Archive for October, 2006

They Did The Mash, They Did The Monster Mash

Oct 20

Posted by Davis in Movies | Comments off

I Carved Your Name Across My Eyelids...I Carved Your Name Across My Eyelids… Hosted on Zooomr

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays and with October 31st rapidly approaching, I’m having a tough time trying to decide what I want to dress up as this year. Instead of worrying about what I’ll be though, I figured that I would link to a contest that BlueSky Studios is having on their blog right now. The contests are open ended so even if it’s no longer current you can still submit your drawings.

BlueSky hosts a contest every Monday where readers can submit drawings based on themes that they pick out. Being a total flim buff, you can imagine how pleased I was when I saw that this week’s contest was based on recreating drawings of classic movie monsters. Of all of the submissions, my favorite has to be the Bride of Frankenstein. I’m not sure that I could pull it off for a costume, but it’s still a great rendition of a classic horror movie character. Hat tip to Ad Jab for pointing out the site.

My Love She Speaks Like Silence

Oct 19

Posted by Davis in Photos | Comments off

My Love She Speaks Like SilenceMy Love She Speaks Like Silence Hosted on Zooomr

No PS3 For You – Hollywood Considers Grounding Sony Over Blu-Ray Debacle

Oct 19

Posted by Davis in HDTV DVDs, Movies, Video Games | 2 Comments

With Hollywood fat cats beginning to realize that 2006 may see the DVD reaching it’s peak in popularity, they are starting to get nervous and have started to show signs of turning on each other. In the latest sign that not all is right in Hollyweird, Variety is reporting that movie executives are upset about being misled by Sony over the PS3/Blu-Ray timeline and are actually beginning to consider alternatives to the Blu-ray / HD-DVD stalemate.

Over the last few years, Sony has continually used the PS3 as a way to convince Hollywood studios to embrace a senseless format war and to get them to refuse to license their movies to the HD-DVD format. There is no doubt that the PS2 has been the most successful video game system ever. With a full year headstart on the Xbox, a slate of exclusive video game titles and a strong international presence, Sony was able to dominate Microsoft and Nintendo in the 2nd generation console wars. Having built this lead with their PS2, Sony has been so aggressive in negotiations over the format war, that it has sparked an anti-trust investigation within the EU.

After sucessfully convincing several studios to boycott the HD-DVD format, industry executives are finally beginning to show cracks in their resolve after Sony has experienced delay after delay after delay in deploying their upcoming third generation console.

“”The more problems the PS3 has had, the more chips Sony has pushed in,” says one senior videogame industry exec. “At this point, it’s a huge gamble.”

The fate of the PS3 will not only determine the future of the videogame industry, but the battle over hi def DVD formats as well. Because every PS3 is a Blu-ray player, its success could help drive the success of the Sony-backed format over Toshiba’s HD DVD. If it’s a flop, studios aligned with Blu-ray will undoubtedly start switching sides.

In other words, a lot more players in Hollywood will be watching the launch of the PS3 than typically pay attention to a new videogame console.”

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again, until the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD studios can figure out a way to end this format war, I will boycott any HDTV DVD system out there. If that means that I won’t be getting a PS3 as a result, then I’m absolutely fine with that. Why the studios can’t license films on both formats is beyond me, but when companies engage in this sort of monopolistic chicanery, they will never receive any of my hard earned entertainment dollars.

The good news for consumers though is that with all of these delays, the studios may take a second look at this issue and see the benefits of either agreeing upon an open standard or agreeing to supporting both formats. Interestingly enough, in a post analyzing many of the issues brought up in the Variety article, The Home Theater Blog mentions that his contacts have indicated that we could see at least one studio agree to dual distribution by the end of this year.

