Empressr Releases Web 2.0 Competitor To Powerpoint

July 13th, 2006 Davis

TechCrunch has an interesting write up on a web 2.0 company named Empressr that is offering an online based alternative to Powerpoint. In the article, TechCrunch also highlights a couple of other web 2.0 start-ups that are trying to develop their own powerpoint applications in this space as well.

While, I haven’t tried any of the programs that he highlights in his story, I’m pretty interested in this nonetheless. Over the last several years, I’ve found that my computing needs have been met less and less by Microsoft and more and more by new Web 2.0 services. Whether it was ditching the truly horrendous Outlook Express for the free Thunderbird program or using online alternatives to Word, it has really made me think about how strong Microsoft’s Operating system monopoly really is.

If consumers increasingly find competitors online that can compete with the software that Microsoft sells, this could help add some much needed choice to the office application space. While finding an alternative to Powerpoint is of interest to me, Empressr’s launch did leave me wanting more. Instead of just allowing consumers to build and export presentations, I would have liked to have seen a way that users could embed presentations into their web pages. While Empressr is a good first step, I think that the real killer to Powerpoint will be a Youtube version of the software where consumers can create rich applications and then showcase them to their readers. With as blog saavy as Microsoft has been, I’m almost surprised that they haven’t already introduced this functionality already.

Posted in Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Oak Investment Partners Throws Away $70 Million on MobiTV

July 12th, 2006 Davis

Over the last few years, I’ve watched the development of the Slingbox and Orb with great interest. Being able to watch TV on the go through a cell phone, laptop or PDA is really cool, but in all honesty I don’t spend enough time on the go to justify paying the wireless access charges on my phone for the service, especially considering that my Audiovox phone already supports a video library that I can snyc on my phone in my downtime.

While I’m probably not your typical placeshifter, I do still find the technology very exciting and I’m glad that there are companies out there that aren’t afraid to risk the wrath of the Hollywood fat cats to provide consumers with access to programming that we’ve already legitimately paid for.

At some point, as the popularity of placeshifting grows, I expect that we’ll see the content and cellular providers go head to head with Sling Media and Orb on the functionality they allow, but for the time being these companies have set the gold standard when it comes to expanding consumer’s fair use rights and would be my first choice if I was going to adopt placeshifting.

With as much money at stake, I guess it shouldn’t be any surprise to see that the cell phone providers aren’t accepting placeshifting lying down, but I continue to scratch my head at the dilluted offerings that are being presented to consumers.

MobiTV is one of these offerings that has received broad support from the cellular industries as well as a number of wealthy venture capitalists. According to GigaOm, the company has actually just received another staggering $70 million dollars from Oak Investment Partners to support their version of what they think consumers want.

Basically MobiTV allows you to receive East coast broadcast television feeds live on your cell phone. While on the surface this sounds like something that consumers might like, it’s a huge downgrade for those used to being able to access any channel, not just the ones MobiTV has partnered with or for those who want to actually time shift their programming instead of watching it live. Given that MobiTV is trying to charge $10 per month, on top of the $20 per month that the cellular company is going to charge for unlimited data transfers, this seems like a really weak service to be offering to consumers compared to the anything at anytime business model of Sling Media and Orb. While it’s nice that MobiTV is trying to work with content providers to provide TV on the go, there is no way I’d ever pay that much money to not have time shifting capabilities despite how much content partners seem to hate the PVR.

Posted in Slingbox | No Comments »

Convert Your Free Napster Songs to Mp3 Legally?

July 12th, 2006 Davis

Digital Media Thoughts came across an interesting program named Sound Taxi that can reportedly convert your DRM infested music tracks to high quality restriction free Mp3s. According to the company’s website “technically Sound Taxi does not circumvent Microsoft’s or Apple’s iTunes DRM protection. Microsoft’s DRM protection system is unprotecting the protected DRM audio files.”

From their description it sounds like the software might be making analog copies of digital songs. I’m not sure the exact restrictions of the DMCA, but if this is in fact a legal loophole, this could be a real problem the music industry. On one level, I’ve never felt bad about pirating songs from the studios because I’ve only really downloaded content when they’ve refused to make it available to consumers online. Call it a form of social protest if you will, but with the advent of paid downloads, it’s been at least 3 or 4 years since I’ve actually used a P2P network.

