Month: November 2005

By Davis Freeberg

According to Hardware analyst iSuppli, it costs Microsoft $525 for every XBox 360 that they build. I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Microsoft for taking a loss on their past Xbox sales, but I think Business Week does a good job of pointing out that it’s not about the hardware, but about the software. Software offers higher margins then hardware because of it’s cost structure. You have very high initial fixed costs to create a game, but after that it costs very little produce additional copies of each title. Because of this, it offers an unlimited upside to the profit margins on software, while hardware margins are constrained by the high variable costs associated with the production of the units. It’s a smart strategy and one that Sony will likely employ as well. Last summer Merril Lynch Japan suggested that it will cost Sony $494 to make their console. If they end up selling it for the analyst suggested retail price of $399, then they will be losing $95 on each of their consoles.

By Davis Freeberg

A company named IS Decisions is out with a product that can completely remove Skype from a network. Why anyone could hate Skype enough to make a program that vaporizes it is beyond me, but I could definetely imagine some clever disgrunted IT geek causing some real mischief with it.

This seems like a pretty unnecessary piece of software. If IT Managers are really that concerned about having Skype on their computers, they could simply use the unistall that comes with the software. In a letter posted on Skype Journal, the CEO of IS Decisions defends the product.

“I am François Amigorena, IS Decisions’ CEO, SkypeKiller’s editor.

Please don’t get us wrong: we are not in any way Skype or any software editors’ enemies. We just want to make sure we give our corporate clients maximum choice in their network management.

If they want to allow the use of Skype on their networks, it is perfectly alright with us. But if they don’t, we provide them with an efficient tool to perform a clean and remote uninstall.

More, SkypeKiller can also be used just to detect Skype instances without uninstalling them or only partially.

San Francisco municipal WiFi is live Well add three new hotspot venues for free wi-fi in San Francisco. In addition to SBC Park and Union Square, Niall Kennedy is reporting that TechConnect, the City’s wireless access grid, is alive and broadcasting. Niall tested the new service out at the three locations and couldn’t actually connect, but it’s nice to know that it should be here shortly.

By Davis Freeberg

While Bill Gates and Peter Moore were busy promoting the launch of the XBox 360 yesterday, it appears that Microsoft was also preparing for the launch of their latest PVR offering the LRM-519 by LG Electronics. According to BetaNews the product was launched this morning, although it does appear that some Best Buy stores may have jumped the gun on the offering.

This lastest DVR to hit the market appears to be priced at the high end of the spectrum. With a suggested retail price of $599, plus a $10 a month program guide fee, it may not end up being the TiVo killer that LG Electronics hopes it to be, but it does offer a lot of functionality including home media support, DVD burning capablities and the ablity to expand your hard drive without being a hacker or paying weaknees to upgrade your storage. From the BetaNews article

“The device includes a 160GB hard drive and will run on Windows Media Center Technologies. The DVD recorder will support a range of recording formats, including DVD+R, DVD-R and DVD+R Dual Layer discs. Users will also be able to expand the storage space of the unit by connecting external hard drives to the DVR’s 2 USB ports.”

Microsoft has been experimenting with their guide data on the foundation box, but this is the first time that a non MCE Microsoft PVR box has been available to consumers outside of Washington state. While I haven’t seen demonstrations of the Foundation box yet, there does appear to be video of this box in action at Microsoft’s Program guide page. Apparently the box uses the Microsoft Extender platform and could be a good alternative for consumers who want the convenience of an extender unit, but who don’t care to own an XBox 360. DVD Recorder Reviews offers a brief overview of the capabilities of the program guide.

“The Microsoft Program Guide service can search up to 14 days of programs by title, keyword, actor, director or category. Any scheduled recording can be configured to record only once or for an entire season of shows. There’s also up to 90 minutes of “live” TV pause, and even the ability to jump forward 30 seconds.”

Engadget was fortunate enough to demo and review the LRM-519 last September and Everything HDTV was lucky enough to get invited to the LG press event. The Nears provides a detailed analysis of the user manual for the box.

Update: Editor’s note: It’s going to be awfully hard to get excited about this thing without more detail. I can’t find any info on whether or not this unit will support HDTV recording or have more than one tuner. A single tuner non HDTV PVR would be pretty worthless to come to market with at this point. Especially if you have to pay $599 to buy it plus $10 per month for guide data. Seems like the new Vista MCE box and the new HDTV TiVo boxes with CableCARD support due out next year would make this unit pretty much irrelevant.

1. Introduce full screen slide shows. There is nothing quite like the experience of sitting in your living room and watching beautiful photographs float across a 43” plasma. With a soundtrack to your life playing softly in the background, the kids playing on the floor and a nice glass of white burgundy, watching your photos float across the screen is the perfect compliment. As TiVo and Media Center turn your living rooms into virtual photography galleries, Flickr should develop full screen slide shows for users to watch their photostreams, their friends’ photostreams, and the photos you have selected as favorites.