“The A2 and XA2 along with the Xbox add-on will put HD DVD into insert-number-here additional homes and from there who knows where this will go. One thing’s for certain however HD DVD has established a “beachhead” new window regardless of what Mike Dunn has to say on the subject. The net result of this may surprise even the most ardent Blu-ray supporters; I’m told to expect at least one Blu-ray exclusive studio to announce neutrality, before the end of the year.”

Reading this makes me hopeful that we could see an end to this stalemate sooner or later, but until we see the PS3 deployed on a large scale, I think many studios will take a wait and see approach when it comes to the issue of whether they should be format agnostic. While I’d like to see this technology begin to gain widespread adoption, until we see a solution where consumers aren’t put at risk of buying obsolete equipment so that studios can profit, I will also take a wait and see approach.

San Francisco Local Politics Derail Free WiFi Project

Oct 18

Posted by Davis in Technology | 51 Comments

No WiFi For You

San Francisco land of the nuts and fruits. I can only say that because I live here and consider many of them my close friends, but if you were a fly on the wall at last night’s EarthLink Google WiFi meeting you would know what I mean.

Over the last two years, San Francisco has expressed an interest in bringing wireless internet access to the entire city, but two years later we are still arguing about how to get this done. It started in September 2004, when the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a resolution allocating $300,000 for the city to investigate various wifi options so that they could bring affordable internet access to the entire city. In January of 2005, Mayor Gavin Newsom used his state of the city address to show his committment to free wifi by declaring that “we will not stop until every San Franciscan has access to free wireless Internet service.”

Over the next year, the city studied the various issues associated with bringing free Wifi to the city and by December of 2005, the list of possible vendors had been narrowed down to 7 companies who offered formal proposals to the city. In April of 2006, the mayor announced that they had selected EarthLink and Google to help build and run the network at no cost to the city. At that time a lot of excitement and buzz was generated by the possibility of the citizens of San Francisco having free WiFi.

Unfortunately, as with a lot of things in San Francisco, politics once again seems to have derailed something that could have been so great.

Despite the announcement made last April free WiFi instead has turned out to be vaporware thus far with Google and Earthlink discovering that dealing with the local San Francisco political scene is about as fun as being set up on a blind date with Mike Tyson after being rubbed down in meat sauce.

The lunacy of San Francisco politics can take several forms and town hall meetings are sure to attract some of San Francisco’s craziest nut jobs. While I was surprised not to see San Francisco’s representative from the 12 galaxies, Frank Chu, attend the meeting, I did get to see Chris Sacca from Google face a parade of activist oddballs who neither understood technology nor the positive social impact that free wifi could bring to some of the city’s most disadvantaged citizens.

At the meeting, Sacca did an excellent job or remaining calm and explaining the technology in language that anyone could understand, still these local political gadflies seemed to feel that EarthLink and Google providing free WiFi to the citizens was akin to killing kittens because, they attacked Sacca with a venom that was absolutely shocking.

Some of the crazier demands that were suggested at the meeting included a “requirement” for every San Francisco renter to sign a lease addendum with their landlords before being allowed to install a WiFi card in their PC, forcing Google to agree to transport kids back and forth to the Zoo in their Google busses and a requirement for EarthLink to pay the electrical costs for running computers in order to prevent brownouts.

Now if Google and EarthLink were receving public funds from the city or if the city was going to have to pay for the costs associated with running this network, I could understand why people would be so concerned. But why should Google and EarthLink be held up and extorted by local politicians, being forced to give in to any number of demands when all they want to do is give people free WiFi.

The internet is truly one of the most amazing technological advancements in the last 100 years. The ability to connect digitally to the entire world has transformed every single aspect of my life. When I needed to find a new apartment in San Francisco, I saved money by using Craigslist to find a great place. When I had worthless junk left over after I moved, I’ve been able to use EBay in order to have a much more effective digital garage sale. When I need access to any form of information I can use services like Google to find it. If I don’t want to pay for cable TV I’m able to use YouTube as a replacement. In short, I can’t think of a single area of my life where the internet hasn’t had an impact in one form or another and it’s the power of this technology that makes the idea of free WiFi so powerful.

