What a Tweet Thought.

From All Things Digital, "University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student Adam Wilson has successfully tested a “brain wave monitor” to the Twitter publishing interface, allowing him to compose a message merely by thinking and publish it to the arguably too-popular microblogging service."

Do you see where this is going? No I don't mean the end of text messaging with fingers.
Go a bit further and imagine all of our thoughts collected, stored and searched by (The Google). Cool, uh?

Google, Tweet Thoughts,Brave New World,Fahrenheit 400,

Resist Twitter?

Twitter is a lottery with a key difference. The winning ticket was drawn "before" the tickets went on sale. Biz Stone, founder of Twitter, has the winning ticket, but we still feel compelled to buy tickets. We don't want to be "left out", "un-cool" or out of sync with the Obama generation. Everyone talks about Twitter although the old line about "how are they gonna make money" is starting to wane. We all know the answer. After a billion tickets (or Tweets) the winning number will be drawn (sort of) and the winning ticket holder (Biz Stone) will come forward to collect his One Billion Dollars. Yep, that's what this is all about.

Text messaging across the celluar-internet boundary at 140 characters (vs. 160 for SMS), and a clever name. The guys at YouTube got $1.6B for little more than that. Chad and Steve didn't invent "user generated video", they just had a clever name, and a venture backer who happened to be on the board of directors at Google.

Biz Stone is a former Google employee. He made Blogger (the application hosting this blog) a success for Google.

And if you are still wondering why anyone would care if you are eating a bagel or picking your nose, you're right - they don't. Twitter will persist as yet another electronic message conduit - a mechanism to influence while informing you, like Google, Yahoo, CNN, etc., and those who profit from providing the conduit like Verizon and TMobile.
"Psst, there's a bagel crumb stuck to your cheek".

Follow me on Twitter

Tags:
Twitter,
Verizon,
Google,

The Green New Deal

The Great Depression officially ended with World War II, which resulted in the deaths of 70 million people, the Holocaust, and the Atomic bomb. The current global economic crisis will put more people (in a more crowded world) out of work and destroy more wealth than the events of the 1930s. Revolutions often begin as food riots. Signs of unrest are in the news everyday - small and often politically energized - but anti-social none-the-less. How does the current crisis end? At the April G20 Summit, UN representatives will present a "Green New Deal" agenda. The world has an opportunity to focus stimulus spending on infrastructure and technology for renewable and cleaner energy. Over $2 trillion dollars in global stimulus spending can be classified as either "Green or Clean", and perhaps more stimulus can be focused on this problem.

There are still a few people who think Global Warming is either myth or Mother Nature, and therefore does not warrant mankind's intervention. The International Conference on Climate Change, ICCC held in New York last week, attracted a few hundred attendees. Scientists who are either funded by big oil, or blinded by their data. Apparently big oil has switched agendas - at least with their advertising dollars - to a "responsible energy" mandate. The real question is not whether global warming is man-made, but rather can man-made technology be used to ameliorate what is clearly happening to our world climate-wise. If the pursuit of the answer puts people back to work, and puts the world on a path to less finite-and-dirty-oil dependency, the world will be better off. And it beats the hell out of WWIII.

BTW, useful technology also emerged from WWII: nuclear power generation, radar (which directly led to communications protocols that enable mobile telephony, commercial jet aviation, and rockets (which enable global satellite communications. The technology side effects of the Green New Deal may not be realized for decades.

Google is watching what you watch

In the news today, Google will use your web surfing and YouTube video selections to create a profile that will allow advertisers to target you for search-based ads. Naysayers, Luddites and worry-warts will cry 'Big Brother' but hey, Big Brother is coming whether you cry or not. And we will welcome him with open arms because stuff we do gets easier and more relevant to our needs. Behavioral targeting is a good thing. And it will move into other aspects of our media consumption. Calero Media Systems develops IP for making advertisements you view on TV, relevant to the media you watch on TV. In other words your personal interests affect what products are pushed on you. If I watch "24" on Fox, or the "The Unit" on CBS, I am probably not a customer for "Depend". And therefore, I neither benefit from nor want to see the commercial. (I also don't want to see commercials for "Flomax", even though I am a 55+ male with a prostate inflating like a circus balloon, I want to get medical information from my doctor, not the Ad Agency that just ran the "Depend" commercial).

On the other hand, if I search for "Depend" (which I had to do to create the link above) then Google now thinks that I "might" be interested in male incontinence. Just because Big Brother is watching, doesn't mean he is paying attention.

Watching what you watch is how you get to watch for free.