Flickr should also create smart filters that randomly show photos from your contacts or specific lists of contacts that you can build for specific events. Imagine how cool it would be to (announced at upcoming.org or course) put together a flickr meet up at a venue with multiple plasmas. Then take the flickr RSVP list and run their photostreams through a filter and have that filter randomly show their work at the Flickr meetup. Talk about WOW factor.

As part of a full screen slideshow initiative Flickr should definitely build a Media Center plug in specifically. Media Center will hit mainstream adoption next year. Seeing your flickr stream and favorites in full screen mode on your Xbox 360 or Media Center PC would be white hot. In order to do this in a cost efficient way, Flickr would most likely need to move the originals of photos off of Flickr and on to users’ hard drives (high res photos running for 2 days when you forget to turn them off would be very bandwidth intensive). It would be important to protect these files. They should be acknowledged but invisible and inaccessible .jpg files that you CHOOSE to allow on your PC in return for the experience. Microsoft should be able to protect these files with DRM.

2. Provide users sitemeter style tracking information. Part of sharing in the blogosphere means knowing about where the conversations about you are going on. Although Technorati can be used to track some of the external links to your flickr stream, what is needed is a flickr based referral system to track both internal and external links to and from your photostream. This referral information should provide basically the same information that sitemeter does including allowing you the ability to rank your incoming links, etc.

3. Develop a stock photography matchmaking service that Flickr users could opt in to. The top 5% of Flickr’s photography at present is every bit as good as what the pros are turning out at the stock photography houses. Flickr should build a stock photo business that undercuts Getty Images by about 30% and provide a 50/50 split for money raised with their photographers. As most on Flickr are amateurs, they do not have the knowledge or connections to get into the stock photo business. Flickr should provide an easy path (for those that choose this) and provide education about the various issues regarding rights clearance where necessary and should have a department to maintain waivers for rights clearance in cases where images might contain people or businesses.

4. Integrate Flickr’s interestingness algorithm into Yahoo! Image Search. Where applicable, Flickr’s interestingness algorithm is vastly superior to both Google and Yahoo! Image Search. Although Yahoo! And Google Image Search are more complete, where Flickr does have top ranked photos they should incorporate these into the Yahoo! Image search algorithm to appear as first page results. This will promote their Flickr brand and provide a substantially better image search experience for the Yahoo! Image Search User.

5. Build a spellchecker that spell checks all the text on your flickrstream including titles, descriptions and especially tags. Many tags are misspelled at present and giving the option many people would want to correct this.

6. Develop a rewards based incentive program to promote Flickr – especially with top photographers. On each users main home page flickr has the following: “Invite your friends and family. Why? Flickr is so much better when your friends and family are on it. When you log in their new pictures are there, and they automatically see yours.

Indeed. While I’m sure people use this all the time, how about promoting it by creating a simple ranking of the top referrers of others to flickr and reward the top 25 with free flickr pro accounts and build a contest for the number one referrer. This would be the cheapest PR buzz they could ever buy.

7. Increase the speed in three specific areas: when adding your photos to groups, when you pull up the most recent comments made on your photos, and when you search. Not sure what needs to be done here but the speed needs to be improved.

8. Make interestingness the default search vs. most recent photos uploaded. Typically the most recently uploaded photos when you do a search are not that interesting. Why not give people the best photos first and let them use most recent as a back up if they so wish.

9. Allow users to sort their contacts’ photos by interestingness. I’m constantly finding super great photos of my contacts. Many of my contacts have photostreams of over 2,000 photos. I would like the ability to sort my entire list of contacts by how Flickr ranks their photos from an interestingness standpoint. How many new gems would I find? I’m sure many. This would be much more efficient than having to hunt through all of their streams. In addition I should be able to pull up all of my contacts photos ranked by favs and filter out those shots that I have already fav’d. If I’ve fav’d it I’ve seen it and know about it. Help me find the best shots from my contacts that I’ve yet to see.

10. Private favorites. Allow me to privately fav photos where only I and the photographer who is hosting the photo can see it. Many people are hesitant to fav… ummm…. “certain” photos that they would like to go back and view as favorites as everyone else can see what you fav. With full screen slide shows this would also be important. Although you might find a particular edgier photo interesting and want to fav it, you may not want it shown in your living room in front of all of your friends at the next Flickr meet up that you hold at your home. This is one of the reasons why a lot of the edgier work on Flickr has lots and lots of views but a relatively low fav/view ratio.

Yahoo: From Dot-Com Survivor to Web 2.0 Powerhouse eWeek.com is out with another article, along the lines of a number of other articles published recently elsewhere, about Yahoo! integrating Web 2.0 services into their core offerings. “Through a series of clever acquisitions and in-house creations, Yahoo Inc. has transformed itself from a dot-com survivor into a Web 2.0 powerhouse driven by blogs, podcasts and other forms of user-generated social media.”