Despite all of the advancement in technology, San Franicisco, perhaps more then any other city faces a significant digital gap between those who have access to technology and those who do not. By giving Comcast an exclusive license to provide broadband connectivity to their citizens, the San Francisco board of Directors have kept the poor from being able to have access to the same opportunities that those who can afford $40 a month for high speed access.

When you go online, it doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, black or white, gay or straight, all that matters is the quality of your ideas and your ability to be innovative.

The poor in San Francisco have the most to benefit from free wifi, more then anyone else.

With free wifi San Franiciscan’s will be able to set up businesses on Craigslist. They can set up blogs through free blogspot accounts and allow their voices to be heard. They can use services like Skype to save money on their phone bills. Yet despite all of these benefits, San Francisco still seems to feel that unless Google and EarthLink are willing to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop that they somehow don’t deserve the right to provide a truly competitive internet option to San Francisco residents.

After listening to the concerns of citizens living in my neighborhood, it is unfortunate that EarthLink and Google will likely need to engage in some horse trading before this deal is done. So much for the free wifi by the end of 2006 that Mayor Gavin Newsom suggested that we might have. Instead of getting free wifi for Christmas this year, it looks like all the Scrooge McDuck’s on the board of Supervisors would rather Tiny Tim and myself get a lump of coal, and a 56k Netzero lump of crappy coal at that.

I can’t help but feel that a very dangerous precident is being set by local politicians who would rather play hardball with Google and EarthLink then provide free WiFi access to their citizens. Considering that San Francisco itself stands to gain millions in tax savings by not having to pay for their own government bandwidth costs, it seems ridiculous to me to try and continue to bargain for more when a competitive process has already taken place and two very reputable companies have stepped up, willing to put their own capital at risk to provide these services to our citizens.

It’s sad to have to see Google and EarthLink run around doing town hall meetings to already get an agreed upon deal done, being forced to grant new concessions which only serve to make free wifi in San Francisco even that much farther away.

If I were Google or EarthLink I’d be tempted to say screw you to the city of San Francisco, pick up my ball and take it to another city where I wasn’t treated like crap.

Although it’s almost certain that I won’t have free wifi by the end of this year at least between now and then, on November 7th, I’ll have an opportunity to try and vote my nitwit San Francisco Supervisor and representative out of office.

DVDs Will Survive

Oct 18

Posted by Davis in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Kiosks, Movies, Netflix, VOD | Comments off

Over the last 12 months I feel like I’ve spent more time reading about video downloads then actually watching them. Video downloads have been around for years through Movielink, but they haven’t caught on largely because consumers have a limited selection, the prices are too high and it’s a bigger hassle getting them to the television, then it is renting a DVD or watching a movie on TV.

To a certain extent, I think that the studios have intentionally kneecapped the downloading business in a distorted attempt to prevent the spread of movie downloads, but the more new movie download services that I see, the more that I’m convinced that it has a long way to go before it replaces the DVD. This isn’t a popular opinion amoung the digital elite and there are certainly those who would disagree with me when I say that the DVD still has a lot of life ahead of it, but nonetheless it’s a reality that I’ve accepted after seeing so many of these movie downloading services turn out to be box office flops.

Despite my own cynacism though, the internet has certainly changed the distribution of movies and once consumers go down the on demand road there will be no turning back. To give Hollywood credit, they have begun experimenting with different business models and consumers have certainly shown demand for streaming TV shows from the confines of the PC, but when it comes to that 2 hour flick, consumers still want to watch it on their big screen TVs instead of the computer. As the industry changes, I believe that there will be a middle ground reached between movie downloading services and traditional DVD distribution. That middle ground will be filled by partners like Amazon, Walmart and Blockbuster Video. The difference between the experiments today though, is that this middle ground won’t be a direct movie download for consumers, but will rather be a DVD burn on demand service that will finally bring the longtail to retail businesses.

