Apps, Software and Video Games shortly will go the way of the DVD – they will live in a ‘cloud’.
May 14th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Bandwidth is the key to the cloud. If you’ve got enough access to it, meaning if you’ve got a fast enough connection, then you don’t need any physical media or software to live in your PC, Mac or for that matter very soon your mobile phone and tablets.
We used to have giant ‘desktop’ computers that had to have HUGE hard drives in order for us to install many applications. For example, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, MS Office, CAD software, etc. all are very large installation packages. Couple this with your collection of MP3’s, photo’s, video’s and documents and most of us ran out of room on a PC that had 50-100 gigs of space for a hard drive.
The obvious to the consumer
Today, as a consumer we see convenient repositories for photo’s, music and videos and documents. Skydrive, GoogleDocs, Dropbox, Box, Amazon Cloud Drive. Now consumers are beginning to understand and use these places to store what they used to store on their home computers. Why? Several key reasons – first, once uploaded to a large mainstream cloud drive (and I mean to the likes of Google, MS or Amazon) your collection of ‘whatever’ is safe. How many of us have dropped or lost a laptop, had a hard drive fail, spilled coffee on our desks and then PC, etc. If you didn’t back it up to an external hard drive you lost it all. Worse yet, I’ve had friends who did and THAT and the hard drive failed shortly thereafter. Years of precious photos (and now videos more than ever thanks for our mobile phones) you can never get back or thousands of MP3’s gone (at $.99 each). Second, consumers now are getting familiar with storing their digital belongings off site and in a cloud. We hear about Amazon’s or Google’s cloud storage drive initiatives more and more everyday. They are fast becoming the new norm. And third – they are not expensive. Certainly not when compared to a 1.5 Terabyte hard drive that can fail without warning.
The not so obvious to us all
What’s not so obvious to consumers is what’s happening in the enterprise business realm. Years ago, you wanted to put up a business domain web site or had a business that required large databases, some required separate servers for clients that are uber security conscious, some needed to have their domain living on a separate server from others (especially the financial and health industries). Others needed production servers, staging servers and then after testing finally deployed an application or web service. Sometimes IT had to physically travel to the colo facility to apply a ‘patch’ to a newly deployed application and hoped that the patch worked as it was supposed to or else everything came to a screeching halt. Businesses lost money, time, and face sometimes. You’d pay Sun, Oracle, Cisco, EMC, etc. millions to deploy servers and DB’s for your environment. You’d spend money on hiring the right technical IT staff to deploy and sync and stitch all of this together. This WAS the norm.
Enterprise today is all moving into a cloud based environment – virtualization is the norm now.
Sun servers were all the rage in the 90’s. But they were VERY expensive. Robust, great customer service, but very costly. Today, you can run a linux box for a fraction of the cost. No more hard drives or servers (blades or otherwise). You can fire up an ‘instance’ and server through AWS in a few minutes. No going into a colo facility. Start-up’s can get to market almost instantaneously and for far less of a cost. You pay for what you use. No more buying a million dollar license for ATG, Vignette or Broadvision and installing 15 discs in a cage. You rent it now. Patches get uploaded by the cloud vendor in a virtual environment and tested before they are deployed to you.
With the rise of this ‘virtualization’, more and more apps or processes now get built into the browser. Java script was written just for this purpose and has allowed for far more sophisticated applications to run in a network environment and now on browsers. Other software will be embedded in browsers as time goes on that will mimic the functionality and hardware on your PC. You can bet on it.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Whereas IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers offer bare compute cycles and SaaS (software as a service) providers offeraccess to such apps as CRM online, PaaS offerings provide turnkey services for developers to get their apps up and running quickly, no infrastructure concerns needed.
Offered as a service, PaaS runs the gamut from development tools to middleware to database software to any “application platform” functionality that developers might require to construct applications. None of these above services come without their problems. But so did everything else before them.
IaaS focuses on managing virtual machines, and the risks are little different than with other cloud types — here, the main risk is rogue or unwarranted commandeering of services. IaaS requires governance and usage monitoring. But with this comes a good degree of convenience and business ROI.
Some of the most popular cloud services running virtually are; Microsoft Windows Azure, Googles App Engine (which offer a nonSQL relational SQL database service), VMware cloud foundry, Force.com ( from salesforce.com), Heroku (also from SF), Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Engine Ysrd Cloud (for Ruby on Rails enthusiasts), Engine Yard Orchestra (for PHP enthusiasts) and CumuLogic (for Java developers). Consumers never see or hear any of this but use web services that live on these services day in and day out.