Like the other articles on this subject recently, Flickr is brought out as the posterchild for social networked content at Yahoo!

“Another big coup for Yahoo was the acquisition of Flickr, a photo-sharing service built around a tight-knit community of users.

Flickr lets users upload digital images from camera phones and computers and set up photo albums for sharing with the community via blogs and RSS.

Flickr helped popularize the idea of using tags to trigger random associations of images and the result is a slick, wildly popular tool used by millions.

Since the acquisition, Yahoo has already meshed Flickr with its Yahoo 360 social network and a new blog search tool launched within the Yahoo News property.

Interestingly, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake now heads up the My Web 2.0 social search product, a clear indication of Yahoo’s plans for aggressive cross-integration of multiple products.

Horowitz looks at Flickr and sees endless possibilities and, although he is careful to avoid discussing future product plans, there are hints that the Flickr technology can be extended to power things like user-generated audio and video uploads.”

“Now you play a pretty good fiddle boy
But give the devil his due
I’ll bet a fiddle of gold against your soul
‘Cause I think I’m better than you.
The boy said, My name’s Johnny
And it might be a sin
But I’ll take your bet, your gonna regret
‘Cause I’m the best that’s ever been.”
– Charlie Daniels Band

Bram Cohen, the founder and chief executive of BitTorrent, yesterday held a press conference with Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, to announce a new agreement between Cohen and the studios that involve him removing links to pirated movies online and receiving in return $8.75 million in VC money from the studios. Cohen’s company BitTorrent Inc. also will help the studios with “content distribution” in the future.

Of course, the irony of the situation is that although Bram’s site may belong to him, the BitTorrent technology he created actually does not.

From slyck.com “”Bittorrent.com is their own, they can of course fix that,” said ThePirateBay spokesperson brokep. “But not in the other torrent sites without changing the protocol. The protocol actually doesn’t belong to Bram Cohen, it belongs to the community and will evolve in the way it seems fit.”

Of course very little BitTorrent traffic these days is even run through Bram’s site. Rather, the technology he created is used in significantly more volume at places like thepiratebay.

“The deal will not prevent all illegal copies from being swapped using the BitTorrent technology. Cohen said during a press conference that even after links to files are removed from his search engine, some files could still be found using other means such as google.com.”

Although Cohen always denied using BitTorrent to pirate movies himself personally (he said he had a Netflix account and that he would be too big a target) it is interesting to go back and read a few former quotes from the man who created the biggest disruption for Hollywood since Napster:

“BitTorrent is completely agnostic as to what kinds of files it distributes (and boy, is there a diversity of them in practice) so banning it would be rather like banning http. Of course, there are plenty of people who would love to ban http. “

“I am a technological activist. I have a political agenda. I am in favor of basic human rights: to free speech, to use any information and technology, to purchase and use recreational drugs, to enjoy and purchase so-called ‘vices’, to be free of intruders, and to privacy. “

“I further my goals with technology. I build systems to disseminate information, commit digital piracy, synthesize drugs, maintain untrusted contacts, purchase anonymously, and secure machines and homes. I release my code and writings freely, and publish all of my ideas early to make them unpatentable.”

“Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a ‘compromise’.”

“The content people have no clue. I mean, no clue. The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they’re so cheap, that pretty soon you’ll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate.”

“Give and ye shall receive.”

It’s sure a funny thing what $8.75 million can do.

TechCrunch : Companies I’d like to Profile (but don’t exist) Michael Arrington talks about 10 ideas he has for new internet service companies.

1. Better and Cheaper Online File Storage
2. Blog/website Email Lists
3. Portable Reputations
4. Tailored Local Offers (via RSS)
5. Facebook, in other countries
6. Free Music
7. Open Source Yellow Pages
8. Podcast Transcriptions
9. Decentralized Review Aggregation
10. Build Something Cool with SSE

Xbox 360: shortages no joke Well, I will say I called the three Best Buys in SF and they were all sold out at 10:00 a.m. in the morning yesterday. Looks like I’ll have to wait a bit to do a review.

From Ars Technica: “Visiting Best Buy, I thought I’d survey the damage. In short, the Saugus Best Buy north of Boston looks like a bomb went off. You can see where the chaos went down last night. There’s accessory racks that look like they were hit by one of those “grab as much as you can in 60 seconds” shopping cart gimmicks. The Xbox 360s were, of course, long gone. There were plenty of parents at Best Buy, a notable contrast to Circuit City, which was younger in orientation. The parents were leaving the store with sad looks on their faces. This is because one employee actually said that they do not expect to receive another major shipment of Xbox 360s until February of 2006.”