In a very well written piece, Chris Taylor with Business 2.0 explores this very issue and offers a compelling argument for why the DVD still has a long life ahead of it. In the article, Chris points to problems with video quality using wifi devices, the fact that DVD players have much higher penetration rates than even the computer and to a relatively quiet deal that Sonic and the nefarious Macrovision entered into last week, as proof of this upcoming shift in the DVD landscape.

While Chris summarizes the issues much better then I could, I would add a few points to his argument for why the DVD will survive. While studios have been pumping out old TV shows on DVD at a shameful pace, there is still a lot of content that they can’t justify bringing to print because the demand is simply not there. With burn on demand technology, studios can make use of their entire archived content without having to worry about production minimums, retail shelf space or any of the physical constraints that prevent b-movies from making it into mass circulation. While each title might not be individually popular, if there are a lot of people who want access to fringe movies, this will prove a lucrative revenue source for content that the studios wrote off as a waste long ago.

Earlier this week, I had lunch with MikeK from Hacking Netflix and we were talking about kiosk technology. One of the issues that Mike brought up was that he was skeptical that we would ever see burn on demand adopted on a wide scale because of the difficulties in clearing the rights for access to this technology. To a certain extent, he’s right. A compelling movie download service has been difficult for any company to put together in large part because the studios have dragged their feet, there are exclusive distribution arrangements and believe it or not negotiating for the music rights in movies, has been a nearly impossible task. While all of these are serious challenges to movie downloading, I would still be wililng to bet Mike a free lunch that we see burn on demand adopted at the retail level within a year for two reasons. First, the studios aren’t going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. The video store has been a jackpot for Hollywood execs and you can bet with Movie Gallery on the brink of bankruptcy and with Blockbuster having a less then stellar balance sheet, that they are now prepared to make sacrifices to help save those businesses. Secondily, and perhaps more importantly though, Hollywood has not negotiated away their rights to offer DVDs on demand at a retail level. Movie downloads are problematic, but whether they allow Walmart to burn DVDs at the store level or whether they do it at a factory, they are still allowed to distribute their entire library of films without having to negotiate new music rights or ways around the exclusivity agreements because the end product is still the sale or rental of a DVD.

At some point, movie downloading will replace the DVD. The convenience of having everything on demand is too compelling for consumers to ignore, but it will take years and many more challenges before we get to that point. In the meantime, Hollywood will embrace the next generation of High Definition DVDs and will introduce a retail burn on demand solution that will eventually give consumers access to 100,000 films from their local video store or entertainment kiosk. Only time will tell if I’m right or wrong, but in ten years, I believe we will look back and see that the DVD did a good job of surviving despite all of the skeptics who believe that the DVD has gone the way of the VCR.

A Penny For Your Thoughts

Oct 18

Posted by Davis in Photos | Comments off

Turn Your Penny Into A SouvenirTurn Your Penny Into A Souvenir Hosted on Zooomr

SeventyMM Is Not Dot Com Sequel

Oct 17

Posted by Davis in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Movies, Netflix | Comments off

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a number of Netflix clones pop up in the US and overseas. While there have been plenty of rumors that Netflix may end up expanding internationally, Netflix management hasn’t wanted to expand outside of the US.

Part of the reason why is that it takes a very efficient postal system in order to properly run a DVD by mail program, but also because the growth has been so significant in the US that Netflix hasn’t needed to turn to international markets for expansion. Where Netflix has been reluctant to provide service though, other companies have sprung up to fill this void. One of the more interesting companies has been SeventyMM, which in addition to having some pretty interesting promotions and some healthy growth expecations, they also apparently have a connection to Seattle as well. Apparently the company’s managing director is Raghav Kher who is a former Microsoft employee and an entrepreneur left over from the dot com days.