What will be obvious to consumers in about 10 years or less
All of this bring me back around to bandwidth and apps. Once we have enough consumers that have access to real fast broadband (100mbps or more down and ideally 200mbps down), then the Apple and Android app store will disappear. Software discs will become obsolete. Video game installation discs – gone. Why, because once you have enough speed, apps can be loaded and accessed wirelessly via the web. The calls to databases, functionality and such can all be received instantly online. Its already happening, slowly. Examples of this in the entertainment space is Ultraviolet, bring your DVD’s to Wal-Mart and upload them to your digital locker – no more disc. Onlive, Livestream, Gaikai all stream video games without the need for a disc, Netflix (you know about them). Consumers are aware of these, but then you’ve also got GoogleDocs and Skydrive for documents and the creation of word and excel docs. We don’t need an install disc anymore.
Last week, it took me 4 days to upload 12,934 MP3’s to my cloud locker at Amazon Music drive. Less time than I ever thought. Available anytime for me to download if need be. That’s nearly $ 13,000 worth of music, stored for as little as $ 20.00 a year.
Mobile apps, software suites, video game discs, movies, music photos and more will still be here but will not physically be in your home forever. It’s inevitable.
DPI is coming to a mobile phone near you!
August 14th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Consumers will be confronted eventually here in the U.S. with DPI or Deep Packet Inspection. DPI simply put is a new technology that gives mobile carriers a way to tell exactly which applications you run and when on your mobile phone. Are you a FaceTime user or Skype user? Do you check Facebook on your iPhone using an iPhone app 5 or more times during the day? Check into G+ a lot? Tweet? Blog remotely to your Tumblr log? Do you text with a friend on the train or bus home? Is that during rush hour or business hours or between 6pm and midnight or in the morning?
Instead of allowing consumers to consume and buy an ‘unlimited’ data plan on their mobile phones (and by unlimited I mean unlimited for the most part and then ‘throttled’ ), carriers are seeking new ways to charge us for mobile usage. And they will have to figure this out because the number of mobile phones and data usage is increasing exponentially. Having a plan now as to how to avoid network congestion (as opposed to later when it really becomes a issue) makes total sense. Its all about balancing out a consumers usage with network peak and lull times usage. If I only was checking and using Facebook on my iPhone, I’d rather purchase a $5.00 a month all-access plan to Facebook than spend $25.00 a month for 2GB of data for everything. Having a ‘Happy Hour’ on data usage from 7pm-midnight would get me to remember to download my music or movies on my iPad or iPhone during those times. Training the mobile public to use certain applications at certain times makes the use of the network better for all users during a 24hr. period. And carriers would not have to sell ‘unlimited’ data plans to us, which really aren’t unlimited after all.
This is not a new concept and is being tested and used in Europe right now. Orange is testing personalized pricing plans with consumers – working with them to determine which applications and activities they really use and crafting a pricing plan that fits them best.
Orange has a Panther plan for heavy users that costs £25 ($39.40 USD) for 10GB of mobile data and voice a month and a Dolphin plan for £15 a month that offers an hour of unlimited surfing at a time of the users choosing. Under the plan, customers can pick a so-called ‘Happy Hour’ from the following; 8:00 a.m.-9:00 a.m. (the morning commute), 12:00-1:00 p.m. (lunch break), 4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. (late afternoon) or 10:00 p.m.-11:00 p.m. (late night).
The more transparent the carriers become, the friendlier consumers will become to switching plans and buying services that fit their habits. The days of just a few data choices for us are limited indeed.
The End of An Era – Music Companies, ‘cloud’ services and the ISP’s are laughing all the way to the Bank, courtesy of you and me!
May 14th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Amazon’s Cloud Drive, Google’s BetaMusic, iTunes upcoming ‘cloud’ offering, current subscription based music ‘cloud’ services and music ‘lockers’ ( eMusic, Spotify, Rhapsody, Thumbplay Music, mSpot, MP3Tunes, and others) are all similar in many ways.
There are slight differences in the cost and the amount of storage for free that you get initially. After that, users will find the old fashioned way we now store and playback music might in fact have been the best and most cost efficient after all.
Today, we all have mp3’s or m4p’s (iTunes) stored somewhere on our computers or in an external hard drive or both. We have our iPod and other devices to playback these files. Load up a playlist and take them with you. Soon, the above mentioned services will offer us the ability to ship all or some of our music collection to what effectively is a hard drive outside our house or computer – essentially letting them live ‘over there’ or wherever that service lives, be it Amazon, Google or Apple. Load up a playlist and playback the music just as we do now.
