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June 26, 2009
Michael Jackson is a test. He is only a test of the emergency broadcast system
Guest post – Dean Takahashi – 6/25/09
The Internet was built to withstand nuclear attack. That was why it was built in the ’60s in the first place, as a communications system with redundancy built in so that the military could communicate even if one of the nodes went down.
We saw some of that happen today, as news of Michael Jackson’s death spread like wildfire through the Internet. TMZ.com got the scoop about Jackson being sent to the hospital. But the site went down from the surge of traffic. The LA Times reported he was in a coma, but then that site went down too. The LA Times managed to report that Jackson was dead, and then everyone else started buzzing about it. Twitter went down. Keynote Systems, which measures web site performance, said that the following sites all slowed significantly: ABC, AOL, LA Times, CNN Money and CBS. Starting at 230 pm PST, the average load time for a news site slowed from 4 seconds to 9 seconds.
This is not supposed to happen. More than a decade ago, when I was writing about computer servers and Sun Microsystems was advertising itself as “We’re the dot in dotcom,” the hardware vendors were all talking about “utility computing.” Carly Fiorina, then the chief executive of HP, touted “adaptive computing,” where software would automatically route traffic from one overloaded server to another. Sun called its version of utility computing “N1,” after the code name for a project that aimed at rebalancing server loads on the fly. IBM, meanwhile, operated on a vision that it called “on demand.”
These visions were great and they all made sense based on an understanding of traffic as a flow of data. Companies such as Akamai set up networks to deliver video in real time for events, such as Victoria’s Secret’s annual lingerie show on the web. In years past, Victoria’s Secret had lots of trouble keeping a site up. But now it’s not as hard. Akamai sets up server centers around the country to feed video to users as needed. But now we’re talking the need to update in micro-seconds.
Servers have gotten better at being multi-headed beasts, especially with the arrival of hardware innovations such as low-power processors and chips with multiple cores, or processing engines, on a single chip. Virtualization software from VMware and others has arrived. That allows a server to split itself into two or three or more machines, just like the old mainframe computers, which had to do tasks in batches by necessity. Each instance of the server can handle a computing task, like fetching a web page from memory and sending it back to the user that requested it. Servers have become like hydras, doing all sorts of these trivial computing tasks at the same time.
And yet networks still buckle under the weight of traffic when something like today’s events shakes the whole world. Mobile networks are particularly weak, as AT&T’s activation problems related to the launch of the iPhone 3G S showed. In some ways, the servers worked today. As one site went down, another picked up the torch. But the transitions were rocky. The promise of utility computing is that you will be able to switch on and off server capacity as if you were switching on and off your lights.
And that leads me to consider the future. As tragic as Michael Jackson’s death is, it’s only a small taste of what would happen in a true calamity. If the servers go down, how are we going to get our Gmail or Yahoo Mail? Who will be there to listen when we collectively Tweet for help? What will we do if the emergency plan is stored on the network?
It’s a wake-up call for the web, and for those who are building its infrastructure and plumbing for it.
(Dean writes for http://venturebeat.com/)
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June 16, 2009
Will TV last as it is today in its present form?
What’s going to happen when we can watch anything on-line we see on TV today or in the theaters instantly on-line (and that image is delivered to your living room or any TV) ? What happens to the ‘per subscriber’ guarantees that programmers pay cable ops to carry their satellite feed? And when I can get CNN for free on-line instantly via the Internet? Or Noggin? Or Lifetime? Or Disney? Right now I subscribe to Time Warner – I get about 150 channels. I think we watch the following: 3 ‘local’ channels (ABC, NBC and CBS), Lifetime (wife), Noggin and Boom (daughter) and ESPN and an occasional HBO movie. That’s 8 channels. If I pushed that I can probably include several others like Turner Classic Films, AMC and Discovery. But not too many beyond that.
Since I can remember, cable companies have controlled what I watch and when I watched it. If a cable op. didn’t like the a channel, it wouldn’t carry it and we couldn’t see it. We were in a closed, 4 wall environment. We are still in that environment, but the walls are coming down. Very slowly. And the big three TV guys are in total denial. They are programming like its still 1999.
