Media Technology

It’ll be interesting to watch how Apple’s iTV + iTunes competes with Tivo in the long run. The big difference is that iTV is inherently narrowcast — play podcasts and downloads from the iTunes store — while Tivo’s main schtick is to provide the advantage of narrowcast on top of a legacy broadcast video distribution system (cable).

Long-term I always bet on narrowcast, but there’s still a big question of timing: when does enough content become available on the Internet that you no longer need your cable TV subscription? And how much can Apple do to make that day come a little sooner?

Ouch. As of now AAPL is up just over 6%, PALM and RIMM both down around 5%.

I’ve been yawning about the rumors of a phone that’s also an iPod — music is the least of the apps that I use on my phone, and I’m quite happy with my Treo 650. But a quad-mode phone that runs OS X, including dashboard widgets and Safari, with GSM, EDGE, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth? Now that’s a big deal! (And just as the future of Palm OS was looking a little shaky — looks like now I can continue with my life-long dream of never having to use any form of Windows. 🙂

I’m especially looking forward to playing with is the two-fingered “pinch” interface for resizing, something that’s possible because their touchscreen can handle multiple touches at once — I’ve wanted something like that since I saw Sun’s Starfire concept video back in 1993…

Swivel looks like it might be interesting. They’re billing their service as “YouTube for Data,” where you can upload your data sets and then graph or compare them to other sets. In its best form I can imagine something like this supporting open source style research, especially if they support ways to explain and present your data (that or a good API for bloggers to link in data). In its worst form I could see any sensible analysis of the data sets getting burried under a pile of meaningless correlation statistics.

Description via TechCrunch (via Datamining Blog):

Swivel Co-founders Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy start off by describing their company as “YouTube for Data.” That’s a good start for someone trying to understand it, because the site allows users to upload data – any data – and display it to other users visually. The number of page views your website generates. Or a stock price over time. Weather data. Commodity prices. The number of Bald Eagles in Washington state. Whatever. Uploaded data can be rated, commented and bookmared by other users, helping to sort the interesting (and accurate) wheat from the chaff. And graphs of data can be embedded into websites. So it is in fact a bit like a YouTube for Data.

But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof). Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. Track your page views against weather reports in Silicon Valley. See if something interesting occurs.

The New Scientist has a write-up on an EU-funded prototype system called Tai-Chi that can turn ordinary surfaces into a touch-pad input device just by attaching a tiny piezoelectric sensor (i.e. microphone) to the surface. In one configuration, the system figures out where you’re touching / tapping by listening to how vibrations are distorted by the object and then either comparing to a database of vibration “fingerprints.” The method requires calibration to create the database, but they’re claiming accuracy to within a few millimeters.

From some email spam mail I just got:

 Hi thisisjusttestletter. How are you ? Call me. Poor you, i don't even think how much spam you are recive. when they can 

That makes two of us.

In his closing plenary at this year’s CSCW, Bill Buxton made a provocative point about how to make a difference in the research world. His key point was that people often think of technology as alchemy, creating gold out of nothing. But alchemy (the creation of brand new ideas) is very hard and very rare, and is ultimately a fool’s game. Most progress comes not from alchemy but from prospecting, the recognition of good ideas that are already out there, the understanding of which ideas are ripe for exploitation and the ability to marshal the right resources to get them into the world. He quotes Alan Kay: “It takes almost as much creativity to understand a good idea as to have it in the first place.”

The example he gave was of the Blackboard, which was invented in 1801 and which Buxton claims revolutionized education more than every other technology introduced into schools since then put together. Before 1801 each child had his or her own slateboard, which he or she used to mark and correct answers before copying them down on paper. Buxton noted as an aside the irony that we’re now trying to reintroduce slates into the classroom in the form of tablet PCs, but his main point was the fact that there’re very few differences between a slate and a blackboard: a blackboard is just a slate that’s been made an order of magnitude larger and hung on the wall. A technologist looking for novel innovation might overlook such a “minor” modification, and yet that slight change made all the difference.

Bill Buxton gave the closing plenary talk at this year’s Computer Supported Collaborative Work conference this year, and bet everyone a drink that in seven years:

…it will be as cheap to buy, per square foot, to buy 100 dpi full-color displays as the same square-footage of whiteboard today. In 7 years, displays with on the order of 20 times more pixels than are on that screen right now [pointing to a 15′ x 15′ projector screen] but the same size will be cheaper than that screen is right now without the projector. It’s going to be about one to ten dollars a square foot for a 100 dpi full-color display that’s 6mm thick. And the only question is which of the six or so competing technologies is gonna get there first.

And now, what does that mean? That’s a technological affordance, it doesn’t mean anything except that it’s interesting because I’m a technologist. But as a designer, as a citizen, as a father, I care because now I can’t think about watches, mobile phones, or any of these other devices out of the context of these portable wearable types of things moving around in space collectively and relating to those things there on the wall. What’s that mean for education, what’s it mean for business, how do we conduct our meetings? And that is CSCW, or a different branch of it. And the amount of effort put to that, to me, is still really low.

Personally I think he’s being a little optimistic the time scale, but not by a lot, and he’s certainly right that researchers need to be thinking about how that changes the environments in which we work and live. And he has a little built-in slack in his prediction: CSCW only meets every other year, so even if he’s wrong we won’t be able to collect on our drink until 2014.

According to this graph of spam volume by spam blacklister TQMcube, spam volume has increased more than tenfold in the past six months. I’m not sure if this is some kind of attempt to overwhelm spam-filters and blacklisting services or just another ratcheting up, but I do find it disheartening that doing a news search for “major increase in spam” results in posts and news reports that span several years. (Thanks to Jeff for the link to the graph.)

A few days ago Reuters opened a bureau in Second Life, the online virtual world that’s more second home than game to some 400,000 (presumably part-time) residents. Adam Pasick is bureau chief and sole reporter, and is dedicated fulltime to Second Life. As science fiction writer Charlie Strauss put it a month ago, “Truth stranger than fiction? Must write faster, the clowns are gaining …” (Via NPR’s Marketplace.)