Battle for your TV

So I've been wondering who'll be weighing in for the battle for our TVs. There are certainly some interesting prospects on the market at the minute, but I who will win and does there even need to be a winner? This feels different to a format war reminiscent of VHS vs Betamax or more recently (and on-going) HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray. It's more akin to the cable vs satellite vs freeview vs top-up-TV wars we've seen recently.

Both the cable and satellite offerings have pay-per-view content, while freeview generally doesn't. All of these offerings have recording options, although generally with cable or satellite you would have to use the operators set up box, with freeview you are free to choose from a variety of products, some with hard drives for recording.

Two more recent entries on the market are worth looking at further though. BT and Microsoft. BT have released Vision, which is a freeview recorder with pay-per-view capabilities. It looks as if BT have taken two interesting features from the above and merged them before the others had a chance. Get free digital channels, the ability to record programs and the option to purchase movies, TV shows and sporting events all without a contract and monthly fee.

So far so good, apart from the fact with BT Vision, as the content is delivered over the IP network it means you have to have a minimum broadband speed to cope with the streaming, and the way to do that is to have BT broadband. As a side note, to have BT broadband you need a BT land line, sorry all those who switched to cable.

It seems like a lot of competition, but let's not forget the software companies attempts. Well, I call them software companies, but if you have an Xbox 360 or Apple TV then that's hardware really isn't it?

Now in the UK you can download standard definition or high definition pay per view content. Its movies and TV shows at the minute with no sporting content signed up, but who knows what the future might bring. We've been able to download TV content from iTunes for a while now (well not really in the UK) and let's not forget the muted Amazon Unbox.

We're crossing into interesting territory now. With cable and satellite operators you need a billing relationship (and all that implies, i.e. address etc). With BT, you also need that, but have to buy into their other products. With iTunes, xBox 360 Live and Amazon Unbox you pay for what you use when you use it (or use pre-pay credits) and use them where ever you are signed in to the relevant hardware or software to view your content.

Are we living in a world where we increasingly don't need or want bundles? With mobile broadband from providers like 3, and wireless city meshes potentially driving out needing a cable run into your home for land line phone services and broadband, where digital TV is free and pay-per-view content available through a variety of sources be they games consoles, set top boxes or just over the web do consumers want to be tied into contracts and services they can only use in one place?

SDPs and other acronyms

Acronyms have always filled me with fear ever since my university Software Engineering class where we'd read case studies but with the names changed in a humourous way, like SNAPPERS for an automated processed through a photography lab. What it stands for now escapes me, but leaves me frightened nether-the-less. The telco industry is filled with them, the software industry has plenty go spare too and I'm stuck in the middle.

After reading JPs recent entry about the word 'platform' now being an overloaded word, I remembered what the telco industry was currently going through. I get the impression sometimes that in the industry if it's not worth putting a committee together to solve a problem, then there is no problem.

Take your typical Service Delivery Platform (SDP), talk about a problem that doesn't need solving! SDPs are specific to the telco industry according to Wikipedia. But, why are they specific? If SDPs are so central to (and I cringe as I type this) 'Telco 2.0' why isn't anyone else doing it? Why can't I just buy one? For that matter, why isn't there an open source SDP I can run?

I really like Urmy's "complex is lots of simple" approach. I look at some of the newish companies coming out and they seem to have something in common. David James said something which stuck with me about making your product x, the best damm product x anyone has seen. Take Twitter for example, what they do is really good, and it's simple to use and code against.

When building a generic framework, I'd like to see lots of loosely connected, easy to use web APIs to make it so easy to plug an application together, you could build it before you had time to put a committee together. Yes, those newish start ups do have the luxury of having no legacy systems like telco's do, but that doesn't give anyone permission to shroud those legacy systems in the mysteries of acronyms.

hReview use for music ratings

After my previous post on various music web sites and they work out for me, PSD left a comment pointing to the microformats site, and more specifically hReview.

What I'd really like to do is be able to traverse my music collection and build up a hReview page of where I've given a rating to songs and albums. What would be cool, would be to then import that into those music sites so my musical tastes are syncronized (and no, not the album by Jamiroquai).

Twitter as a messaging platform

When you have an itch, scratch it!

Well, that's what I've started to do. My itch is a common one in the UK and probably throughout Europe and certain parts of the world, but when you generalise it, it becomes a problem that nearly every one has. When there's a certain piece of information that I want to know as it happens, how do I find that out?

For me, it's Arsenal scores. I'm a big Arsenal fan, and unfortunately I don't get to see many games live (other wise I might not have this problem). As much as Arsenal play on TV, I often don't get a chance to see that either, I don't subscribe to Sky or cable, so I'll pop to the pub. Anyhoo, I want to know when there's a change of score, and I want to know the final score of all Arsenal games. So what did I do about it?