A few things will change however that will drastically alter not how or what we listen to but what it will cost us to listen to what we now playback for free. And the changes are subtle but substantial. And these changes are all designed to generate money, a lot of it, for 3 separate entities; the music cloud service of your choice, the music companies and your local ISP.
What has been an essentially free activity for all of us (creating and playing back music on our device of choice locally), will now very quickly become an expensive one, remotely. The change has been slowly evolving – with the ISP’s like Comcast, Time-Warner and others that supply us leading the way. They have all decided to ‘cap’ and meter our bandwidth usage under various tiered plans. Just like we get our water and electricity usage metered, so will our ‘internet’ usage.
And that’s old news – I’m not telling you anything you have not already heard before. Soon, we will keenly be aware of how much data we will be using monthly. And now, the new music ‘cloud’ offerings will present us with tiered pricing plans to store our music monthly as well. You might have 10 gigs of music (which is NOT a heck of a lot, personally) today that you want to store on Google’s Beta Music Cloud Drive ( they are just being used as one example). For me, I’ve got a ton more than that and I add to that monthly. So initially, I’ll choose a plan for 10 gigs, but I am 100% sure over time, I will eventually double that.
In addition to those charges I want to turn on my ‘cloud’ player and listen to some tunes being played back at my home, through my PC piped into my speakers in the house. Well that used to be free when I loaded up my player locally on my PC. Now with my house being metered, here’s a rough idea of what I could be faced with.
1GB streamed per month = a little more than half an hour of music per day
3GB streamed per month = about 2 hours of music per day
5GB streamed per month = about 3.1 hours of music per day
For music aficionados, that is not a lot of time spent listening to my music. Now mind you, I don’t have to use a cloud service to listen locally – I can continue doing what I do now. But that also means I’ve got to keep a duplicate set of files. And it does not include any bandwidth for any other activities on the Internet during the month I engage in. If you have a iPhone or other device that plays back music, sure you can stream your collection from that same cloud service, but wait, there’s a data cap on your phone too. But wait, there’s more. The new Chrome notebook offers a plan too when you are NOT connected to WiFi – and it’s not cheap:
• Free 100MB per month (what you get with the first two years of ownership under the current plan): 1 hour and 45 minutes of music playback for an entire month
• $10 for an unlimited day pass: listen all day
• $20 for 1GB of data in a given month: a little over half hour of music per day
• $35 for 3GB of data in a given month: nearly two hours of music per day
• $50 for 5GB of data in a given month: a little over three hours of music per day
All of this cost and metering does not include monthly cloud ‘subscription’ costs. Put it all together and you might be looking at some heavy fees every month that you don’t currently pay storing and playing back your music collection locally or playing back on the road through your iPhone, etc.
Now I am a big cloud advocate – there are some big advantages clearly in storing your collection outside of your house. The biggest single advantage I can think of is a disaster – and they DO happen. Replacing a 60gig collection is not only time consuming and expensive but just go and try to remember what was in your collection of say 40,000 songs – good luck! This alone is reason enough to consider storing your collection remotely. Other disadvantages include getting the songs up there to start and you don’t want to move the collection once you are there. Ever try moving 60gigs quickly – there is no quickly. So choose your service very carefully!
While all of these new music services sound great and offer us new and improved ways to listen to our music, I can’t help wondering if one day a few years back the ISP’s and the music industry got together in one big Hotel room and figured this out as a way to get back all of the lost revenue that the ‘Napster’, ‘Kaaza’ and ‘Limewire’ era sucked out of them. Maybe they will get the last laugh after all. Here’s a better one – how would a Netflix for example, replicate a ‘cloud’ locker storage scenario for movies I might purchase? Could it? Just think of THAT cloud storage plan!! Ouch!
LTE capable iPhone = 10 Mbps speed is coming – faster than a speeding bullet!
March 2nd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
LTE ( Long Term Evolution) – Verizon’s LTE field trials in Boston and Seattle have shown downlink average rates of 5 to 12 Mbit/sec and of 2 to 5 Mbit/sec, which will give mobile customers browsing speeds comparable to a typical wired home Internet experience, the company said. More than likely we will see this around this summer with the release of the iPhone5.
How wonderful is that. The problem is that once you have that kind of speed to use, you’ll use it alright. And especially with video. That’s just what Verizon and eventually ATT want. Why? Because they won’t have ‘unlimited’ bandwidth plans anymore for mobile – they will meter – http://bit.ly/hO .