Behavioral Targeting,Behavioral Advertising,Google Search,

Is the Freemium model a cop-out?

If 100% of your non-advertising revenue comes from 5% of your users then what is the incentive for Freemium Internet business models, beyond a claim that your site will really make money someday? Unless your "uniques" are really high, or your audience is very targeted, you aren't getting enough revenue from ads to pay the team (unless maybe you are the team). Freemium is a cop-out. A way of saying "our product really isn't worth paying for", but try it for free and maybe you'll feel compelled to upgrade to our super-duper service someday (or more likely we'll promise our investors you will). Do you know any Bricks and Mortar companies that use this model? Can you imagine what would happen if Prostitution used the Freemium model? You don't have to look further than online Pornography to see that endgame. Free online porn has displaced paid-for models. Last week, the Porn industry "bent over" to ask for Federal Bailout money. Good luck with that - nobone gets bailout money until Congressmen can wax prophetic and produce soundbite fodder. And XXX doesn't play well in November.

I dabbled with Freemium solutions from LinkedIn, Flickr, and others. But the only Freemium model I stick with is the New York Times crossword puzzle subscription. (You can read the online paper for free, but wasting your time on that damn puzzle will set you back $6.95/month). I figure it's cheaper than buying a few papers from the newsstand - and I don't have to hoard quarters.

The next wave of Internet providers must provide value services that people will pay real money for. Creating and marketing for pay services in the nexus of the current Great Repression is a huge challenge. But not failing to market services that are worth paying for will condemn most Internet companies to failure or dilution.

The Future of Video & Movies on Demand

The recent court ruling in favor of Cablevision allows cable providers to offer on-demand programming to non-DVR subscribers, by remotely storing subscriber selections at head-in locations. Many DVR subscribers already have access to on-demand servers from Comcast and others. This week, my satellite TV provider began offering on-demand to their HD/DVR subscribers. The HD/DVR set-top boxes have the required Internet connection - in fact I am downloading TV shows over my "Comcast" cable modem to my DirecTV sat box. The major of American TV viewers will use these approaches - why buy another box to put under the TV?

The next tier of VOD/MOD users will be Netflix customers. Netflix has the brand, the content (20% of their DVD inventory and growing), and a multi-price point hardware solutions for viewing VOD/MOD on your television set - where it belongs. You can choose a Web-to-TV component with general Internet Access, the $99 Roku Netflix-streaming-only box or the LG Blu-Ray DVD/Netflix streaming solution (price to be announced but expect $400).

Next is AppleTV with a loyal set of iTunes enthusiasts. Vudu - a proprietary solution with "snappy" search made possible through extensive caching and peer to peer networks with other Vudu boxes - will need serious black magic to stay viable against this competition.

New cable/phone solutions will fall Somewhere in-between. Turner Cable has a web-to-TV solution forthcoming. Verizon & AT&T will fiber variants. And Sezmi with 4G will each lock up segments of the market.

Internet-only solutions viewed primarily on computer displays will persist although many of the players will end up as acquisition fodder (e.g. BitTorrent and Jaman) or disappear entirely (e.g. MovieBeam, CinemaNow, etc.) or merge with general purpose content providers (e.g. Veoh, Joost).

Online vs. On-TV Advertising

ZenithOptimedia's June 2008 Forecast for the world adspend shows television advertising dominant but flat, maintaining a 37% share of the ~$600B market in 2010. Internet advertising grows from 10% to 13%, mostly at the expense of slight declines in Newspapers, Magazines and Radio.

Today, Internet advertising is dominating by "search", which is dominating by Google. The battle for online video advertising is just beginning. The WSJ reported on July 9, 2008 that Google's YouTube only generates revenue from 4% of the content with a total revenue of $200M. Plans to re-architect the business are underway.

Video advertising will take several formats: pre/mid/post roll runs of varying lengths, embedded product placement, sidebar display ads, etc.

What happens when the distinction between online and TV blurs. When, for example, I'm watching "web content" on my big screen TV using a Web-to-TV device connected to my ISP. I'm watching branded messages in a lean-back setting with my friends and family. Do I care whether the content comes in as MPEG2 from the Satellite receiver or as Flash/Silverlight/H.264 through my cable modem? I don't think so.

The question branded advertisers should be asking is not "how to move my ad content from TV to online" but "how but to exploit online technology to blur the distinction between Online and TV.

Tags: ZenithOptiMedia, YouTube, Google, online advertising, pre-roll

Dumb or Dumber?

