It is no secret that movies are available for free on the Internet. But online viewing is still a niche activity, largely because of slow broadband connections and because people generally have to watch the videos on their computers.
Enjoying online movies is about more than bandwidth and large screens: it's depends on awareness
Another reason holding back public adoption is awareness. Most people don’t know where to go to find content.
A movie-use guide for beginners published Wednesday could help change that. Helen Anderson published the guide on her Web site, Brainz, and it lists the most popular places to turn to for programming and films.
Zeebo's $200 console brings mobile phone technology into the video game industry
Going after Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft’s Xbox is a challenge most companies – even very large ones – wouldn’t even think of doing.
Why bother indeed creating yet another video game console when the market is pretty clearly defined among the 3 leading brands and that the world is experiencing its worse economic downturn in almost a century!
But despite common sense, San Diego, Calif.-startup Zeebo did the unthinkable and launched its video console at the Game Developers Conference, here in San Francisco.
I’ve met with Zeebo CEO, John Rizzo, at GDC and here an excerpts of our conversation.
What is Zeebo?
It’s a new game console for the emerging first world. The 800 million individuals in the emerging middle class in Mexico, Latin America, Russia, China, India.
Do you stand any chance against rivals like Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft? There’s no established console market of any scale in these markets because:
consumers can’t buy local contents, because piracy is rampant and no developers – locally or in the U.S. – would want to develop content for these markets;
consoles are expensive. In brazil the Wii is a $1000! The Zeebo will sell for less than $200, 5 times less expensive. In the markets that we try to serve, we benchmarked the console price at a discount to the consoles in that particular country. In Brazil, $200 is lower than a PS2 by a substantial amount. We expect that outside Brazil the console will be less than $179 this year. Well below $149 next year.
How can you be sure the games will not be pirated? Because for the first time, we’re using 3G delivery networks as a content delivery mechanism, pirate proof, very secure. So what we did with Zeebo, is a low cost console hardware built on cellphone technology optmized for the local requirement of the culture.
What games will be available for the Zeebo? We’ve been able to sign 15 of the top video game makers, EA, Activision… In these markets, they don’t generate any money or income, and it’s all upside to them. So they see us as a direct marketing channel of their old content in these existing and new markets.
Creating a game for a new console is expensive. How did you convince video game publishers to do it? Porting a game is actually a small amount of work and money relative to the cost o developing a new game, which can cost tens of billons of dollars. It takes about 2 to 6 months and between $50,000 to $100,000 to do a port. It’s a very very small expense.
As popularity grows, some predict app store chaos is on the way
With the sales of smartphones multiplying – especially in the U.S. – mobile app stores will serve a true mass market in just a few years.
According to In-Stat, sales of smarrphones with a clear app-store focus will reach 100 million units in five years – or about 30 percent of the global smartphone market.
That could quadruple the number of app store users.
Today the most active store is run by Apple for users of its iPhone. But Research in Motion, Palm and Microsoft and others are initiating and redoubling efforts to catch up.
With the coming wave of app stores, consumers will likely face a chaotic market place over the next year or so. Many will likely be confused about where to turn to find applications for their phones with hardware providers, service providers of operating system companies running competing stores.
But the market is anticipated to iron on over time.
Using an online search engine can be an art as well as a science. Sometimes picking the right search term or knowing exactly how to phrase a search isn’t clear.
Google has taken a step toward arresting the confusion by introducing on Tuesday a technology that helps link a search to other related topics.
Google says the technology tries to understand associations and concepts related to a search and proposes more useful related searchers.
New feature looks for topic related to a search
These related searches are the items found at the bottom and sometimes the top of a search page,
Here is an example from a Google blog post. The new algorithms will associate a search for the “principles of physics” with related searches for “angular momentum,” “special relativity” and “big bang.”
A second improvement the company announced delivers more informative search results for longer search queries. For instance, a search for “earth’s rotation axis tilt and distance from sun” will return search results with more than just a few lines of explanatory text.
The greater length allows Google to highlight all the words query, instead of just a few, giving a user more information about the Web page.
Benchmark Capital's general partner, Peter Fenton, is betting his career on the return of the IPO market this year
Now, that’s a contrarian view!
Speaking at a venture capital panel at the Open Source Business Conference today, Benchmark Capital’s general partner, Peter Fenton expects the tech IPO market will return this year.
Fenton’s co-panelists – Ryan Floyd, general partner at Storm Ventures, Tim Guleri, managing director at Sierra Ventures and Robin Vasan, managing director at Mayfield Fund – were less enthused; seeing the economy stabilizing at the end of the year and the return of the IPO market in 2011.
So?
“We’re inherintely optimistic in the venture business,” admits Fenton.
Is this the case of extreme optimism. What do you think?
Facebook’s privacy policies have been a lightning rod for controversy, and it’s easy to see why.
The site is the nation’s new town square. People come, meet others, share thoughts and expose the kind of personal information they might in close, casual conversations.
Facebook creates a loophole for the "limited" use of personal data, says Jeff Chester
The trouble is the close, casual conversations take place on the Internet, where all sorts of strangers can listen
For the most part, Facebook has been respectful of individual rights to privacy. But several of its polices have come close to the edge, such as its Beacon advertising program that let advertisers list a member’s online purchases.