And they will have to. Not only will you be bale to use this for sending and receiving video, pictures and other data, but you’ll be able to make crystal clear VOIP calls using software on your phone – thereby getting around the minute usage meter. But you can figure that the carriers will simply meter bandwidth and replace metered minutes with metered bandwidth. I’m not sure which is worse but I guess it will depend on whether you talk, text or tweet (which is really 2nd gen texting anyway)?
It’s the pirates who are on the right side of history.
February 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
In Praise of Piracy – a well written article and one you might want to read, by Jon Evans.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/05/in-praise-of-piracy/
then visit this site: http://www.dontmakemesteal.com/ - a Digital Media Consumption Manifesto
b.
Chrome OS NotebookUser thoughts and first observations – by Happily stuck in a cloud
February 4th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Chrome OS NotebookUser thoughts and first observations – by Happily stuck in a cloud.
(written entirely on the chrome using googledocs)
So never did I dream that after submitting a request to google to become a beta user for their new ChromeOS Notebooks that I’d be accepted. I’m not even sure of what the reasons were that I mentioned to them ( and I do remember them asking for some) that I wrote down. Yes, I have over the years managed to amass a good deal of apps that I use from Google. But so what, I’m sure I’m not alone on the planet – others probably use more. But nonetheless, here I sit with a brand new notepad on my lap writing my 1st impressions about this machine and its OS. I have read some of the reviews on this laptop – some written using a ‘prototype’ – (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/12/cr-48-chrome-notebook-review/) (http://searchengineland.com/first-day-review-the-google-chrome-os-cr-48-notebook-58322 – or http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/09/google-cr-48-chrome-laptop-preview/ some of the parts of these reviews I agree with, some I don’t. Google has a place where you can apply and on the notebook itself, it has a feedback button which I will be using.
I am MAC an PC proficient, have been under and in a few Apache OS servers (and even less so for Linux servers) and I don’t sling code seriously, just dabble in html5 and now starting ruby as I understand Mac is or will be releasing a ruby for Mac platform and perhaps one day I’ll be able to write my own apps for the iPad in ruby ( but that’s far off for now). Back to my Chome OS thoughts.
When this lap arrived in a box ( see my previous posts to see the cover) I thought someone sent us a housewarming gift. We moved our family from Los Angeles (and L.A. is literally falling apart) to the white warm watered sandy beaches of the gulf coast near Clearwater Beach Fl. If someone from Gooooogle is reading this – A BIG ‘thank you!’ many times over.
So, the biggest changes I have noticed thus far from the traditional lap is:
1. Verizon was incredibly smart to partner and offer 3G wireless access (100mg for free a month); Verizon will be reaping the reward – no one uses 100mgs a month of data unless you are an ant.
2. Cloud computing works and will take the masses some getting used to; but its where EVERYTHING is going.
3. This laptop is on of the lightest and coolest (temperature as well as hipness factor)I have ever encountered;
4. Apple was a heavy influence and its ‘app’ store concept a key part of how this OS works;
5. Its a bit disconcerting NOT being able to view my files and docs by browsing a file structure a la windows; but I’m almost used to it.
6. Using this requires a change of habit and thinking and that will be tough for some, but its refreshing (at least for me).
7. It ‘feels’ nice – like my black rubber iPhone protective casing. Easy to grasp and hold. Plus, Google gave me ‘stickers’ !! (I feel like a kid again).
8. EVERYTHING is done using a browser and you can’t minimize it to look at a blank or customized screen ( that’s right, you ‘skin’ the browser instead of place a ‘desktop’ image on your laptop screen.
9. The instructions were written by the same guy who wrote some other Google instructions – with a sense of humor, thank f’ing god!
10. Screen, resolution and powering up once closed up- is great.
So, let look at he above points.
1- First, Verizon – who approached who is not important – Google or vice versa. Nonetheless, Verizon will capture a lot of new revenue from new COS (ChromeOS) owners. If you can’t find a hot spot, activate this service and you’re connected. Depending on your activities, you’ll pay for your usage. Hence, a nice new rev. source for Verizon Wireless. Unless of course Google buys all the white space spectrum and wires the major cities for free with 4G, but that’s another post for another time.