Chris Anderson asks, in the July 2008 edition of Wired magazine. if the emergence of the Petabyte era - the ability to amass and analyze massive amounts of data - obsoletes scientific theory. A computer cloud and programs like Google's MapReduce, can brute force analyze raw real world data to uncover trends that once required scientific models and limited testing to unravel.

Nicolas Carr asks in the July/Aug 2008 Atlantic magazine if "Google is making us stupid" - by simplifying an individuals need to think. The ability to focus and engage the brain in cognitive activties, like reading an in-depth article, have been replaced with scanning "wiki facts" on a computer screen or iphone. The imminent death of journalism threatening newspapers and magazines like the Atlantic is one validation point.

Scientists no longer need to think. Individuals no longer need to think. What will we think of next?

Tags: Google "Map Reduce" "Cloud Computing"

CUDA Shouda Woulda

Nvidia is known as the leading graphic chip (GPU) company. Their chips are in high performance PCs and video game cards. The complexity of a GPU surpassed the Intel Pentium processor several years ago. Today's Intel chips have two cores soon going to four. Nvidia GeForce8 GPUs have 128 stream processor cores running at clock rates exceeding 1GHZ. Nvidia has recently created an open programming environment to allow 3rd party development for new applications. This platform, named CUDA, for Compute Unified Device Architecture, is available for free from the Nvidia website accompanied by with numerous application notes and benchmarks.

CUDA solutions will soon move into the SuperComputer domain like approaches based on IBM Cell, Intel Pentium and AMD Operon. IBM expects to regain the spot of the Top 500 when they attain PetaFlop performance on LinPack benchmarks in the next few days. (One peta equals a quadrillion, or one million billion). According to EE Times, May 12, 2008, the IBM solution is based on 12,000 Processors and consumes 4MegaWatts.

Stanford has a program for configuring a compute cloud from individual PS3s (like the SETI program). These solutions offer a potentially higher parallelism (think of 1 million Sony PS3 crunching the same problem), but inter-node communication is limited to DSL/Cable Modem bandwidths. The IBM supercomputer bandwidth is ~1 billion times higher.

The next milestone after Peta is Exa, one billion billion floating point calculations per second. That threshold could be reach in four years. It would be like everybody on the planet using a Pentium CoreDuo computer to crunch the same problem. How about World Peace for a start?

Tags: CUDA, PetaFlop, Top500, Cell

Global Good, Bad and Ugly

The Good
Energy Technology. Guess what? There may be a lot of oil left in N. America that is cost effective to extract at $125 barrel. Real break-thoughs in alternative energy are yet to come.

Food Technology. Ethanol sucks - It sucks do-gooders into believing they're making a difference; It sucks wheat and grain fields into more corn that won't be eaten which sucks food right out of people's mouths, and more of your paycheck out of your pocket. Genetic engineering can produce more food and turn inedible plant life into energy-rich ethanol fodder. Time for the food-Luddites to take a pass.

Meteorology. Today's kids might grow up to solve global warming (or cooling) with engineering solutions on a global scale.

Biotechnology. If only the FDA would get out of the way of progress.

Internet Technology. As the virtual world gets smaller, reason and human rights tend to rise.

The Bad
Overpopulation - the rain forests are being converted to coal so poor people can get eat for another week. The seas are over-fished and the coastlines of many countries are polluted with fish farms. People produce people faster than Mother Earth can feed them. There are simply too many people on the planet. Population control must be a human priority or Mother Nature will sort it out the hard way. As George Carlin once joked - "We don't need to save the Earth. Mother isn't going anywhere. It's people that are going away.

Global warming. Buying a smaller plastic water bottle isn't going to do shit to slow down global warming. Short-term we need weather, and socio-economic predictions so we can being to adapt to inevitable changes.

Petroleum. Someday it will be as costly as Extra Virgin Olive oil. The transition will suck, but the world will be better off after the addiction is over.

Health. Cancer is essentially undefeated 35 years after Nixon started a war on it. Drug resistant pathogens kill more young Americans than the war in Iraq. Animal-to-human crossover virus's like H5N1, didn't go away, continue to kill people in Southeast Asia, and continue to threaten global pandemics.

God, or rather human interpretation of what God wants. Does God dislike birth control so he'll have more souls in Heaven? Does Allah really want Islamic Jihad to kill all the infidels? And what about the the 1400 year-old religious battle between the Shia and Sunni?. Francis Crick, the Nobel prize winning biologist who discovered DNA, once remarked that 10,000 years from now humans will look back on all religion as a joke. I doubt we can wait that long.