Last month, Facebook proposed changes to its privacy guidelines that gave it new liberties to use personal data from members, but then revoked them in the face of a gathering storm of protest. In the process, it agreed to let members comment and vote on future changes to the rules.
The Center for Digital Democracy praises the new public participation, but complains of loopholes and ambiguity in the new policy.
“In all the principles, the wording allows enough legal wiggle room for Facebook to ignore them completely,” writes Executive Director Jeff Chester.
For instance, statements such as “people should have the freedom to share whatever information they want” would be better phrased, “People have the freedom to share whatever information they want,” Chester says in seven pages of criticism made available Tuesday.
He goes on to say Facebook fails to adequately inform users how third-party developers might use personal data for advertising and marketing.
Facebook also creates a “huge loophole” when it reserves its “limited” use of personal data without stating what that limited use is.
While Facebook’s steps toward openness are laudable, questions from privacy advocates such as Chester are well worth the asking.
Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst is seeing a spike in interest for open source, globally
Open source thrives in a recession.
A sentiment largely shared among the 400+ people attending the Open Source Business Conference that just kicked off this morning in San Francisco.
Here’s an excerpt of Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat‘s CEO, comments on open source opportunities in this downturn.
The more desperate is the industry, the more interested people are about open source… The good news is that people immediately perceive open source to being low in cost.
But one of our problems is saying, that it’s not just lower in cost but it’s also about innnovation, about service… but the good news is that we have a good foot in the door.
Red Hat thrived in the last tech recession
When budgets cut 5 percent it’s one thing, but when budgets are cut 10 to 20 percent, depending on the area of the world, people are looking for something different.
Red Hat had its real commercial start after the dot com bust when people took what was perceived at the time as a risk of Unix to Linux.
That discontinuity forced people to go outside their confort zone, led to people trying something new.
And what they found was: WOW, not only is that cheaper, it’s actually higher performance… flexibility, commoditisation… But that really started because people were pushed out of their confort zone.
And this is time in general for open source as companies get pushed out of their confort zone. When you think about architects, system admins, people who are down deep in IT who make a lot of the recommendations, they have no incentives to want to change from what they are doing today, unless they are forced to.
And as CFOs and CIOs are getting pushed on budget or getting forced to question, that’s good for us.
Open source companies have 6 to 18 months window to make their mark
That said, we all as an industry we have the next 6-18 months to go out and really demonstrate our value proposition now. Because when this discontinuity stops, people are happy to go back to their confort zone.
The people who aren’t the ones who write the checks are less concerned about the cost of some of the proprietary offerings out there. So while costs is high on people’s agenda, we need to go out and sale value, not just cost.
But the good news is, wether it’s Europe, Latin America or Asia, we’re seeing a continuous interest in open source. Now it’s up to all of us to turn that obvioulsy into revenue. Time is ticking!
Here’s an audio excerpt of Whitehurst’s comments at OSBC.
Mobile applications are all the rage, but one unanswered question is whether apps creators will go for the write-once, run anywhere platforms now being developed.
The argument for a single platform sounds good on paper. Let the platform, not the app writer, adapt the application to the differing operating systems (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Research In Motion, Symbian) that run today’s mobile phones.
A new version of Rhomobile's platform now supports Google's Android
But some developers – particularly larger ones with more resources – say they have no intention of using them. In house developers know how to separate the core logic of the app from the interface that needs to change phone to phone.
The industry may come closer to answering the question with the release on Tuesday the latest version of Rhomobile’s open-sourced Rhodes 1.0 framework. The new version adds support for Google’s Android software.
“As a web and mobile app developer, I was attracted to the idea of leveraging our web development skills to build natively running applications,” Michael Morris, CEO of Carry The Day, said in a press release. Carry The Day developed two Rhodes-based mobile apps.
That’s how rivals describe Cisco System’s big push into the data center last week.
"I think it's going to be a tough road," says Mike Klayko
With typical marketing aplomb, Cisco unveiled its Unified Computing System last Monday along with a promise to save customers 30 percent of their operating costs. The cost cuts come, it said, if they turned to Cisco for a broad range of their networking, storage and computing needs.
To make good on this last point, Cisco introduced its first blade servers.
Some rivals answered back almost immediately. “Would you let a plumber build your house?” asked Jim Ganthier, Hewlett-Packard’s vice president of infrastructure software and blades, according to eWeek.
On Monday, Brocade Communications Systems offered a pithy criticism of its own. And it boiled down to this: would you trust your infrastructure to unproven gear?
“I’m not sure the largest accounts in the world will put their most critical applications …on a version one product,” said Brocade CEO Mike Klayko in a video posted to You Tube. “I think it is going to be a tough road just because…they’re not a known expert in that space.”
Klayko argued that H-P, IBM and Dell are on version six and seven of their servers and that saving costs is not a secret known only to Cisco.
“We’re all going toward the same goal of taking cost out of the environment,” he said. “I just think we are better positioned.”
Can anyone @IBM fix the WiFi network at #IOD11 ? It's been terrible for the past 2 days and everybody I talked just can't stand it anymore 3 months ago
Posted by Mark Boslet 
