I’m really disappointed that I didn’t have this idea first. The blog not martha has some step by step directions for making salad bowls out of bacon. I am doing this for sure next chance I get.

Posted: February 28th, 2008 under food.
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ABC announces that they are introducing a video-on-demand service that doesn’t let you skip commercials. I’ll be about the millionth person to pile on, but this is such an amazingly bad idea I can’t help myself. “As we developed this at every stage, there was an agreement that however we put this together, disabling the fast-forward function was key.” As my friend Adrian used to say “That’s a stupid comment, and you’re a stupid person for making it”. Why don’t you build a better car by disabling the gas pedal?

Some of the comments refresh the tired old “pile on the music industry” meme, but this is sooo much worse. Its 2008. We know how this movie ends.

If you haven’t seen it yet Chris Anderson (author of the seminal “Long Tail” theory) wrote an excellent article about how “free” works on (and off) the Internet. There isn’t anything terribly groundbreaking in the article, but it’s really well written. Maybe someone at ABC will read it before they embarrass themselves like it’s an all-night naked karaoke session.

Update: Read/WriteWeb has an excellent rebuttal to the Freemium article. Good points all. Musicmatch was one of the greatest “freemium” product of all time in terms of cash flow conversions, but the model wasn’t a good match for Internet scale when we tried to port it to Yahoo! One of the reasons that “unlimited mail” storage works at Yahoo and Google is that most people can’t use a lot of that storage – it doesn’t have a lot of utility to have tons of files in mail. I’m interested to see how the “media locker” product evolves over the next 5 years. There is no doubt that either Yahoo, Google, Amazon, or some well funded third party (or all of the above) will offer unlimited free media storage in the next 5 years with a decent player interface. That will put the freemium model to the test.

Another interesting development will be all these tech companies going carbon neutral via offsets, increasing the marginal cost of networked computing. I’d love to see what that cost of storage curve is projected to look like with the offset costs overlayed.

Posted: February 26th, 2008 under digital entertainment, digital music.
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I bought an Apple TV on a spur of the moment as a Christmas present for my wife (lame, it was really for me). I had never really given the product much thought before, I bought it primarily to be able to access the huge number of mp3s I have on hard drives in my house from the living room. We live in a relatively small place, I really only need to send music to 1 set of speakers with 1 control panel so I didn’t need to do much thinking. When purchasing the Apple TV (I got the $300 version with the smaller 40G hard drive), I sort of felt like I was overpaying for a box/functionality that if I did some research I’d be able to get much cheaper.

But I knew (instinctively, that the Apple solution would look good, minimize cables, and work with my iMac and home network out of the box. So I said screw it and shelled out.

Damn what a great brand they have. There are all kinds of case studies you do in business school about brand marketing, but my experience with Apple in the last year basically tells you all you need to know about brand marketing. Oh and don’t forget the engineers and product people, because the whole experience has delivered.

After this latest free software upgrade here is what I can do with my 6 button remote.

• Access all the music/photos/video on my iMac and any external drive connected to it
• Browse iTunes and purchase music
• Browse iTunes and purchase or rent movies and TV shows
• listen to or watch free podcasts
• Youtube
• Flickr

I can’t power the thing off, oddly enough, which I don’t get.

But there isn’t much more internet functionality I really want on the TV. I’d love to add some tweaks on the margins and I’m sure new stuff is coming, but for really anything else (ie. requiring a keyboard or mouse) I can grab my phone or laptop or sidle up to the desktop. A year ago I was hoping Apple didn’t get the internet, now it’s obvious they really get it.

I’ve been working on the fringes of the Interactive TV space since I went to an international conference on the subject in the fall of 2000. eNow/Relegence founder and product genius Edo Segal had the web 2.0 server-side xml/rss syndicated feed model down before just about anyone else and I was over there looking for distribution opportunities for our content indexing tools. WAY too early of course, thank god my Amsterdam boondoggle was the limit to our investment in interactive TV at that time. Of course at Musicmatch and then Yahoo I had lots of meetings and numerous deals with hardware companies, software companies, MSOs, and retailers about digital home products and concepts. It would be scary if I actually listed them all out. I even helped launch and market a few. The “digital home” space is a lot like mobile on a smaller scale: there have been a lot of entrants, a lot of ideas, a lot of money spent bringing failed products to market. Big corporations with vested interests in yesterday’s cash cows creating walled gardens, copyright issues muddying the waters, competing standards, etc. Meh.