Let's put that question to one side for now and look at Twitter. I've been using Twitter for a few months and I'm lovin' it! One of the key points here is that it's a pulling mechanism of messaging. You have to 'follow' someone to view their updates but you can view those messages on the web, through RSS, third party applications (using the Twitter web API or RSS) or through SMS.

Let's get back to the question at hand. The Beeb has a great website for sport, particularly their refreshing latest score pages. Although not RSS, which is a shame, the page is formatted nicely, so writing an application to extract key data is pretty simple. Twitter can then be used to post that data too and anyone, myself included, can subscribe that information in my preferred means.

Looking back at the little application I wrote, it's screamingly obvious that with easy to use web APIs all you have to do is write some plumbing code to do what you want to do and scratch that itch that's been irritating you.

So far, I've created users on Twitter for Arsenal, Birmingham and Manchester Utd.

Soon, I'll be creating users for all Premiership clubs and pushing this a little more. Let me know if you have an itch (or well, at least a team you'd like to follow, it can be any team that has a live scores page from the BBC Sport Football website), let me know =)

last.fm vs musicovery vs pandora

I love listening to music while at work, and I can't help but feel agitated that my favourite web music players (last.fm and pandora.com) don't work when I'm on the company network. I've recently discovered musicovery.com from a friend mentioning it on Twitter, which more and more is my source of information. It works on the company network which rocks, I think it streams through a flash based player to traverse the company network rather than streaming straight into the browser. I can't help but think though that why isn't there a microformat for favourite and 'banned' music to use anywhere?

I'd rather use last.fm or pandora.com at work, but I can't. The next best thing would be to share my 'taste' of music across these sites.

Come on everyone, microformats are the way forward!

Blyk - Free calls for adverts

Something came to my attention earlier this week, a new virtual cell-co, Blyk. Blyk's angle here is that it's giving away over 200 free SMS and 47 minutes of free phone calls. All this is in exchange for being advertisted at.

There seems to be two schools of thought about advertising, the Cluetrainthought (number 74) against the Google/Facebook "look at us we're made of millions yet we don't take a penny" thought. Blyk seems to be taking the second side.

Get them while they're young!

Let's consider for a while, as the Guardian points out, teenagers are going to love this, free stuff rocks! But the Register points out a more serious side with the consequences.

Blyk will not only have your profile data for getting the sim (age and sex etc), but by using the handset it will also have call and location data about the caller as well. This data is invaluable, your location (although generally restricted by hundreads of meters at best through Cell Mast postitioning) can be used for targeted advertising and can also use call and SMS history to target ads as well. Will they go as far as reading your texts for key words?

People expect stuff for free now! Most are willing to be advertised at for free stuff, but some are still cautious about this.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this all yet. Anyway, check them out and Blyk in the news:

http://about.blyk.com/home/
http://www.blyk.co.uk/
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/nov2006/gb20061103_894708.htm
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/24/blyk-launches-ad-based-mobile-network/

Gordon Ramsey and Software Craftmanship

It's amazing the way you can find links between tenious, discrete things. This week my tenious link is Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmare. I find it really interesting that no matter where Gordon finds himself he tends to offer the same three pieces of advice, the only difference is how he assists execute that.

1) Keep things simple - most resturants Gordon visits tend to have elaborate menu's, trim the fat and do what you're good at.

2) increase efficenticy - to increase turn around and quality, put better processes in place. A simplefied menu will help, but add fresh food with pre-prepared (that day, not days old!) bases that you can churn out.

3) do some marketing to increase awareness. Let people know you've changed and give them samples to show them the goodness.

Looking at this, I can certainly see where my industry fits in. Make your products easy to use, make it so building your products is easy, and go out there any let people know about it and try it for free!

RippleRap

Whilst at LeWeb3 in Paris earlier in December I had the opportunity to test drive RippleRap.com from my buddies over at Osmosoft. Ripple Rap is a note sharing tool that can be used in Conferences, telephone meetings and the like. One missing feature was a mechanism to give feedback, so I thought I'd throw something up on here and send it over to them.

RippleRap is built on TiddlyWiki, a open source, primarily client based all-in-one wiki page and so I was somewhat familiar with the navigation and use of the application.

So, the question that I wanted answered was why I would want something like this instead of a text editor (local or hosted) or a wiki page online? The wifi at LeWeb was up and down and as you run RippleRap from disc you would never get any connection errors. If you were using a hosted solution you would have had to use local based notes and copy and paste all over the place. If that were the case, why not use just a local text editor? Well, when you do have connection, RippleRap automatically publishes any saved notes to anyone else using the app for that conference. This means others can read your notes and conversely, you can read other people's notes.

