Taking advantage of the falling chip prices due to manufacturing optimization of cellphones and flat panels, more high tech toys are coming! This is very exciting, especially the Night Vision glasses which will probably be bought by somebody like my husband.
Here’s a link to the article.
Here is an interesting editorial on how digital media consumption could change the advertising and “watercooler” experience. I like how this author is embracing digital technology and taking an enlightened and open view on how the changes will be positive for media companies, advertisers, and customers alike. Now if only the media companies would get with the vision. Perhaps if the advertisers push on them using this perspective, then we’ll see an end to the media companies’ paranoia and fear faster. It seems sad that the media companies will have to be forced into new business models. But once they realize that they can penetrate world-wide they will get with the rest of us.
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Published: March 17, 2008
Here is an interview with Google’s CIO, Douglas Merrill. What’s interesting in the interview is that Google’s IT is decentralized and that a lot support is left up to the employees. At first it sounded to me like Google was kinda loosey-goosey on the software it allows it’s employees to use, but a upon reading the details given, it sounds like many other companies they have restrictions around what software employees are allowed to use and they they are very cost concious about software too — sometimes opting for the personal versions of software rather than the corporate or industrial versions. In all, I was expecting to read that Google handled its IT radically, but I didn’t get that impression from this interview. Consequently, I came away from reading this a little disappointed.
It looks like thanks to Google, everybody wins, including customers, from the Spectrum auction.
Something about this sounds fishy. I wonder what kind of CRAZY DRM scheme could be bundled in this proposed music deal.
First of all, I don’t want Universal Music’s entire portfolio on my music player. I may already own a bunch of my own music, I still like the CD experience, and I think that I would be overloaded with too many choices of what to listen to. I’m picky with my music, so I don’t want everything on Earth on my player, especially when I’m listening to songs at random. I’ve also heard a different version of the deal in which Universal does open up it’s entire portfolio to Apple to pre-load iPods and iPhones with 50-songs in exchange for some of the music device revenue. After that they want to charge some fixed amount per year to buy additional blocks of music. I’m not sure I get this. I’m not sure what Apple gets out of this as an advantage over iTunes and keeping all the money for its music devices. It’s not clear yet, either whether there will be some fishy DRM to prevent the spread of digital music files and to force customers to subscribe if they want to listen the music that was bundled with their device. It sorta feels like Universal is trying to either take over music devices or make it impossible for Apple to continue to be successful. I have no love for iTunes and I have even less love for the traditional music industry. Despite this, iTunes is the devil I know, so I’m a little scared of Universal’s proposal.
Speaking of DRM and downloading music, my Dad said something interesting to me a while back about my little brother and why he illegally downloads music. He said that the iPod memory capacity is too big and that my little brother feels the need to use all of the capacity. Therefore, he does willy-nilly downloads of music that he may not like. Perhaps many young people behave this way. Perhaps Universal received a similar assessment of young people’s online activity — who knows — and they are trying to combat illegal downloading by prefilling iPods with crap. Gosh, that would seriously crack me up if that is what Universal is thinking. The flip side of this is that if my brother had to pay for this music, he wouldn’t have purchased it in the first place — it’s like samples at the Costco to him. To me it seems reasonable as the content provider to act like Costco and let people sample so bands can build a fan base and then sell stuff to that fan base (I guess that’s the purpose of radio, but listening to radio, we know they only play about 40-different songs a day — there is no diversity, and the selection is controlled by the music companies.)
More Rambling 