Born to run
April 17th, 2008After the experience of watching Vista SP1 clip, you deserve to listen and watch the actual Boss.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6se90rFN1qI
I hope it made you forget Vista video.
Vista SP1 video: Is this a viral marketing campaign from Apple?
April 17th, 2008The level of taste is not there. Whether a spoof or the real thing, this video of Vista SP1 is making Microsoft image sink even more, compared to the stylish Mac OS X.
If this video is part of a viral campaign, the awareness has clearly been created, but the associations that the video inspires are far from helping Vista and Microsoft. Microsoft should better start renewing their image. Soon people will be embarrassed to say they have Vista, and be associated with the level of taste of this video.
Just have a look at the blogsphere reactions: TechCrunch, Engadget or The rise and fall of Microsoft’s civilization: Caught on video.
Do you know anyone that is embarrassed to say they have a MacBook or an iMac?
Mobile Web: emerging or dying?
April 16th, 2008
WAP was one of the big disappointments of the mobile industry in the late 90s. Mobile Internet would be enabled by WAP, that would allow Internet access adapted to the small screens and lower processing power of the handsets of the time.
Telcos invested a lot of money to deploy the first WAP infrastructure and first Mobile portals, only to find that the service was completely unusable: too many clicks, too slow. On top of that operators tried to peel the onion with a too high price for mobile data, as they benchmarked WAP data rate with the price per byte of SMS (outrageously high, in terms of Euro/Byte). The failure was such that WAP was renamed Wait And Pay by the users, and mobile operators did not recover their investment.
Since those days, a lot of effort was put by operators to create better Walled Gardens, with downloads (games, ringtones, music tracks, etc), video-streaming and other WAP applications. WAP still requires a significant amount of Interoperability Tests (IOT) and WAP pages adaptation to guarantee applications will work. Usability and usage have increased, but still the penetration of the service is rather low (13%). Applications developed for Symbian, Blackberry and Windows Mobile, such as Google Maps, Gmail client or MobileTV Rich Media Clients have improved user experience, but still required important adaptation to keep up with the evolution of handset models
Only with the arrival of the iPhone and its Safari browser, Mobile Internet is beginning to show signs of success. As commented in previous post, 85% of iPhone users access the web from the handset, compared with a 13% of the overall market. One of the keys for this success is the performance of Safari rendering regular web sites. Such is the success of iPhone/Safari, that many mobile applications developers are seriously considering to drop any more native Mobile Application, and just focus on websites designed with mobile in mind.
As web based applications improve - and they have improved a lot; see Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube or AdobeTV -, and as handset browsers get more powerful, supporting JavaScript and Flash , there will be a bigger trend to write apps for these mobile browsers. Applications will work similarly in the desktop and in handsets such as iPhone or Android. Furthermore the browser gives enough abstraction to avoid handset adaptations and porting applications to different mobile OS’s.
Is this the end of native mobile applications? Will mobile handsets connect to the Cloud sooner that PCs?
Internet TV: Everybody wants to play
April 14th, 2008
Last week we commented on the move of Adobe into Internet TV - beyond the pure technology role they already play in YouTube. After testing Adobe Media Player, I like it specially for the control it gives you to decide what to watch every night, compared to regular TV. Technically, in slow broadband connections the streamed programmes do not play optimally, with too much re-buffering. I would have preferred a progressive downloadapproach, such as the one YouTube uses: i.e. you can start watching the show before it is downloaded, but once downloaded, you can watch it as many times as you want without any buffering, as the file is in a temporary folder in the local drive.
There were more Internet TV news last week, which ReadWriteWeb compiles and comments:
- Blockbuster moving online after recent acquisition of Movielink, with plans to launch an Internet TV set-top box, a la AppleTV, Netflix, Tivo or Vudu.
- BBC iPlayer will be made available in Nintendo Wii console, what would make Wii a stronger player in a field where it is lagging behind PS3 and Xbox360. The iPlayer will use the Web browser with flash support in Wii. More than 42 million programmes have been accessed through iPlayer since Christmas 2007 launch until March.
- Babelgum, Joost competitor, is moving from purely content distribution to content creation by setting up a $10m production fund.
Everybody wants to play in Internet TV. This is becoming a threat to telcos that have deployed IPTV. While IPTV is still superior in terms of user experience and it is able to appeal to a wider audience (not necessarily techie or PC savvy), Internet TV just make use of the increasing bandwidth available to offer Internet TV with a global reach, not tied to a broadband access provider.
