Christopher Herot's Weblog

TiVo at D6

Kara Swisher interviewed TiVo CEO Tom Rogers at D6 this morning.  Swisher opened the discussion by observing that TiVo invented the DVR and still had the most compelling user experience, but that business success has proven elusive.  In the tradition of all the CEOs who presented at D, Rogers preferred to look on the bright side and pointed out that TiVo had a bright future of delivering content from both the cable networks and the Internet.  Also, while the networks have been worried over the ability of consumers to skip commercials, TiVo could offer those same networks detailed information on what commercials people did watch.  He said that this data revealed some surprising insights, such as that the most watched commercials were not necessarily those on the most-watched shows.

While TiVo has spawned many imitators among the cable MSOs who build DVR capability into the set-top box, the company has been successful in striking deals with some of those companies to run TiVo's software in the box, and has been successful in suing those who do not.

Rogers dodged a question from Bob Frankston about how whether TiVo was still relevant when consumers could avail themselves of more innovative and DRM-free content on the Internet by pointing out that large screen TVs were still selling well and would be the home entertainment vehicle for some time.  Also, TiVo is connecting to Internet video services such as Amazon's to that viewers could watch that material on their TV sets.  As he put it, his own children don't distinguish between live TV and material that has been either stored from live or downloaded.

xkcd

In another instance of geek culture leaking into the mainstream, the New York Times ran an article today,  This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix about Randall Munroe's Internet comic strip xkcd.

The Times article makes an attempt to explain the humor of the comic at right, explaining that "sudo" is a Unix command "that temporarily grants godlike powers" but like all humor, the enjoyment comes from a recognition that we've been there before:

$ rm foo
rm: Permission denied
$ sudo rm foo
Password:
$

Music Delivery: Downloads, CD, DVD, Blu-ray

If you read the news that ITunes has surpassed Wal-Mart as the top music retailer in the U.S., you might think that the bits-on-plastic mode of music distribution was on its way out, but even with the price of petroleum going up and bandwidth coming down, those little plastic discs still offer some advantages.  For one thing, there is the sentimental attachment to and security of owning a physical artifact instead of just rearranging some magnetic domains in return for your $10 or so.  Microsoft reinforced this notion when it announced it would discontinue supporting retrieval of license keys for music previously purchased from MSN Music.  Also, it is so much more satisfying to give or receive a gift when an actual object changes hands instead of an email being sent and received.  And if you are a musician with a new album you want someone to listen to, they are more likely to do so if they have a jewel case with some nice artwork on their desk instead of some bits on a hard drive.

In addition, there are a lot more bits on their way. Music has long been recorded and mixed at 96/24 LPCM (each second taking 96 k samples of 24 bits each, encoded with a lossless Linear Pulse Code Modulation) or in analog format, using 30 inch per second tape.  However, producing a CD meant downsampling to 44.1 kHz and 16 bits, resulting in the loss of information.  Digital downloads in mp3 or AAC went through compression which discarded even more information.   While a new generation of consumers have grown up who have only heard digital music, musicians such as Neil Young have been quite vocal about the decline in quality.  Indeed when T-Bone Burnett used a Jimmy Reed song for Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood he dug up the original analog tapes rather than use the commercially available CD.

While the CD has been frozen in time since the 1980s, its cousin the DVD has evolved to contain a number of more advanced, and larger formats.  Most DVD players can play audio at 96/24.  This was originally intended for use in movie soundtracks, but some albums such as Neil Young's Greatest Hits and John Mellencamp's forthcoming Life, Death, Love and Freedom use this feature to deliver a static video with a high resolution stereo soundtrack, effectively turning the home DVD player into a high-res CD player.  In addition, the Mellencamp album will come with computer-ready WAV, mp3, and AAC files on the disc.  All of this takes a lot of space, but that's not a problem with DVDs.  Then there is Neil Young's new archive project which will fill ten Blu-ray discs with music, videos, and scanned documents.  That would take close to ten hours to download unless you were my neighbor with four Internet connections.  Of course he is the wave of the future and soon these downloads will happen in no time.  My prediction is that we will still have bits on plastic, but the plastic will just contain a digital ID that will allow the user to download the content, perhaps caching it on  a local hard drive. The consumer will insert the disc in the slot and press Play, unaware of precisely where the bits are coming from or where they are stored.

Electro Magnetic

Michael Piersante describing some of the equipment at T Bone Burnett's Electro Magnetic Studios in Los Angeles.

Twitter Stressing Out

What more can I say!

Amoeba Music

Los Angeles is home to one of the last remaining real record stores, Amoeba Music.  In the age of iTunes, Amazon, and Wal-Mart this this cavernous two-story establishment would be an anomaly anywhere but Los Angeles, where everyone seems to be wither working in or somehow connected with people that make music, movies, and television.  (But then the store has siblings in San Francisco and Berkeley).

Amoeba has an extensive offering of CDs and DVDs of every possible genre, used music, and the largest set of vinyl records I've seen anywhere.

More photos here.