In this new world of ‘TVnomics’, I no longer need to hope that my cable operator will carry a particular program. With the likes of Hulu, YouTube, TV.com, and a few other content aggregators, I’m no longer tethered forever to Time-Warner. Using Amazon or Netflix I can watch on-line nearly anything I can find on my Time-Warner delivered TV service. And this has only really been possible since approximately 2 yrs. and 3 months ago (May, 2008) when Hulu launched.
So we have been seeing very ‘non-traditional’ programming hawking itself as a TV show for the web. Shows on no budgets, small ones and even big one. Some of these shows are being pushed out to the web by the networks (trying to find some viewer traction), and some by independent suppliers. All of them for the most part are sub-par and relatively few advertisers have climbed aboard.
Instead, the networks think that if they tease the traditional TV audience they have with bits and snippets of content found on TV pushed onto the web, they can have TV on the web or call it ‘Web TV’. Why in the world don’t CBS, NBC or ABC stream this ‘live’ simultaneously with broadcast? Why can’t they put the same show and advertisers on-line day and date with its broadcast on TV? Won’t this substantially help grow the very business on-line they fear now? Yes, I bet it would.
And in the long run, not too much of what they can do will prevent us all from getting it on-line. Once the majority of us have fat pipes able to deliver a TV show and watch a show seamlessly (think FIOS) as if it WAS TV, then instead of their being 95 million cable homes and 200 million homes with TV’s, there will be hundreds of millions of homes with TV’s – they’ll just be connected to a fat, dumb pipe. This changing of the guard won’t take that long – figure in the 5 years or so, things will REALLY shift.
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May 27, 2009
What is ‘Real-Time’ search? And why should I care?
So you’ve heard of real-time search yet? If you haven’t, you will in the next 30-60 days. Its the newest iteration of search and its actually quite different in that you can compare and contrast the 2 ’search’ methods like a river and an ocean. RTS (real-time search) is like a blast of information that you first retrieve in real time and then this information gets crawled and categorized on the web for permanent storage and retrieval by you or I. Similar to a financial stock trade, RTS happens in realtime, without the information being stored, processed or archived or categorized. Then once the information gets handed off to traders who need it ASAP, it gets archived for retrieval later. So, the same set of data is retrieved in RT as can be found later archived on the web – river and the ocean ( a great metaphor – Thanks to Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta).
So Google amasses data, stores it, catagorizes the information for future retrival and serves it up upon your request. RTS happens before this – it happens the instant its published on the web. So retriving, storing and ranking data is not part of RTS. That’s traditional search as we know it. So the value to this new search algoythym is that there is no lag time for the latest information. Its just there and it DOES give us a great deal of value. Using the plane that went down in the Hudson River a bit ago as an example. The very 1st report and photo came froma twitter feed, not a website that spouts news, i.e. CNN, etc. The final few moments of the Lakers playoff games and score where captured in RT on twitter. The final score reported on the cover of Yahoo a mere 15 minutes after the games end. American Idol winner? So this information is helpful (but not essential) to know ASAP. So, being able to search social media ‘chatter’ (I call it) becomes something very ‘now’ and ‘immediate’. It brings together the traditional web and a users social graph so to speak. Every month, something like 200 million users log-in and chat on Facebook, 46 million users tweet, and many more IM each other or text about something. This ’something’ is now getting captured and offered up to us in RT. The combo of the two systems is really where it comes all together. RT search is not social search either. You don’t just get RT search because you ‘crawl’ facebook, friendfeed and twitter chatter. RT search is NOT replacing traditional search – its an add on component that will allow us to further monetize the phenomenon known to all of us as the internet. The list below will only grow exponentially in the coming months. The race is on to master RTS.
http://collecta.com/ – the one to beat for right now – collects all feeds below and then some
http://www.oneriot.com/ – searches Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services
http://tweetmeme.com/ – searches twitter and re-tweets popular tweets on twitter
http://search.twitter.com/ – searches twitter directly
http://www.scoopler.com/ – searches Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious
http://blogsearch.google.com/ – search the web and only blogs
http://friendfeed.com/ – filters search results by who my frineds are and what they are saying on twitter, friendfeed
May 18, 2009
Interesting bitsandbytes – celebrity data, new search engines, Disney’s views on content
Interesting bitsandbytes:
Celebrity Data:
*Ken Sonenclar, managing director of DeSilva+Phillips, opened the media investment bank’s Future of Celebrity Media conference, by pointing out that entertainment mags are down 18 percent, not as bad as magazines in general. And as more bloggers create their one celeb-focused sites and media stars like Ashton Kutcher and Martha Stewart are reaching to fans directly via Twitter, bypassing the traditional avenues. It’s getting so bad, Sonenclar said, “Even paparazzi aren’t being paid well anymore. They’re competing with too many so-called amateurs.”