SeventyMM may be a young company, but I don’t think that this is going to be another dot com bust for Kher. Already they are the largest DVD by mail provider in India and there is little doubt in my mind that India still has a lot of potential for the DVD market to grow. While international sales of DVDs have taken a big hit from piracy, between India’s blistering stock market, their keen interest in Bollywood films and the current demographic shift into the middle class, SeventyMM may end up being an interesting company to keep an eye on.

Watch Out For Ad-Hoc Networks

Oct 17

Posted by Davis in Uncategorized | Comments off

The first thing they taught me when I started taking business courses in college was that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Some may disagree with this statement, but even “free” things carries costs even if they are sometimes a bit abstract.

I guess I shouldn’t have been all that suprised to find out today that the two months I used “free WiFi” in my apartment may not have turned out to be free after all. At the time, I was fighting with Comcast and figured I could leech off of free hot spots to tide me over. For the most part, I didn’t think too much about the security issues associated with doing this, but after reading Q Daily News’ article on scammers using Ad-Hoc networks to get private information, I’m now quite nervous that I may have put sensitive data at risk.

After booting up his laptop and looking for a nearby WiFi network, Jason saw a number of “ad-hoc” networks that were pretending to be Tmobile or Starbuck hot spots. In the comments a reader reports that this could be an issue with people having their laptop set up improperly, so it might not necessarily be scammers coming after you, but if you see these ad-hoc networks, it’s probably not a good idea to be doing Google searches for your social security numbers on them.

Apple Takes Cheap Shot Against Microsoft

Oct 17

Posted by Davis in Microsoft | 13 Comments

On Digg today, there is a link to Apple’s own web page where they admit to shipping “a small percentage” of their video iPods with the RavMonE.exe virus included on the device. Talk about PR nightmare. It’s bad enough that Apple has to run those super annoying ads where they try and get people to believe that viruses don’t exist if you have a Mac, but now they blow it big time by taking a page out of Sony’s book and actually infecting their customer’s computers with a known virus.

Normally, I would have been able to look at the announcement shake my head and walk away, but suprisingly, instead of issuing a humble mea culpa, Apple actually had the gall to try and shift the blame to Microsoft on the issue.

“As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.”

I would certainly hope that they are upset with themselves over not catching it, but what I don’t understand is why they felt like they had to resort to name calling when Microsoft has absolutely nothing to do with this. Had Steve Jobs been better at competing in the 1980′s and 90′s, Apple would have been the dominant player in this space and they would have been targeted by the hacker community. Instead Apple developed a small cult following and the hackers went after Windows.

Considering the amount of money that Microsoft spends each year fighting these viruses, I think it’s hard to blame them for it. Hackers are smart and creative and for them to get Apple to ship a product from their own factory with a virus included, shows how resourceful they really are. Microsoft did not write the virus, distribute the virus or ignore the virus when it was pointed out to them, so I fail to see why Apple would be upset with Microsoft over their shipping hardware that was infected by a virus.

The Apple fanboys can line up and talk about how great the iPod is or how much Microsoft sucks, but it’s this exact arrogance that makes me never want to use Apple products no matter how good they are at marketing them. Looking at just a few comments on Digg, I’m glad that even the hardcore Appleheaded fanboys aren’t completely buying into this, but Apple should have stepped up said I’m sorry, that it was limited to a couple of video iPods and everyone would have been fine with it, but by putting Microsoft into their sights, it only guarantees that this story goes viral and that we see a backlash of criticism over the issue.

If I Ever Meet You I’ll CTRL ALT Delete You

Oct 15

Posted by Davis in Music, VOD | Comments off

Could there be anything more viral then Weird Al Yankovich? The scary part is that my biology teacher in high school was his college roomate and he was a total nerd then. Now thanks to Digg and the internet he’s a rockstar. My favorite line has to be “I’m down with Bill Gates, I call him “Money” for short I phone him up at home and I make him do my tech support.”