2-.Cloud computing – if you have not figured it out by now, hard drives that spin and even SSDS drives (unless they are used to start the computers OS) are ancient history. Between Microsoft’s 25 gigs of free space at Skydrive, Google Docs, Dropbox and many others, you have plenty of choices where to store your precious word, excel, power points, pictures, videos, music files, etc, etc. forever. Use LastPass as a password reminder (browser based AND works with chrome) so you don’t need to remember each of your storage lockers as you want to get in and the rest is pretty easy. Once you store it in a cloud, you can basically drop kick your laptop or desktop (going by way of the Model-T as well) and not care. Buy a new one, and install Lastpass again and access your files. Nothing lost. Ever. Microsoft and Google are NOT going anywhere. Not closing their doors in the near future or at least as long as I’ll be on the planet.
3.- It’s light – I have not weighed it, but its VERY light. Lighter than anything I own and I’m a nut for light and portability. No one wants to lug a big heavy PC anywhere outside the home. And yes, it is cool temperature wise. Especially the bottom of the computer. I’m sure if you have ever taken your laptop into your bed with you, you know what I am talking about. Typically, all laptops have a small fan that cools the processors and hard drive. Not so here.
4.- You don’t download .exe’s or programs. That’s ancient history too – Apple was the influence here. Google made an chrome ‘App’ store. They prepared popular applications without drivers so they could be chromized and made installable on the laptop. I wish they made a bluetooth app so my wireless bluetooth mouse worked, but I’m sure they are working on it. In the meantime, there must be hundreds of programs turned apps that you can grab. Just like iTunes, you download the app. Thanks Apple!
5.- Not being able to view my LOCAL files was at first a bit disturbing. But I had to remember that since I began using PC’s and Mac’s, that’s what you did. There was no ‘cloud’ computing. So, at first, you need to think a bit different and realize that ultimately this is in your best interest.
6. – Change of habit. No more ‘save as’ locally. Use Google Docs which = word, excel, PPT, etc., save them to the native Google doc acct. or save them to dropbox, etc. It all works except saving them to ‘my documents’ or your ‘c’ drive. Its different, but not that much different. Besides, the PC still does all the work saving it whether its local or remote – what do you care? Your habits and thinking just changes.
7.- the outside of this feels great. It is an easy grip and feel similar to my iPhone outer case cover. Rubber-like and not slippery. Better to me than a sleek plastic feel most laptops have.
8.- When it boots up for the first time, its a chrome browser you operate in, nothing else. When you click for a new tab, it brings up a new tab BUT that tab also brings up the chrome store. The chrome store is where you grab whatever apps you want to operate within the laps environment. So, just like the iPad, you’d grab apps of a similar nature. Homage to Apple, doing this was easy enough and not unlike something have not done before. Nice and it was as easy to install these, if not easier as I wasn’t asked for a password or verification each time I requested an app like I am at the iTunes store. Although, to be fair, I have not bought any apps yet and this will more than likely prompt those screens.
9.- So, some of the ‘good humor’ part.
Safety Notices
(This is the usual yada yada…just more fun).
“This product contains sensitive components. Do not drop, disassemble, open, crush, bend, bake, deform, puncture, blend (guess we’ll never know if it will blend), shred, incinerate, paint, bring to the moon, or insert foreign objects into the device. Do not spill liquids, rocks of any size, or food on the device. Do not expose the device to water, moisture or rap music.
This product contains small parts, which may present a choking hazard to small children, as well as men who have not emotionally matured. Keep the device away from small children, regardless of how much they want to bang on the keyboard.
This product does not contain any user-serviceable parts. Repairs should only be made by an authorized technician. Note that the authorized technicians do not necessarily include your neighborhood 15 year old brainiac that you call anytime you get an antivirus pop-up on your computer. Do not do anything silly with the battery. We already said not to bake the device but apparently we had to repeat ourselves.”
10. – The screen is 1280X 800 resolution with a 12.1 inch size viewable space. Better than most. Once turned on and if you close the screen and then open it, it takes about 2 seconds to come back. Far quicker than a PC or Mac. And 2 seconds is not an exaggeration. This is an Atom chip powered laptop, and its pretty quick but the chip COULD be updated to a newer version Intel chipset now being used in the 64bit laps. But I’m not complaining. I did own a 9 inch laptop which was way too small and then a 10 inch, which again was too small. The 12 inch seems perfect however, I’d bet that a new AirMac at 12+ would give this a run for its money.
Next up – switching over to using it more than full time.
And you thought Twitter was just for ‘I’m eating lunch’.
January 1st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I’ve been a user of twitter since its inception and I’ll admit I didn’t get it at first. I mean, why do I want to waste my time telling anyone where I am or what I’m eating for breakfast? Or reading what they eat for lunch? I’ve watched Twitter grow up now for sometime and it has seen some massive growth. So, it cant be from everyone telling everyone else such mundane and useless information. There has to be something here that means so much more. And there is.
