical evolution, the effects of success, and the ups and downs, he said. In the beginning, he said, he was nervous and talked a lot, but was very focused on singing his songs. "I'd make a lot of jokes and then sing a tear-jerker song."
Young was asked how music and technology go together. "There is a lot of math; it is emotional math," he replied.
Larry Johnson, of Shakey Films (which works on all of Young's films), said Young had the concept for his latest project on paper 15 years ago. About two years ago, they put the footage all together and waited for the Blu-ray HD-DVD fight to end.
"We are cramming the disc full with every feature we can," Young said.
They started off envisioning it to be something like a video game, a "3D tumbling experience through time," he said. "You could see the history of the world and other great performances through time. It would be a nice thing to do. Hopefully we will get this approach done, but by the time we are halfway through, it will morph."
"The recording business as we know it is changing. As an artist I try to remove myself from the business," Young said. "I steer myself away from that...the commerce of distributing music will work itself out."
He added: "We are trying to give them quality whether they want it or not. You can degrade it as much as you want, we just don't want our name on it." People are taking music and doing whatever they want with it, he said. "The laws don't matter. These are people in their bedroom doing what they want. It's the new radio."
Young said you can't be "scared or paranoid about trying to survive." Sure, when the digital revolution came along, it was "like getting hit with icepicks." Now, he said, the ice is tiny, maybe a little like snow.
That said, he's clearly not a fan of MP3 quality: "Putting on a headphone and listening to MP3 is like hell," he said.
Of course, digital and multitrack recordings in the '80s didn't sound so great either. The sound was shallow, he said. Now, he said, audio quality is climbing, though he still makes all his recordings in analog. "I plan to dumb my analog to the higher level so masses can enjoy it," he said.
Besides music, Young is working with engineers and developers to create a car that doesn't require roadside refueling. He is working with a variety of developers and scientists to develop a large, American-style car that doesn't require fossil fuels. "I have trained myself to take this on," he said.
"America is full of big people; it's a huge country and the wind blows. I don't want to have cars blown off the road with high winds," Young said. "We work with aerodynamics, and there's the X Prize effort to get 100 miles per gallon." Scientists are working on interesting concepts such as cars running on compressed air with stackable motors on the wheels, he said. Other solutions are more fringe.
"It's very kooky. People say you are nuts but I am used to that," he said. "People are so paranoid about the power establishment. That's what they think about when you come up with an idea that is going to bring change."
Young said that he wasn't interested in the Tesla, a sporty and expensive electric car. "The Tesla isn't ready to buy yet--you have to plug it in," he said.
Young said that he is an "overseer" more than carrying on a day-to-day role in his electric car project.
He lauded the Internet because it's a great place to find science experts all over the world. "People who are just kooks," he said. "You have to filter and separate and look on the perimeter of scientific world and give them encouragement."
Young is planning to chronicle the damage cars are doing to the environment and the development of a car that doesn't require roadside fueling in a new movie. The car will be wired to the gills, with all kinds of sensors and cameras feeding data, Young said.
On surveillance, Young said, "Surveillance society is out of control. There is nothing you can do. You can fight it...there will be an ongoing battle for privacy."
I saw Iron Man (cool Web site) on Sunday, joining the hordes who contributed to the $100 million dollar plus opening of the film. The movie was a blast so to speak, and Robert Downey Jr. was outstanding in the lead role. It has plenty of digital special effects and great production design, especially the futuristic computer usage scenarios.
(Credit:
Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment)
Minority Report has some interesting computer usage scenarios, but Iron Man is far more sophisticated. It's difficult to describe the digital systems, but they are artificially intelligent (pass the Turing Test), and allow Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, to design, fabricate, and control very complex gear, with voice commands and hand movements, in matter of weeks, not decades or centuries.
There were some old-fashioned keyboards and command line screens along with advanced 3D user interfaces and heads up displays, but no Google searching, Twittering or iPhoning. The cars (Audi paid for the new R8 to have featured role in the movie) were very ordinary but fleet.
A note to movies goers: the jumbo popcorn with the free refill has been suspended due to the rising cost of corn and production of ethanol, at least at my theater.
See Metacritic for reviews of Iron Man.