So where are we in 2008 on the digitl home front? There are basically 3 products that can be considered really good in the market: Tivo, Sonos, and Apple TV. And Apple TV is by far the best (I think – I don’t have a Sonos or a Tivo anymore, but I know people that do). Not to flog a dead horse as Ned Martin would say, but notice none of the products were brought to market by cable companies, satellite companies, non-Apple PC companies, MSFT (although Xbox 360 deserves honorable mention even though they have lost close to $30B on it), Intel, telecom companies, etc. My DirecTV DVR sucks, but I had no choice if I wanted dual tuners which is the killer app. And I have no hope that it’ll ever improve to the Apple TV level.

These 3 products have a few things in common

• They set out trying to tackle specific problem (time shifted TV integrated with personalization and guide; synchronous or asynchronous streaming music in every room of your house, getting the content from your computer onto your TV/stereo) and avoided extra features that added complexity.
• They were willing to lose money at the beginning (and for a while) as the market filled in
• They charge a premium for the device, making sure it has a feature-set rich enough for early adopters, and avoid the temptation to compete downmarket with undercutting products.

Generally this is is the model that worked so well for Apple with the iPod. Focus on making the hardware excellent (interoperable, reliable, easy to set up). Don’t aim for the mass market at first. The last point is the interesting one IMO, because it goes against what we are taught usually happens in consumer electronics and PC businesses. Calculators, walkmans, boomboxes, CD players, HD TVs – they all started diving in price almost immediately upon release.

Of course, Apple needs to open up Apple TV at some point – same problem they have with iPhone. Let me add cool 3rd party apps. And I’m not buying any content with DRM on it (ill happily rent DRM’d content though). But they definitely nailed it with this upgrade.

Posted: February 16th, 2008 under digital entertainment, digital music, internet radio, portable devices.
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SxSW ‘07, which is when Twitter became a thing by my reckoning, was a year ago next month. Why does Twitter still suck? From a technology standpoint, correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t “do” much except route small packets of info around the internet. Not like they need to buy gazillions of servers to keep up with demand etc. The technology is a lot simpler than even the eNow/Relegence technology we developed back in ‘99/’00. Why do a noticeable portion of my twitters not make it to the few places I want them to go? Why is the twitter.com down (seemingly) all the time? The Twitter blog is complaining about abuse, but come on we all deal with it.  I have definitely noticed that the number of people following my feed isnt growing anywhere near as fast as my Facebook network.

I’m definitely a fan of the concept and hope they figure out a way to improve, not getting bought too early etc.

Posted: February 13th, 2008 under social networking.
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Steve Smith in Sullivan Canyon, originally uploaded by steveray.

The mountain biking in Santa Monica has been off the hook with all this rain we’re having. I’ve ridden Sullivan Canyon 4 or 5 times this year, its always a different ride because the stream keeps jumping its banks. You need to ford the stream at least a dozen times coming down, sometimes riding in the stream itself for extended periods. I caught this shot with my iPhone camera. About 40 minutes later I broke the screen trying to switch the music without stopping. Grrr.

Posted: February 11th, 2008 under moblog, mountain biking, portable devices.
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I blogged about the Facebook ads targeting the Yahoo employee network a few months back. It turns out that the VC behind the ads has put up round two to see if the continued uncertainty at Yahoo is helping his CTR. It is. He’s also targeting MSFT employees.

Yahoo’s employee base has a higher number of entrepreneurial types I’d guess, since a larger percentage of the employees came aboard via acquisition.

My own unscientific research gleaned from talking to my friends at Yahoo! – the ads were definitely noticed.

I always said during my tenure at Yahoo! that is MSFT did finally acquire them, during the resulting bureaucratic confusion I would simply stop coming to work and see how long I could keep getting a paycheck a la Office Space. My over/under would be 12 months.

Posted: February 8th, 2008 under social networking, work.
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