As for online, Yahoo’s OMG leads by far when it comes to uniques, Sonenclar said, showing a bar chart of celeb sites. OMG is distantly followed by TMZ and People, and Microsoft’s Wonderwall, which has come out of nowhere. However, 90 percent of Wonderwall’s traffic comes from people clicking on the “celebrity” channel on MSN’s homepage. The same is true for OMG’s success. While that may skew those sites popularity, versus celeb mag sites run by People and Entertainment Weekly, advertisers don’t really care, Sonenclar said. Still, whether those sites can create brands as well known as People and EW, remains a very open question. Ultimately, the power of celebrity brands still make it possible for established media to hold their own in terms of attracting users and sponsors.
A Studio head that gets it:
*Less than a week after the announcement that Disney (NYSE: DIS) was taking an equity stake in the News Corp-NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) joint venture. Iger told analysts: “We believe that broader distribution of our content makes sense given the growth in online viewing,” adding, “New media isn’t going away.
“We absolutely must be where our consumers are going.” One reason: if Disney and others don’t make programming available on a well-timed, well-priced basis, consumers will find it anyway. Iger said going with a service like Hulu helps fight piracy by offering better alternatives.
But avoiding piracy isn’t the only rationale. Iger wants to be where the audience is and, so far, the demographics for Hulu are younger than those for broadcast television. Just as he has with iTunes sales and ABC.com VOD, Iger stressed that cannibalization isn’t a concern. Instead, Disney sees a way to expand its reach to views.
Search Engines –2 NEW TYPES:
# 1- Systemic Knowledge – meaning its not searching but computing the answer (think Spock from Star Trek). Visit : http://www.wolframalpha.com/ 
# 2- And Real-Time search – is the second. They are: one from OneRiot 
and one from Tweetmeme 
. Real-time search also can be found here: Twitter Search, , FriendFeed and the recently launched Scoopler. But for the most part, oneriot, tweetmeme and scoopler all are designed from the get-go as ‘real-time’ engines.
*Wolfram Alpha is a search engine that you can use to compute systematic knowledge immediately. You can put in anything you would like to know and you can compare multiple results with each other. There is no need to know how to search; just type in what you want to know.
This is significant in that real-time search s now becoming more important from a ‘social’ perspective than before. First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages. John Bothwick describes it like this:
“In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration – yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving.
A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow. “
May 16, 2009
TV is coming to the iPhone and it’s free and it will ‘rock’ rumor has it.
Word on the street is
Hulu will be putting out a free iPhone app very soon that streams full length TV shows using 3G and WiFi. And any hopes of AT&T charging for TV flew out the window. Guess Apple 
will be sucking wind about charging all of us now through iTunes to watch the same things. Wonder what that will do to iTunes sales of these shows. My hunch is not too much and if anything will make more fans and will increase ratings. Why? Why do I say that giving away ‘Lost’ won’t cause a loss of
sales of the same at iTunes? 
Because, if you are really a rabid ‘Lost’ fan, you will want to own it anyway, whether you get to watch last night’s season finale or not. Giving it away for free (and on a very small screen) only whets the appetite of those that might decide to sample the show using the app. Come ‘on everyone, haven’t you all
heard of piracy? 
Well, this is simply ‘legal’ . Have you ever heard of the WWF? (or WWE today). They still give away wrestling on TV daily on TBS and charge $ 39.99 or more for essentially the same show on PPV. It seems like someone in Hollywood may finally be seeing the light.
April 29, 2009
Passed links vs. search..which gets more traffic? The answer might surprise you!