Back in the days when I first jumped aboard the web, prior to the first dot.com meltdown, you had Netscape (R.I.P). I used NS as a place or ‘portal’ as they called it to find out the weather, news, events, movies and other things that was scattered throughout the internet. Actually before NS, I used BBS boards. Useful, but a bit boring and graphically plain and in 1 or two colors, its was sloooow to use and a terrible user experience. But then again, that’s all there was until NS appeared. (Can you say 28k and 56k baud squelching modems)? 
And then AOL and Yahoo came along which was a step up from NS. It started collecting ‘links’ for us.
Our browser (netscape) allowed us to bookmark our favorite places so we didn’t forget them. I used to have way too many. And then really simple syndication showed up (RSS) and that was pretty awesome. Sites created an RSS ‘feed’ which was a link of sorts. We then had RSS ‘readers’ and presto, web sites and readers could ‘feed’ us what they updated without us going back to the site to load it up every hour or two. A syndication of information of sorts, quite useful and all of a sudden EVERYONE has an RSS feed. Then we had ‘shared’ bookmarks. The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList. Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies such as Backflip, Blink, Clip2, ClickMarks, HotLinks, and others entering the market. Then Delicious in 2006 along with reddit, newsvine and dig showed up. All of these allowed us to share what we thought was cool and interesting that we found on the web. Collaborative tagging so-to-speak.
And then came Twitter. I found that the best way to use Twitter is to consume and drink from twitter and not to necessarily feel so inclined to ‘tweet’ incessantly. With my RSS reader, I have to launch it and peel through (and find) the feeds ‘I’ have chosen to read. With twitter, if I follow people who are smarter than I am, they find things that they ‘tweet’ about and ‘tweet’ them out. Even the ‘re-tweeting’ of things becomes a beacon and new river of new information for me to see and learn from. Think about it – using smarter people and friends to find cool things to discover and read about on the net in just a short 140 character ‘tweet’. No long story to read, a quick blurb and a link. If I think it may be interesting, I’ll read it. Sometimes I don’t even need to read the article – its encapsulated enough in a tweet. And, yes I get to see what is most obvious about twitter delivered to my mobile or ipad, which is the current trends and events that happen somewhere on the planet which CNN and ABC never get to first anymore. Its usually someone with a mobile phone who
‘tweets’ it. (Think the jet in the Hudson river in NYC).
Yes Twitter can be used as a marketing tool and is all the time – sometime too much so. Twitter’s usefulness as a ‘free’ loudspeaker or podium for their services /software/business can work against people more often than not as its abused so much so that way. But as a way to consume snippets of information from around the planet for even short periods of time from people who are experts at one thing or another that you are NOT an expert at, is pure serendipity. There’s no other tool like it today.
Cell phone minutes will become Bandwidth minutes soon…
December 18th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Have you tried to make a call from your iPad lately? How about using your Droid cell with a fee Sip application (Sipdroid or pinger for the iPad or even GoogleVoice). It works really well – crystal clear calls most of the time. All of these have something in common. Eventually they will bypass your cell carrier using the internet and Voip. What does this mean for the Verizon’s, AT & T’s, etc. of the world? It means once an application like GoogleVoice (GV) becomes seamless and commonplace and as soon as 4G, Wimax etc. becomes the norm, people will begin to use free Voip and cut back on their cell usage in minutes.
cell phones get metered
The implications are big for these carriers. And I know they see it coming. They can’t prevent apps being developed and sold in the Android and Apple marketplace as they don’t do the gate keeping. How will they hold on to their revenue base when erosion begins due to these apps + access to the web? They will most likely follow in the footsteps of Time-Warner and the rest of the cable industry and monitor like a leaky faucet your bandwidth usage on your phone. They will trade minutes for bytes. Charge us by the amount of bandwidth consumed. So, enjoy the unlimited cell minutes some of you have on some cell plans today, because those days are numbered. Sure, there will be unlimited bandwidth usage, but my hunch is that at least initially like everything else that’s new, it will be costly.
Look Ma, No Wires: Browsing at the Speed of Sound
September 14th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Imagine opening your laptop or your hand-held anywhere you happen to be and instantly showing five full bars of muscular Wi-Fi service? Nirvana.
There would be no need to find a Starbucks, or a McDonalds, or any other place with a Wi-Fi hotspot. You’d be in a Wi-Fi hot-zone.