I got some benefit being able to read other people's notes from the conference. Others had picked up on things I missed and I could read notes from sessions I missed as soon as someone saved their notes (and had connection to publish). Some added quotes, some commentary and thoughts; I think a range of different possibilities will emerge if this grows.

I like the fact I can also get the feeds from agenda points, there's a great example from JPs talk.

There were some things that could be improved upon and new features which could spring up. My thoughts drift the idea of a conference dashboard where I could enter tags which I'm interested in and be presented in feeds from the web tagged with that information. For example, the tag LeWeb3 appeared in Twitter, Flickr and probably a whole bunch more. I'd also like to be able to tune that to get updates from sites which I'm interested in and not to receive updates from sites in which I'm not interested in.

I'd also like to have a permalink to the notes I've and others have made so I can quote those in blog posts.

It'd be cool to be able to go to RippleRap.com to set up a conference with agenda and then pull that down to distribute it, or get the permalink to that for others to download.

Vlogging the anwser to TV reborn? Get out of town!

The panel in this session were rambling on about video blogging with a bunch of web apps which I won't mention here. Don't get me wrong, this is relevant, the fact you can do an interview on a phone and publish it is freaking cool. However, this session titled "TV Reborn" sounded like it should have been a discussion on how media companies can play with the web and they failed to deliver!

I asked a question (heartbeat++++): "you've talked a lot about video blogging, but what about open source film like A Swarm of Angels and content providers giving it up like Star Wars Mashups?"

The answer was summed up by Paul Downey on Twitter.

The panel didn't understand the question, and I was largely ignored. It's not that these guys don't get it, but (a Phillipe Stark saying coming up) they are walking and looking at their feet.

[edit]

thanks to Phil Hawksworth for capturing this photo:


[edit2]

Here's the video, goto 41 minutes to see my question:

http://light.vpod.tv/?s=0.0.394193

International Surfing

Sitting in a hotel lobby, trying to get onto wifi, I seem to have 4 accounts with my provider through an employee scheme, my broadband and FON and a mysterious 4th. When I tried to log in with two of those I had an error messaging saying something about not having 'roaming' enabled. The provider didn't recognise my FON account and I couldn't get details of my other account. Thank you, but why should I have to have roaming to get on the web? It's not like I'm making long distance international phone calls, the web is here in the room (I can feel it), but I'm not allowed to play. I had to buy credit, and that just sucks!

100th Blog post

I'd noticed that my blogger account was showing 100 posts for this blog and to be honest I was a little surprised. I thought I'd go back and look at my posting habits. Check out the graph. When I started this blog, it was mainly so I could post amusing anecdotes of my travels around Italy back in May 2005. I'd been fed up of emailing everyone and missing people off, so I gave my friends the blog link and told them to read that for my misadventures. If you've been reading for a while, you'd noticed that after that trip I had nothing more to say. Then I started with a few bits and pieces until a few months ago when I started hitting the blog hard.

While I've been working in my current job, I've been absorbing more and reading lots which has culminated in my suddenly having quite a bit to say.

Now, sometimes I don't know if other people are having the same thoughts as me, or if I'm having the same thoughts of other people. Art reflecting life, life reflecting art and all that. But it seems people are being quite reflective of their own blogging.

uncov.com launches against bloggers who like to think their journalists. I don't think I'm in this category, I just find this gives me a place to ramble, and get my thoughts down.

Piotr and David have both commented on why they've not be blogging enough, and I'd say to that, that blogging to me is my mind dump. It's a place to get everything out. I'm not a journalist, and I certainly don't spend a great deal of time writing my entries. In fact, I'm with Scoble here, don't be afraid to be wrong or to look wrong. And if you're thinking about stopping your blog, think about your global microbrand.

Using Onaswarm.com or a solution to the Robbie Clutton problem

After some discussion on my previous entry (people do read my blog, cool), I'm happy to say that so far I'm pleased with onaswarm.com and the conversations coming from David Janes over there.

I tried out a few things which Cristiano wanted, like hosting the link in your own domain and building gadgets.

First, on my own (rarely used) home page I added an auto discovery RSS element, so the RSS icon appears in the address bar and points to my lifestream feed. I also added a new page to show just a gadget along with the auto discovery RSS feed. You could do similar things with a redirect straight to the feed, or use some XSLT to transform the feed to your own presentation.

As a lazy developer and human being, I had hoped someone had built something like this so I didn't need to. Thanks onaswarm, expect some feature requests from me in the future =)