The ugly.
Asteroids, cataclysmic volcanoes, earthquakes. Who said there were any guarantees?

Tags: Francis Crick, DNA, Biotechnology, FDA, Cancer, Global Warming, Oil

web-to-tv 3.0

WebTV, founded in 1995 and later acquired by Microsoft, was the first attempt at bringing web media to the television. As described in PC World "getting the Web to display on a typical TV in 1995 was like watching an elephant tap-dance--you were amazed not that it could do it well but that it could do it at all. With the WebTV, Web pages looked horsey, some media formats didn't work at all, and using the remote control to hop from link to link was excruciating."

Today's Web-To-TV solutions are more robust though limitations in control persist. Do people want to stream the PC to their TV - or do you just want to turn on the TV and easily search, select and share web media with your family and friends? How do you type in a URL with a one button remote? Which hardware solution / media restriction do you want to live with? Is YouTube really worth watching on your 54" 1080p display?

A byline in the Financial Times today offered an interesting definition - Web 2.0 is a world dominated by user-generated content, while Web 3.0 will be a world where professional content dominates. The Web-To-TV evolution is poised to make the same transition - from today's YouTube cats-on-a-treadmill to professional actors, lights, camera and action - all on your big screen TV in full HD. Now where did I put I put the remote?

Tags: webtv, web-to-tv, Financial Times

what you get is what you see

Here's a simple rule of thumb for watching web media: If the content was created with a cellphone or laptop camera quality camera, then it is best viewed on a cellphone or laptop display. If the content is produced in a studio with HD camera & sound capture, then it is best viewed on an HDTV with multi-channel sound.
To date 99% of the media available on the web is produced by the viewers, i.e. user generated video. But how do want to view web media produced by professional actors in studios?
Vote and see how the crowd votes

Tags: ask500people.com

The last unexplored country in semiconductor land

I have been involved with semiconductors for 35 years. In college I fabricated solar cells and laser diodes on one inch wafers. I started my career at Texas Instruments during the conversion from three inch MOS wafers to four inches. Minimum feature size was 5um (or 5000 nanometers). The 16K DRAM was struggling to reach cost effective yield and the 64K would prove to be an opportunity for TI to bury a hundred million dollars in the West Texas sand, before moving the entire project to Japan.
Today the train known as Moore's Law, has dropped most of it's cars. After Intel, TI, TSMC, & UMC there aren't many fabs that can afford to travel down the line to 45nm, 32nm or 22nm. There really is a point where quantum effects say "Stop, Backup, Find some other way to compute". Molecular/genetic solutions may provide the next "quantum" leap in compute power but you need to be majoring in biochemistry if you want that career path. In the meantime, architecture may be the last not-fully-explored territory left in this business.

Tags: Moore's Law, Texas Instruments, Intel, TSMC, UMC, nm, multi-core, DRAM

Someday every TV will be online

In 15 years, broadcast television will only be useful for high-profile live events like the Super Bowl, awards shows and programs like “American Idol, Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, said during a keynote interview at the TelevisionWeek Upfront Summit in New York.

I think he's too pessimistic. Web-to-TV will happen in 10 years, and American Idol certainly won't last that long (one can only pray). The web will subsume regular TV broadcasting for 95% of what people watch. Of course the "pipes" must get bigger - and they will; the consumer electronic industry must integrate internet access and embedded browser-player functionality into television sets - and they will; and users will need new techniques for finding content in an infinite span of long-tail channels - and they will.

Tags: NBC, American Idol, Web-To-TV, long-tail

Pay me or Play me?

How do companies make a connection with people who need their products in the web-to-tv age?

TV commercials are broadcast to everyone. Right now, there is a hamburger commercial playing on my TV, but I haven't eaten a hamburger in thirty years. The broadcaster doesn't know that - and they're wasting they're money to pay for my eyeballs, whether I DVR-skip it or mentally skip it.

The TV viewing experience can be compelling if the product matches your needs. At some level TV is absorbed subconsciously better than repetitive dancing stick figures on a Flash banner ad.

Internet video does offer behavioral targeting with cookies or user-defined preferences that feed advertising delivery options.

How about TV embedded advertising that is tailored to the viewer. Cable can deliver neighborhood localized advertising, but having neighbors that love hamburgers won't change my dietary bias. Web-to-TV has the potential to match the highest impact ads with the right potential customer.

Tags: web-to-tv, commercials, DVR

Place-shifting and web-to-tv

Location free TV, and the Slingbox by SlingMedia are place-shifting technologies. They allow you to watch "your TV" from a PC/smartphone through the internet - from anywhere in the world. And InFunGo> has a software solution that connects your mobile devices to your home media server, from anywhere in the world.