Current Wi-Fi technology is designed for very short-range use such as in your home, office or at the local coffee shop. Signals at the lower-end of the “white space” spectrum, or 700 megahertz, can travel long distances, muscle their way through walls and create a much larger Wi-Fi-type hot spot. It’s like bringing Wi-Fi over an entire community or city. You can skip the expensive cabling and go wireless.
A proposed Order implementing open access to the vacant TV channels in every media market nationwide will be voted on at the Federal Communication Commission’s September 23 Open Meeting. It will address the next step in its plans for unlicensed use of the TV whitespace (the portions of the TV band that are not used in a particular location to carry TV signals). It has been called ‘wi-fi on steroids’.
The regulatory move, generally supported by all five commissioners, could help alleviate pressure on mobile networks that have frustrated some smartphone users who deal with dropped calls and slow Web connections. Think AT & T in NYC.
Ironically, it was the switch from analog to digital signals by television that freed up the extra “white space.”
“TV white spaces“– the radio spectrum vacated when analog television broadcasting ceased last year operates at lower frequencies and higher power than Wi-Fi, so the signals reach much wider areas than your typical wireless Internet router. New devices would be capable of transmitting the Wi-Fi signal over a potential range of several miles, rather than just hundreds of feet, would not be interrupted by walls and other obstructions, and would be as fast as today’s broadband and DSL connections.
Some benefits will provide dynamic management of the air interface, adaptations for vehicular use, computing mesh operation, inter-working with cellular systems, and peer-to-peer link establishment.
Calling the communications technology “super WiFi,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said that private carriers are increasingly relying on WiFi hot spots in urban areas to pick up data traffic where their own networks are overburdened.
Genachowski’s proposal would reserve two television channels in each local market for wireless microphones. This is not sitting well with some high-tech companies that argue that priority for wireless microphones subtracts from precious airwaves that could be used for a new wave of mobile broadband devices and uses.
And the new the move faces some opposition from broadcasters, Broadway performers and ministers. Huh? What did you say?? Those critics, who have filed suit against the FCC to prevent the release of white spaces, say users of that spectrum could interfere with television channels and would throw off wireless microphones that operate on those frequencies. News and sports broadcasters, church ministers and singer Dolly Parton have argued to the FCC that they need some spectrum reserved for their wireless microphones. (Dolly, say it ain’t so?)
Operators are likely to experiment with different pricing models as they try to better manage the use of their networks. And some are doing that already with AT&T — often criticized for struggling to keep up with the demands of iPhone users — were one of the first to do away with an unlimited data plan.
“Bandwidth as an end-user service is hard to sell; it’s hard to monetize,” said Wim Sweldens, president of Alcatel-Lucent‘s wireless division. “If you go to a person and say, ‘I’ll sell you a megabyte of mobile bandwidth, how much are you willing to pay?’ nobody can answer that.”
Instead, if users are asked to buy a book or game or sporting experience on their mobile phone or an app for the iPhone or android, they understand the value, he said.
Google, Microsoft and Dell have long lobbied to use white spaces. They want to use the waves to connect entire universities to the Web with wireless links that use fewer bay stations. And my hunch is that Google would love to have use of this for when they release the Chrome OS licensed to many builders of a portable tablet, due up shortly to compete with the iPad.
Dell envisions that white spaces will spawn innovations for the home. Consumers could rely on refrigerators that automatically signal the home tablet computer when food is running low, and place an order with the neighborhood grocery. Microsoft hopes to connect more of its devices to information stored on its clusters of data centers – known as cloud computing – to allow access from anywhere to applications such as its Office suite of software.
Currently, we have over 1 billion WiFi chips in every laptop in circulation, chipmakers need to develop chips that are compatible with the spectrum qualities. Then, device makers have to update their iPhones and Kindles to allow users to switch to white-space networks.
I simply want faster wireless speeds anywhere I go. I am tired of being ‘tethered’ to a broadband cable. I say, let it happen.
Sshhh!…what’s real reason why Comcast is buying NBC? TV Everywhere of course.
December 4th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
G.E.’s decision to sell NBC Universal reflects the shifts in fortune that are battering the media business, especially network television. The broadcast division of NBC Universal could lose big, a remarkable downturn for a network that had earned roughly $400 million in past years.
Problem: the Internet has fractured audiences and few viable business models have emerged for the distribution of content online.
What the new Comcast venture looks like: Comcast will contribute its own cable channels, which include Versus, the Golf Channel and the E Entertainment channel, and a modest amount of cash, about $5 billion, to a joint venture in which it will own 51 percent. G.E. will retain a 49 percent stake, and would likely reduce its ownership over several years and in theory, Comcast-NBC Universal will be a company separate from Comcast’s cable assets.