While Sound Taxi may or may not infringe upon the legal rights of the studios, I certainly think that there might be some ethical issues with the software they are providing. Allowing people to convert iTunes into Mp3’s is one thing because consumers have paid for each song, but allowing (legal or not) consumers to bypass the “subscription” copy protections that Yahoo! and Napster doesn’t exactly sit square with me. If you are paying $5 per month to download an unlimited number of songs and then using SoundTaxi to turn those into Mp3’s, it’s hard for me to see how this wouldn’t be piracy. At the very least, it has to be a violation of Napster’s TOS.

I think it’s ridiculous that Microsoft is having to pay studios for consumers to transfer their music off of iTunes and in someways the studios have brought this on themselves by not supporting an open standard for DRM that allows interoperability regardless of where you buy your music from, but in the case of Sound Taxi, I think that they may have taken this too far. Finding a work around to Apple’s refusal to share FairPlay is one thing, but using legal loopholes to circumvent subscription based music programs runs the risk of undermining the free and subscriber based mp3 models that a lot of consumers enjoy.

Posted in DRM | No Comments »

Polar Frog Leaps Over Hollywood With DVD Burning Kiosk

July 11th, 2006 Davis

Anyone who has followed my writing on Thomas Hawk knows that I’m a sucker for DVD kiosks. While most consumers don’t realize how much they enjoy them until they try them, I think that kiosks are going to play an important role as media continues to become comoditized. So far Hollywood has been reluctant to fully support the kiosks and what consumers have been left with are vending machines that typically are limited to just a few mainstream titles that can quickly sell out.

While there has been some interest amoung the retailers for a more robust offering, Hollywood has yet to agree to the licensing terms to provide burn on demand kiosks to consumers. So far, Best Buy, Walmart, & Circuit City have all lobbied Hollywood for this feature, but the Hollywood executives still continue to ignore them.

Redbox, Movie Gallery and Blockbuster have all experimented with kiosks, but without the rights to burn on demand, the offerings have been pretty slim for consumers. There does appear to be hope however. In an attempt to leapfrog Hollywood’s refusal to allow burn on demand, Polar Frog Digital will begin offering independent burn on demand DVDs at Sprouts’ health store locations. Sprouts is very similar to Whole Foods or Trader Joes and they have locations in California, Arizonia and Texas.

I think this is a great move by Polar Frog. Previously they’ve deployed these machines in adult film stores, but the real potential for kiosk burning comes from partnering with mainstream businesses and while I think the porn industry can be remarkably progressive when it comes to embracing technology, I think that DVD burning has a greater benefit to people who visit mainstream retailers on a regular basis, then people who are already visiting a video store to begin with.

By working with independent studios, Polar Frog will be able to offer up to 700 - 800 movies and up to 3,000 TV shows with up to 40 different new burn-on-demand titles per month. In order to burn a disc, it will take 6 - 8 minutes to complete and while on one level having to wait 10 minutes to get a movie is a bit of a drag for consumers, on another level it’s an important benefit to retailers who should be able to convince customers to buy a cup of coffee or browse their stores while waiting. Hopefully, at some point we can see Polar Frog embrace a system where customers can order the burned movie online and then pick it up without a wait for consumers.

This is a great development for movie lovers everywhere. Hopefully, as Sprouts and Polar Frog benefit from this partnership, Hollywood will take notice and we can see more cooperation between retailers and producers of content in the future.

Posted in Kiosks | No Comments »

Buttondown the Hatches - Microsoft Offers Password Protection

July 11th, 2006 Davis

For the most part, I’ve really enjoyed using Windows over the last ten years. Sure it’s had it’s ups and downs and who hasn’t gotten the famous blue screen of death, but I’ve been remarkably lucky about avoiding a lot of the major problems that a lot of consumers run into. Even today, I still own a computer running Window’s 98′ and I just can’t bring myself to get rid of it because it still works great. One complaint I have had about Windows though has been the difficulty behind securing information on the system.

While they offer the ability to password protect your screen saver and to lock down the system as a whole, they’ve never offered consumers a way that they could password protect folders that have sensitive information on them.