Fred Wilson had an interesting post this week about traffic, social nets and Google. The basic question was this: Has the time come where suggesting a link to your friends in a social network or a blog (Facebook, MySpace, Linked in, etc) actually registers more traffic to that particular page rather than a google search would? Are visits from Facebook greater than visits from Google overall? Is the ’social ‘ discovery of links and pages on the web more powerful than simple searches? It seems that depending where you are and what you are pointing people to, traffic flows differently. If its on a content site (games, etc) those links and suggestions result in about 25% more traffic than those sites and links having nothing to do with content (i.e. B2B sites). So, if you’ve got good content, it wants to be shared by all.
They ‘tracked the passing-along of links pointing to two campaigns running concurrently for the same product (different micro-sites). One of them had a good offer but so-so content while the other campaign had great (funny) content with no offer. The % of unique visitors generated by the pass-along of links to the good offer was under 10% while the traffic from the pass-along of the links to the good content was over 40%. The campaign with good content also got significantly more traffic overall. What data like this suggests is that the prediction you make in your deck about dollars shifting from media to content is a really good one in my opinion. As marketers compete for the attention and interest of their audience, the best way to do this is through content that’s delivered to them via their social graph. This already happens if the content’s good. There just isn’t enough of it.’
Over the course of the last 6 months or so I realize that I’m getting more and more information from my friends, IM, twitter, email, RSS, and Facebook than I am from searches. And the way I search and what I search for has changed. I’ve gotten most of the links for content from my friends through one messaging tool or another. Yes, I got the link for the workprint of ‘X-Men Origins’ just about the same time I read the story about it. And I never searched for it – it came via a socially passed links. And more to the point, when I looked specifically on google for that link, I had a tough time finding it.
Overall, The most popular mode of sharing is email (25% of visits from passed links come from links shared through email), followed by blogs (18% of visits from passed links come from links shared through blogs), video sharing sites (14% of visits from passed links come from links shared through video sharing sites like YouTube), and forums/message boards (11% of visits from passed links come from links shared through forums and message boards). Social networks account for around 9% of the traffic from shared links. These stats are courtesy of Meteor Solution ( http://www.meteorsolutions.com/)
April 25, 2009
Can you put yourself in a video game? You sure can right now! (see video below)
(Disclaimer: I am currently doing some work for BigStage Entertainment) 
There is some very cool technology here today and hopefully soon will be available to the masses to play with. Big Stage Entertainment, located in Los Angeles owns the tech and software and has been striking deals with some very large and well known entertainment companies, including brands and content partners such as Intel, MTV, Lionsgate, Sony BMG, Epic Games, Splash News, GGL Global Gaming, Stephen J. Cannell Productions, Icarus Studios, The Venue Network (TVN), and Ogilvy. When I first met them and saw this, I was as fascinated with the technology as I was the people behind it. Not only is the tech pretty cool, but the ones slinging the code are even better. If you are a gamer, this is something you’ve probably had wet dreams about for years – being able to jump into a video game, armour and gear, guns and all, trying to kill the aliens or zombies. Unlike the many social networks or other duplacative software clients vying for the same consumer ( video encoder, IM messenger, browser, etc) Big Stage’s technology is one of a kind.
Check me out, I’ve placed myself in the ‘Warhammer’ Dawn of War video game. You can try this for yourself at www.bigstage.com.
The Big Stage @ctor™ that you can create today (www.bigstage.com) is generated using advanced stereo reconstruction technology initially funded by the CIA and other government grants as part of a 9+ year research project at the University of Southern California (USC) under the direction of Professor and Department Chair of Computer Science, Gerard Medioni, Ph.D. In 2007, Big Stage Entertainment secured exclusive rights to exploit this technology for all purposes outside of Security. Big Stage Entertainment has invested thousands of hours of additional engineering time to produce what is today the most advanced mass market 3-D avatar technology anywhere – with no laboratory setting or special equipment required.
To realize this twofold goal of simplicity and realism, the Big Stage R&D team focused on extracting the quality and accuracy of complex 3-D scanning technology, previously only available to production houses and animation companies, to offer it to any consumer with a digital camera through a free, fun and easy-to-use browser platform. The team also built a system through which new technology advancements are automatically inherited by existing Big Stage @ctors™, meaning that the facial fidelity of your Big Stage @ctor™ will continue to improve over time.