Exclusive content (like football, NBA or F1), ease of use, and user experience will keep IPTV differentiated for a while. As Internet TV catches up, IPTV providers will need to add more applications to still win the race.
Bubbles, Recession and Music Industry
April 11th, 2008
“Más dura será la caída” is a Spanish saying that could translate “the higher the rise, the harder the fall”.
Economic cycles are a fact acknowledged by economists, that have written a lot about them. Simply google the term and e.g. see the definition from Wikinvest:
“Theoretically, any deviation from average growth is considered an economic cycle, whether growth of GDP, household income, employment rates, etc. In practice, economic cycles are divided into two main categories: booms and recessions. Booms are associated with a strong economy, while recessions are characterized by below-trend economic growth. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) defines economic cycles a bit differently […]it classifies the economy as being in expansion or contraction. […]
The basic idea behind economic cycles is that […] in the long term, the highs and lows average out to form the trend, or average, economic growth rate. This trend growth rate […]has remained relatively steady in the past”
Economists are very good at making predictions a posteriori, and have developed all sort of theories, including: (1) that the government/central banks interventions somehow incentive the creation of cycles, (2) that the stock market anticipates the cycles and can be used to predict them or (3) that consumer expectations are the best indicator of the coming cycle. And many more.
While there is true in these explanations, one important root cause of recession or crisis are bubbles: The bigger the bubble, the sharper the recession.
- The Internet bubble of the late 90s with dotcom stocks irrationally valued, even with no business case
- The UMTS license bids in UK and Germany that sent the telecom industry into a severe crisis, after licenses were bought at 6000 Euros per inhabitant!
- The house market in UK, US or Spain, with valuations that are not sustainable compared to average earnings (see graphic above from the Economist, and guess its projection).
Future expectations are a clear factor in feeding booms and recessions in the cycles. In year 2000 we could read articles in Wired, explaining how the IT revolution had created a source of permanent growth that would end with the cycles. And so Wired predicted that Bill Gates would be the first trillionaire, based on Microsoft Stock continuing its late 90s price surge over twenty years. Similar rationale went into the UMTS licenses, predicting that wireless data and Machine2Machine would increase revenues by orders of magnitude.
So what is the tipping point after which expectations change and so the cycle? Couldn’t have we all kept the faith in IT revolution powers, so that Bill Gates was by now trillionaire? What if investors had kept (more) faith in mobile operators? wouldn’t we have by now wireless connected machines (fridge, microwaves ovens, washing-machines..) everywhere? What made the bubbles burst?
At some point in time there needs to be some fundamentals to sustain prices and valuations. Whether stocks, spectrum licenses or housing, an investment needs a return according to its valuation. Big crisis comes when the expectations have irrationally led to high prices/valuations that can not be sustained by fundamentals. Faith is lost and the sharp adjustment comes as a crash, crisis or recession.
Free market and its law of supply and demand are the best invented system to set prices. It only needs healthy competition, transparent information and the assumption that human beings are rational in their decision. The last point is not always obvious.
So what does the Music Industry has to do with all this? Not much, except that they are going through a tough crisis, once their bubble of high prices burst, due to digital distribution. Music was over-priced thanks to the tyranny of physical distribution - CD, vinyls, scarce shelf space -. Adjustment is just coming.
Free Music Pays Back
April 10th, 2008
Last weekend while walking in a mall, I saw a record shop that was playing in their big plasma screens a live concert from Celine Dion. When I saw it I wondered who can be interested in having this DVD? I am not specially keen on Dion, so you can imagine that the idea of purchasing it was never in my mind. A couple of days later I saw a TV add of Dion’s DVD, and thought, why not downloading it with eMule. Celine Dion World Tour will be soon in town, so why not see what the show is about.
Clearly I would have never bought the DVD in the record store. Yet, the curiosity might have made me spend one hour of my time to watch the downloaded concert.
What would Celine Dion prefer? Shouldn’t she prefer that I watch her downloaded show for free, and maybe get interested to go to her concert?
Last.fm says that free music leads to increase sales of songs: Free music encourages sales
“Last.fm’s on-demand service, which lets users play any particular song, only allows a user to stream a song in full three times. After which, they’re prompted to purchase the track through one of the affiliate services. […] Since the service launched, Last.fm users are purchasing 66% more albums than before.”
With the huge amount of information we are exposed to and the increasing fight for attention, the music industry is short-sighted not to see that it is already a privilege that we lend our ears and our time to listen to an artist. Artists should encourage to have their music available to as much people as possible, including those who would have never bought their music in the first place.
Adobe positions on Internet TV
April 9th, 2008
Adobe just just released Adobe Media Player 1.0 and Adobe TV. Built on AIR, the Media Player supports Flash video and h264 video encoding, with 1080p, 720p and 480i resolutions. Users can subscribe to channels, with content available from CBS, Universal and MTV among others, including the Long Tail of niche content creators.
You can get the player here. You can also tune to Adobe TV with hundreds of videos on Adobe products, including, Photoshop CS3, Dreamweaver and others. More details in TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and NewTeeVee.
Adobe Flash technology already supports YouTube and it is a de facto standard for Internet TV and video clips. With the new launch Adobe aims not only at providing technology but also the Service behind. Adobe is playing in the same league as YouTube (without the social network component), iTunes (without the rental yet), Joost (without the P2P technology), Vuze (bittorrent based) or Miro (Internet video aggregator), only with different technology choices and content strategy.
Adobe has successfully reached some content agreements, and it is already inserting video ads. With the support of standard and hi-definition, Adobe Media Player can be a solid platform for Media companies to put their content in Internet. At least the ad-based business model is well known. And Adobe support mobile handsets will give even a more compelling proposition to content owners.
Cloud Computing: Welcome to Google’s Cloud
April 8th, 2008
Google has just launched App Engine, the service to give developers access to Google Cloud, or in other words, to the same Google infrastructure that runs G-Mail, Google Apps or Google Earth.
App Engine provides a number of tools to develop Web applications that will run on Google data centers. The basic service will be free, and will provide for capacity to serve 5 millions pages per month, including 500MB storage and 10GB data transfer per day.
As you can see in the video above, Apps Engine is easy to use and supports applications in Python. Other languages will be supported later.
Amazon was already offering access to its Cloud with Amazon Web Services, claiming 330.000 developers, and Google will be a strong competitor. Start-up companies like Bungee Labs were already offering Platform-as-a-Service, and while these companies will be hit, Google service will create an awareness on Cloud computing, that will make them target for acquisition from other big Internet players not yet in the Cloud trend.
As GigaOm suggests, this service could be a base for other development platforms like OpenSocial for social networks and Android for mobile. Could Google fulfill the promise of Java, “build once, run on any platform”?
To learn more about Cloud Computing and its buzz, here is a good article from NYT: What Cloud Computing Really Means.
Google cause for Openness succeeds in the wireless auctions
April 4th, 2008
Google did not actually want the spectrum licenses, that ultimately went to Verizon and AT&T. Google’s objective was to secure a bid that met the $4.6 Bn price tag that would enforce the regulations they had lobbied for open applications and open devices. Google admits this strategy in their Public Policy blog:
“[…] as the FCC was setting rules for the auction last summer, we urged the Commission to adopt four openness conditions. Further, we vowed to bid at least $4.6 billion in the auction if the Commission adopted all four rules. Even though the FCC ultimately agreed to only two of the conditions, which nullified our original pledge, we still believed it was important to demonstrate through action our commitment to a more open wireless world.”
More details on the auction in NYT’s article here.
Google is quite smart, and the objective of forcing “openness” to wireless operators was achieved - at least from a legal standpoint. This openness can only be beneficial to the end user and it definitively fosters innovation vs. oligopolistic practices.
On the other side, the high price paid for Spectrum, somehow legitimates the need for Wireless operators to behave as oligopolies to get a return.
FCC should rather enforce the openness clauses for the benefit to the Society. This conditions would probably make spectrum less costly, and it would force Wireless Operators to build their business case counting on “openness” instead of oligopolistic control.
Again, bravo for Google and its “openness” cause.
Record labels adapt to new order
April 3rd, 2008
MySpace has struck a deal with Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music to create a joint venture for a Music Site. EMI is reported to be still in negotiations. The labels would take a minority stake at the spin-off of MySpace Music service.
TechCrunch was the first to disclose the deal, an provides some financial details:
“The new company will […] get a cash infusion of $120 million or so from parent company News Corp, and distribute that $120 million to Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. In return, the litigation will be dropped and the labels will give streaming and downloading rights to their catalog to the new entity”
The New York Times gives some highlights on what the service will look like:
“Visitors to the site will be able to listen to free streaming music, paid for with advertising, and share customized playlists with their friends. They will also be able to download tracks to play on their mobile devices […] in competition with similar services like Apple, Amazon and eMusic.
A subscription-based music component, where users pay a monthly amount for unlimited access to downloadable tracks, is also being considered […]
[…] tickets, T-shirts, ring tones and other music merchandise will also be available.”
Labels seem to finally surrender to the new order created by Internet and mp3, even if it is as result of a litigation.