What does "your TV" mean when TV moves to the web. Similar to Google Web Apps, "your Excel" is available wherever you and a working browser happen to be. Ditto your pictures on Flickr or your home movies on YouTube. Place-shifting becomes meaningless when the media is on a server for anyone to access if authorized.

Broadcast TV excels at quality (production, acting, and predictability).
Live means live regardless of how many people are watching. But you pay for it with longer and longer ads. And there is a growing trend to "free" actors (who can't act). The barriers for production and distribution keep dropping. Web TV will excel at variety - any topic at any time. Instead of 50M people watching one show, 50M people watch 50M shows. Many believe there is a collective desire to watch a show everyone else is watching. Everyone can talk about the same show the next day at the water cooler at work or the social network equivalent. Web-to-TV threatens to change that.

Is there utility in combining web media with broadcast media? The networks want their audience to switch back and forth between broadcast TV and companion web content - during a commercial, or after the show is over. (They do this to supplement ad revenue lost to DVR ad-skipping - a $30B loss by some estimates.)

Ultimately web content and broadcast content could be combined on the same widescreen. Early examples of this exist today. Mainstream solutions will require new ways to control and lean-forward content with lean-back content.

Tags: Flickr, YouTube, Sony, SlingMedia, InFunGo, MediaServer, MediaPC

Footprints, Footsteps

The news today is full of stories and examples of carbon footprints. How much carbon dioxide does an action create? I read it may be cheaper (by carbon) to drive your car to the store than walk. Walking will burn calories that you will replace with carbon footprints whose sum will exceed the quantity released by the burning of the gas your trip consumed. Probably untrue but a bit humorous.
Carbon footprint is a fad - an early 21st century fad. The measure that will worry the world this century is water footprint. Unlike CO2 which is released by mother nature in levels that make your trip to the store inconsequential by 8 orders of magnitude, water is a finite resource. Global warming will change water distribution in ways we don't understand and in ways that will be difficult to react to. Los Angeles can't move 1000 miles to the south, but the water could.

The Age of Web-To-TV

YouTube launched the age of user-generated-content. They didn't invent it, but they made it mainstream. With cell phones, laptop cameras and cool new gadgets like the Flip-Ultra, you can vlog easier than blog. Everyone wants to source UGC, but would you watch someone else's UGC on your HDTV?

CBS broadcast every NCAA March Madness game on their website. This is Web-To-TV. Hulu has organized years of Fox and NBC content for free viewing. Web-To-TV is not restricted to repurposed broadcast TV content. Technology has lowered the barriers to entry. A $1000 HD video camera, a MAC running Final Cut Pro, and a few aspiring actors can create TV quality content. The lure of advertising dollars has create a surfeit of aggregation outlets begging to distribute content. The only dilemma for the viewer is how to scroll thru a million virtual channels with a hand-held remote control.

Tags: web-to-tv, Hulu, Fox, News Corp, YouTube

Do people want to watch internet media on their HDTV?

I posed this question to the world on Ask500
This is an interesting site that uses the "wisdom of the crowd" approach. Similar to an exit poll, standard statistical tests (e.g. Chi square) can identify a non-random result with strikingly few samples. Think "Obama in a landslide, before the sun sets in California".

In my question, the respondents are net-savvy by definition. They probably watch internet media on their computer screen. So far the results look like a landside. Click the link and make your choice.

Tags: ask500.com, HDTV, Obama, wisdom of the crowd

User Generated TV

I am sure there are a lot of people who watch Saturday Night Live "live" (if you count tape-delayed for the West Coast as live), but most of us tape the show for viewing another day, with one hand on the ad-skip button. Out of several ha-ha funny skits, and one or two totally dumb skits, one or two will be off-the-chart funny. The lip-sync musical hiatus is interesting for about ten seconds. And the endless food and car ads would put anyone still awake at 12:35AM fast asleep.

The "Best of SNL" has been a favorite TV Special for years. The compilations change as the SNL crew evolves. What if you could create your own SNL mash-up? You can. Online media producer Hulu.com offers individual skits from SNL and other NBC and FOX programs. Combine those with the best gems from ex-SNL star Will Farrell's FunnyorDie.com and you have something completely new.

Video mash-ups become "User Generated TV" when XML playlists can be easily shared and played on the family TV.

Tags: SNL, Hulu, User generated TV, XML, FunnyOrdie, Will Farrell