What does this mean in the future? Douglas Fidaleo Ph.D. and Chief Scientist at Big Stage says it perfectly, ” The game changer occurs by making this capability accessible to all and fully portable across digital life. Very soon, everyone will have a digital version of themselves, and when that happens, cyberspace becomes a very very cool place to hang out. “
April 19, 2009
Cable operators are OUT of room…no kidding!
Holy cow Batman!! We ran out of room?
So what’s a programming service to do when they don’t have channel space to put even their own cable offering on the air? Punt! How do you do that? Well, there’s a little under-the-radar company in San Jose that provides ‘web-infused’ TV. They produce a magic box and some magic proprietary software to the cable operator for FREE. That’s right, 100% FREE. They install it for them and maintain it for them. What does this give the operators? It gives them many more additional cable channels. What does it give the cable subscriber at home (read: you and me) ? More channels on their channel line-up. And its all seamless. It just looks like another channel. The channel or channels are controlled and surfed with the same remote that you were given when you signed up for cable. But here’s the best part. It also delivers the Internet on a channel all controlled by the same remote. You want to watch videos on YouTube, see what’s on Blip.tv? Its all there and easy to find and maneuver. No box for you to hook up, no additional NOTHING. I think this has a lot of potential for growth. They will be launching in a large system back East shortly. So, if you have a fairly robust website that you want delivered on cable TV to millions of cable TV subscribers, you can do that now. They are other pieces to actually how you get launched but its all do-able. Exciting times. I’m going to brush off some of my old cable channel concepts. They might just fly now.
April 9, 2009
Création et Internet or the French version of the RIAA
So last week, a copy of the new X-Men movie made the rounds on the newsgroups. Missing many elements of a feature film, it only heightened awareness of the film’s impending debut this summer – not deterred it. In fact, you can easily argue that fans who saw the illegal copy will RUN to the theater and pay to watch the film in its entirety WITH all the special effects included. Fox- it was a very nice ‘deliberate’ slip-up. Deliberate?? Huh? Its actually a brilliant marketing move on their part. How do I know this? All the posts disappeared in the newsgroups 2 days after they appeared. Only the actual newshosts can delete headers and posts. Confirming that someone at Fox MUST have made an arrangement to put up the movie and then pull it down. No other film was ever pulled like that, leading me to believe that Fox most likely paid to have it put up and pulled down. A very inexpensive but brilliant marketing play.
Now for the French. Arrest the downloaders? Huh? How about arresting the UPLOADERS instead? There are far fewer uploaders than downloaders. After all, get rid of the content going up and there’s nothing to pull down and download. Known informally as the “three strikes” directive, it has won preliminary votes by the Parliament and is expected to be approved in both houses Thursday.
The law empowers music and film industry associations to hire companies to analyze the downloads of individual users to detect piracy, and to report violations to a new agency overseeing copyright protection. The agency would be authorized to trace the illegal downloads back to individuals using the downloading computer’s unique identification number, known as its Internet Protocol, or IP, address, which the Internet service providers have on record.
For a first violation, the agency would send a warning by e-mail.
If a user made another illegal download within three months, a second warning would be sent by certified mail. If a third infraction occurred within a year, the service provider would be required to sever service. an Internet advocacy group based in Paris, said some computer users would turn to encrypted downloads and other methods to avoid detection. On Wednesday, a Swedish company, the Pirate Bay, began a service called Ipredator, which lets users use its virtual private network to make anonymous downloads for 5 euros a month.
So, how in the world will this law make any kind of dent in piracy?? Esplain Lucy!
UPDATE:
At the last minute, several members of the opposition Socialist Party rushed in to vote against the plan, according to Christine Albanel, the culture minister, in what she called a “cynical maneuver by the opposition.” The bill was rejected, 21-15.
Jérémie Zimmermann, director of La Quadrature du Net, an Internet advocacy group in Paris, described the outcome as “a huge political blow” for Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Albanel. “It’s a victory for the citizens and the civil liberties over the corporate interests,” Mr. Zimmermann added. LONG LIVE FRANCE!