Some interesting possibilities could be:
It could use its power in film, with Universal Studios, to expand video-on-demand offerings by altering movie release windows to make movies available on demand the same day they are released on DVD.
It could use its power in film, with Universal Studios, to expand video-on-demand offerings by altering movie release windows to make movies available on demand the same day they are released on DVD to all active basic cable subscribers that buy HBO and SHOWTIME or purchase at least 1 on-demand film per month.
Buying Netflix: Stream movies through this service coupling subscription on cable with certain consumer benefits through Netflix, i.e. day and date with DVD or perhaps even a scheme to stream films just released in theaters 1 time only to ‘frequent flyers’ or renters of the service, but at a big ticket price on-demand.
But here is the real reason why Comcast is buying NBC: TV Everywhere. “TV Everywhere” model, which promises to give their subscribers exactly what they want: anytime, anywhere access to any TV content. They have to do this to keep their customer bases and compete. In a TV Everywhere world, the role of the multi-system operator is diminished. Your cable or satellite TV provider will no longer be your only (legal) means of watching the current episode of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. In a TV Everywhere world, Curb Your Enthusiasm will be available on literally thousands of websites and mobile apps, as long as you can authenticate yourself as a paying cable or satellite subscriber with the HBO package. Comcast risks becoming a “dumb pipe,” providing little more than bandwidth. To avoid that fate, Comcast recognizes that it needs to move upstream and own or control the content itself, thus NBC/Uni. More to the point, a consumer COULD elect to turn off his cable basic subscription and turn around and subscribe to TVE thereby allowing him to see his basic cable channels but on his PC, phone etc. Now that Comcast owns content and some of those channels it can monetize the consumer whether or not they subscribe to the cable in the house or not.
In a TV Everywhere world, it will be a terribly crowded space, with a ton of noise and websites with similar content. The sites that perform best will be the ones that create the best user experience for viewing TV content – and right now, that’s Hulu ( and who knows, maybe Clicker ?). If Comcast buys NBC, Comcast will own about 1/3 of Hulu, providing an ideal launching pad for TV Everywhere it has a very passionate and loyal audience.
This online world is a very splintered and exceedingly difficult to measure, especially when you are asked to sell advertising against the content. The real problem is a lack of tools to properly bring the right economy of scale to online which equates to buying media in a traditional way. Therefore, instead of trying to monetize a cable channel online one by one, with TVE, you can monetize the whole package in a similar way that cable already is monetized. Its a structure already understood by the consumer now. Bundle a bunch of cable channels for a small monthly fee and let consumers have access to them everywhere, including home or NOT.
The Internet while very big, does not yet command the equivalent kind of media rates and fees that Cable or Network gets today. No agreed upon means of measurement exists to give advertisers a definitive ‘rate card’ for the internet. There is no Nielsen for the web, (yet, although it was announced yesterday by Nielsen that eventually, there will be). comScore, even though they do a great job with data can’t extrapolate the data to equate to viewers ‘watching a TV set’. Making the comparison when placing an ad on a video online and the same ad on TV impossible to compare TODAY. Hulu streamed 855 million video stream last month. What does that really mean? Did all 855m viewers who watched those streams watch ALL of each stream or were many of them counted as they ‘surfed’ through Hulu clicking on various videos for a few minutes or even seconds – were they counted among the 855m? What does 855m stream equate to in Nielsen ratings/eyeballs? Does anyone really know? Nielsen despite its shortcomings has some measurable statistics for this, but its still not apples to apples.
Furthermore, Hulu still has a long way to go to prove it can monetize its audience as effectively as its parent companies can do with programs viewed on-air. Why? Its uniques are flat. Hulu’s uniques are scarcely better than they were 6 months ago. Unless the unique number jumps in the coming months (which I doubt it will), Hulu will have to meaningfully enhance its value proposition to grow its audience (can you say “Hulu to-the-TV-via-Xbox/Roku/Apple TV/etc?”) says Will Richmond of Videonuze (Nov 30th 2009). He goes on to ask “What happens to Fox’s programs on Hulu should Rupert Murdoch expand his focus beyond his newspapers’ online content going premium? What if Disney decides to launch its own subscription services? What if Google or Microsoft or Netflix (or someone else) decides to open their wallet and make a bigger play in premium online video?” And, these questions become somewhat less mysterious now that Comcast has bought NBC/Universal.TV will NEVER be the same again.
Comcast chart above courtesy of VideoNuze.com
Posted via email from williamsager’s posterous