According to JK on the run this might be changing though. Apparently, Microsoft is offering a new private folder that you can download for data that might be a bit sensitive. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to authenticate my version of Windows, so I haven’t been able to install the program yet, but I’m hoping to test this later on tonight and will let you know my thoughts. Private folders might not be the most revolutionary move that Microsoft could have made, but it’s a subtle improvement that people will notice. Whether you are trying to hide the girls of IT calendar from your significant other or whether you are trying to protect sensitive personal information that you’ve scanned into a lifebits project, there are a lot of people who should enjoy being able to protect their data from people who might casually use their computers.

Update - Ars Technica reports on some of the controversy surrounding the new utility and fears that employees will use the technology to hide and steal important company files.

Posted in Microsoft | No Comments »

Dark Days For The Soda Industry

July 11th, 2006 Davis

dark days for the soda industryHosted on Zooomr

So I heard a rumor that Zooomr was giving away free pro accounts to bloggers and thought that this was a great promotion by them. By giving away the free pro accounts, Zooomr should get some invaluable feedback and should pick up a few influencers along the way. So far the response has been tremendous and I figured I better get in before they realize that they might actually need to make money in order to suceed as a photo sharing site. Above is one of my favorite photos. It was taken in Oakland and it still holds some mystery for me whenever I see this door. I’m not sure why I like it so much, but there is a certain darkness to the photo that I enjoy.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Hacking Netflix Interviews Reed Hastings

July 11th, 2006 Davis

When MikeK was in San Francisco last month, he had an opportunity to go one on one with Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings. In true blogosphere fashion, before the interview he turned to his readers to find out what they wanted to know about Hastings. The questions ranged from the issue of throttling to the possibility of seeing video games in addition to movies. While it was encouraging to hear Hastings talk about at least watching the video game market, overall I found the interview to be a little discouraging. Throughout the interview, Hastings seems to dodge many of the questions and is very ambiguous about several issues brought up.

When asked about throttling, he defends the practice by pointing to customer service stats instead of looking at the real question of whether or not it fair to not tell consumers what the limit is. While on one level I can understand why he would want to protect this trade secret, on another level I feel like this is one mistake that the company hasn’t properly addressed. By hiding the limit of what it takes for consumers to get a downgrade, they prevent customers from making proper buying decisions. The company can argue that they allocate DVDs fairly, but there is nothing fair about hiding the information from their customers and until they properly address this issue, it will continue to be the one weakness in Netflix’s outstanding customer experience.

Posted in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Netflix | No Comments »

Davis Finds His Voice

July 11th, 2006 Davis

Believe or not I had never heard of blogging until Thomas Hawk told me he was starting one. I remember thinking how stupid I thought the whole idea was. He was really excited about it, but I couldn’t figure out why. I remember asking him why he didn’t just use the website that he already had. (Tom’s Top Secret beta blog from the 90’s)? He told me that this was something different, an online diary of sorts. I didn’t get, but that’s OK because Tom did. He understood that a blog isn’t as much a diary, but a conversation and when I saw Tom begin adding to that conversation, it was exciting to watch. For a long time, Tom encouraged me to start up my own blog, but the idea of writing everyday seemed like a chore that I wasn’t interested in taking on. Eventually, he convinced me to start writing contributions on Thomas Hawk.

At first I was a little apprehensive, but after a lot of editing, Tom published my first article about a company that I’m very passionate about and I was immedietely hooked. As I contributed more to Thomas Hawk, I found that writing was less a chore, but a great way to share and develop thoughts. The more articles I published, the more I grew to enjoy blogging. While Tom was always willing to let me publish as much as I wanted on his site, I started to realize that if I really wanted to join the conversation fulltime, then it needed to be with my own voice.

For a long time I put off starting my own site, but when MikeK at HackingNetflix asked my why I didn’t start my own blog, I had to ask myself why it was that I was putting off something that I knew I would enjoy. I still plan on contributing to Tom’s site from time to time, but I hope to use Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection as a place to not only discuss and watch technology and new ideas, but to also look at how that technology is changing the world from a business perspective. I plan on writing more frequently and hope to feature my own digital photograph (Tom made me buy a Canon Rebel, but I’m still learning) and have already warned Tom that I plan on pilfering his Zooomr stream with my personal favorites of his shots. As this blog develops, I hope that you’ll enjoy my own unique take on the digital landscape.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »