Bucking Starbucks' WiFi Pricing
Starbucks and T-Mobile have launched their WiFi hotspot offer in the UK. It costs too much, and the coffee sucks. Bring on some competition.
TV Sucks
From TV Sucks, by Michael Rosenblum: Television, up until now, has been a group activity. Why? Mostly because it has been so difficult and expensive to make. After all, if Picasso had to pay $1500 a day to hire a paintbrush, and then had to deal with union canvass setters, union paint mixers and union paintbrush dippers — and then had to be an employee of the Sherman Williams company to paint, he probably would have sold life insurance instead. (Not to mention having to focus group Guerinca. “No, put the eyes back in the heads. The audience finds this …
Radio-of-Me
Lean-back media brings content to the user, rather than the user having to actively engange with complex systems and delayed gratification. Some thoughts on the experience of ‘traditional’ lean-back media, and how collaborative filtering and DRM could bring the power of p2p to that expereince in a way that the music industry could actually support and encourage.
uniqueliveevents.com
Last night, care of Helen, we blagged our way to a viewing of The Barber of Seville at the Royal Opera House, organised as a promotional evening by uniqueliveevents.com, a newish consortium formed by BT Broadcast Services and Shooting Partners. The opera was broadcast live from France, and displayed projected via JVC’s QX1 projector (“the highest quality image currently available in the world using DILA technology”). Where we were seated, there was a lot of fan noise from the projector, but the image and sound quality was very good, and the whole uniqueliveevents.com proposition is an interesting one. Their pitch …
Intelligent Media Sharing Gets Its Lean-Back Back
Intelligent Video-On-Demand and music file sharing can offer a very lean-back experience, compared to the lean-forward effort required to deal with most tools for p2p file sharing, or multi-channel TV.
More on Geolocated MOOs
My earlier post was a little unfair on mudlondon and other geolinked MOOS, I think. By my own definition — location is what becomes of places when things happen there — sites such as mudlondon may well become places, assuming stuff actually does happen there — people gathering, talking, building. My hidden bias and agenda, which I should have articulated at the beginning, is that for the geolinkage to mean much to me personally, the experience of the virtual place must in some way play off, rather than simply representing, its real referent — the fascination for me is in …
Place, Location, and Geolocated MOOs
There is a fundamental difference between the notions of place and of location. A couple of new geolocated MOOs highlight the distinction.
Zeitgeist II
The Self-healing Minefield — the military gets gung-ho about smart networks and peering. Terrifying.
Zeitgeist
We’ve been looking at satellite phones for a project in a hot place far from normal coverage. The best we’ve found so far is the Thrane & Thrane TT-3080A which has worldwide coverage through Inmarsat, and can do single-channel ISDN data transfer. The only problem, according to the very helpful sales guy at Satphone.co.uk, is that we’ll have to get our order in quickly “as we only have limited numbers of them and they are very popular with journalists going to the Middle East.”
Music Piracy a Blip, says Lessig
From Associated Press: Washington politicians would make a grave mistake in crafting new copy-protection laws based on Internet patterns today, an influential Stanford law professor warned. The professor, Lawrence Lessig, pointed out Wednesday that millions of consumers are downloading music and other materials onto their computers because slow dial-up connections make it tough to stream content quickly to a variety of devices. That’s bound to change within a few years as connections get faster, he said, making today’s debate irrelevant. “In the future, it will be easier to pay for subscription services than to be an amateur database administrator who …