 

Amoeba Music Inc.
6400 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA  90018
323-245-6400
www.amoeba.com

The Twitter Song

Mary Hodder twittered this today and I just had to pass it along:

IF I HAD TWITTER (The Twitter Song)* **

If I had Twitter
I'd tweet in the morning
I'd tweet in the evening
All over this LAN
I'd tweet out danger
I'd tweet out a warning
I'd tweet out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this WAN

If I had a cell phone
I'd txt in the morning
I'd txt in the evening
All over gsm
I'd txt out danger
I'd txt out a warning
I'd txt out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this closed-source nightmare of overcharging dinosaurs

la la la

If I had a photo
I'd flickr in the morning
I'd flickr in the evening
All over this land
I'd flickr out danger
I'd flickr out a warning
I'd flickr out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

Well I've got Twitter
And I've got a cell phone
And I've got flickr'd photos
All over this open web
It's the tweet of justice
It's the txt of freedom
It's the datasharing love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this LAND

* words and music adapted from Lee Hays and Pete Seeger
** parody of online culture by Mary Hodder.

Travel Gear

Chris Brogan asked a Twitter question this morning:

          I travel with lots of little gadgets for media making. How do you carry yours? Show me your bag?

Since I am about to take off on a trip, I gathered up my stuff and took inventory.  I was expected to be annoyed by the number of power supplies, but as Jim Storer pointed out, you can charge almost anything via USB these days.  The more enlightened manufacturers equip their devices with USB ports, and for those that don't Malleable Devices provides adapters.  It's a good thing, since the presence of a USB port on the device is not always a guarantee that the device will accept power that way.  For example, my Nokia N95.  Indeed, among my devices, only the laptop and the Bose headphones require custom power adapters.

My kit, clockwise from top center:

• IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpad T43p
• Logitech QuickCam Pro for Notebooks - for Seesmic and Skype
• Power Supply for Thinkpad
• Cree LED Flashlight
• Jawbone USB headset and charger
• Palm GPS Navigator and power cord
• Palm Treo 680 - Just use this for GPS now
• Charger for Nokia N95
• USB Cable for Nokia N95
• Nokia N95-3
• Adapter for micro SD card used by N95
• SD to USB adapter
• USB drive
• iPod USB sync cable
• Audio cable for connecting iPod to Automobile sound system
• iPod
• Earbuds for iPod
• Bose QC-3 noise canceling headphones, charger, cables, airplane adapter

I'll dump the Treo as soon as I can figure out how to make the GPS work in the N95, although the separate Bluetooth GPS is convenient for sticking in the window of the airplane.  Getting rid of that and a few power supplies might give me room for some clothes in my carry-on bag.

TweetWheel

TweetWheel is yet another example of how a system as simple and elegant as Twitter can, with a suitably open API, spawn all sorts of interesting and useful applications.

You give TweetWheel your Twitter username and it shows you all the people you follow and draws arcs among them to show you which of your friends are following each other.  It's a little buggy - not all the arcs show up, but it's an interesting way to measure the density of your social network.  UPDATE: The developer says TweetWheel only fetches the first 100 friends for each of your friends, so that's why it can sometimes miss connections.

TweetWheel is the work of Augusto Becciu in Buenos Aires.

Thanks to Paul Grous for alerting me to this one and illustrating one of the valuable aspects of Twitter:  "If the news is important it will find me,"

Social Media Breakfast 7

This morning the Boston Social Media Breakfast moved across the street to Ryles and filled the room with local entrepreneurs at Twitterati.

Today's topic was Hiring/Getting Hired in a 2.0 World.  Stever Robbins led off with his Ten Great Cultural Career Lies (v3) and an admonition  to use social media such as Twitter as a tool to make connections which can lead to a conversation rather than as a substitute for the conversation itself.  (Video here.)

Aaron Strout described how he filled some recent positions at Mzinga by forsaking the usual resume/interview process and using social media to source and evaluate candidates.  Of course he did end up bringing the finalists in for face-to-face meetings, but he found using Twitter, LinkedIn, etc to be much more productive than the old way of doing business, since it gave him more insight into the candidates than he could get through a prepared resume.  He has more on his blog and there is video here

Todd Defren has been using a similar approach at SHIFT Communications.  He said that for the most part the people they want to hire "are already known to them" through Twitter and other forms of social media.  The last three hires came to them that way.  [I have no video of his talk, since the combination of my Nokia N95/AT&T/Qik stopped working and I had to reboot my phone(!) but he has written about this at his blog.]

Chris Brogan gave an entertaining talk about how he got his first job at The Phone Company and how he left there (just in time) for a series of jobs where his reputation preceded him.  (video)

During the Q&A (video, more video, even more video) I asked if hiring through social media branding applied equally well to positions outside of the marketing function.  I've seen it work for PR people (Amanda Gravel at SHIFT, Amanda Mooney) and consultants (Stowe Boyd, Laura Fitton) but how well does it work for people whose jobs don't involve a market-facing role, such as engineering, IT, or accounting, or for companies who have not embraced social media.  The answer from the speakers was that (1) al companies would need to embrace social media if they wanted to survive and (2) that if they didn't you wouldn't want to work there anyway.  That was good advice for the assembled Faithful, but it may be a bit premature for the average job seeker.  Certainly I favor putting my time and money into companies that practice transparent business practices and communicate well with their customers, including encouraging their employees to do the same, but how to explain the success of Apple which is one of the least transparent and social-media-aware companies in the industry.  In the ensuing discussion, the best answer we could come up with is that if you are going to present an old-school, opaque interface to the world, you had better be damn good at it, like Steve Jobs.  For the rest of us, Mark Twain had good advice: "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."

More videos at qik.com/cherot.

Thank you to Bryan Person for organizing and SHIFT Communications for sponsoring the event.