LIVEdigitally

Long long ago (last year), in an office far, far away (San Mateo), Blake Krikorian (Sling Media CEO) had a vision wherein Slingbox owners could easily share clips from favorite TV shows with each other. We knew it was a good idea, but didn’t want to push to far forward due to industry relations, copyright issues, bandwidth issues, etc. Looks like they’ve come a long way in the few months since I left, and a lot of these issues got worked out, which is very exciting. They announced two major new things at CES 2007: SlingCatcher and Clip+Sling.

SlingCatcher coverage is fairly pervasive, and I’ll hold off on adding any commentary of my own until we get closer to product launch. Watch this video or read about it at Zatz Not Funny, Engadget, Crave UK, MobilitySite, or ShinyShiny.

For Clip+Sling I was able to attend Les Moonves’ keynote during CES, and recorded a video of the whole demonstration:

It was great to watch Blake up there, especially as Chad Hurley had been on stage as well. YouTube is definitely great for user-generated content, like the videos we all make with our cameras these days. It’s a real pain for most users, however, when it comes to TV content. Most consumers have no idea how to record video to their PC, or even worse how to edit down to the clips they want. I think Clip+Sling with a centrally hosted server launched in conjunction with CBS and other networks could be extremely disruptive in the online video space. I’m looking forward to the launch later this year.

More Clip+Sling coverage: Engadget, Laptop magazine, PVRWire, SlingCommunity, and Zatz Not Funny.

Disclosure: I am a former Sling Media employee and have some stock. In fact, I just found a couple of videos of me doing Slingbox demos with the nice people at BuyTV (and the Slingbox Pro too)

Also, I video’d the CBS “media” presentation during the keynote.

Opening disclosure: I am working on a consulting project with Netgear, but that work is unrelated to my blogging about them.  I was invited to their press conference and chose to attend and got to see three new products that I was previously unaware of.  This blog post is because I am genuinely amazed with a product of theirs.

Now, onto the story.  Netgear had a press conference this morning and unveiled three new products which I will list and describe in ascending order of excitement and interestingness.  Before the demos, Debbie Williams (Netgear’s Chief Marketing Officer) gave a brief “state of the union” for the company.  Basically: 10 years old, market cap of $883M, products sold in >16K retailers, and they introduced 50 new products in 2006 (methinks about 42 of them were routers, but I guess it counts anyway, right?).  She then went on to discuss how 2006 was the year of building the home network for the digital lifestyle (love that term, but I think I may have heard it before), and 2007 is the year of delivering the experience. She then introduced Vivek Pathela, Netgear’s VP of Product Marketing to do the demos (again, listed here in my order, not theirs):

1. Storage Central Turbo.  This updates 2005’s Storage Central device by adding the capacity to expand to multiple terabytes of data as well as gigabit Ethernet.  If you aren’t paying attention to the bits and bytes, it means it can store and stream HD movies around your house.  This is a fairly evolutionary/logical enhancement to the product line.  The MSRP is $249 (with no included hard drives, which makes sense since it’s so much cheaper for you to buy your own anyway) and the product should ship “early” this year.  More pics:
   
2. Dual-Mode Cordless Phone with Skype. Now we’re seeing some interesting convergence happen.  Quite a few companies introduced Skype or VoIP phones in 2006, some worked well, some didn’t.  Netgear seems to have added a clever twist by incorporating a standard telephone in the same handset (aka Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS).  This is a very smart combination, as it lets a consumer have just a single home phone that can work with both Skype and POTS systems.  Also, you can get multiple handsets all working with the same base station (although an audience member asked a great question: can more than one handset make a simultaneous POTS call? which stumped the Netgear team – I sure hope it’s a yes).  The demo went great as Vivek called Patrick Lo, Netgear’s CEO, and had a quick live call with near-excellent audio quality.  MSRP $199, available now (on Amazon)!
   
3. EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD.  Oh my is this one interesting.  It’s a, well, “box” that hooks up to your TV and your home network connection.  It then streams your music, photos, and videos from any PC or networked storage device (NAS) to your TV.  It also streams from YouTube (they demoed a classic Diet Coke/Mentos video, which about 90% of the audience reacted as if they’d never seen it before - wow).  It also works in high definition (up to 1080p resolution), including full upscaling/downscaling of video.  It supports almost every video codec, including MPEG-4 HD, WMV HD, DivX, MPEG-2, H.264, etc etc.  It also streams iTunes (including protected content if from a Windows PC, sorry Mac folks).  It also has USB to locally connect a flash drive or an iPod.  It also supports multiple units so you can start a video in one room, then finish it in another.  It also has full PVR (TiVo-like) capabilities.  And from the demo, it looks like it works very well!  As a guy who has spent about 8 years designing award-winning devices just like these, I am quite impressed.  Quite!  MSRP $349, available early 2007.
   

I’ve seen a bit of other coverage already of the conference.  MacUser compares it against iTV and calls the UI “uninspired” which is a fair point, but I think making comparisons against a product that’s not really been “announced” yet isn’t quite appropriate.  Also, I disagree that Apple will beat the $349 price point, as I think they’d rather rip into their loyal customer base who are more willing to overpay for the Apple brand.  More coverage from Ed Kohler, Eric Savitz at Barron’s, Gadgetell, and SciFi.com, but for very extensive details, here’s the Engadget transcript.  I also bumped into Dave Zatz (with Sakshi Goel of Netgear), Netgear’s resident CES blogger.

So there’s my front-runner for most interesting new product of CES: the Netgear Digital Entertainer HD.  We’ll see how the rest of the show pans out!  More Netgear conference pics below and the whole CES collection is here.

When it comes to mobile technology, it seems that major carriers and phone manufacturers around the world have a common mantra: “they do it in Japan and Korea, therefore …”  The statement applies when trying to convince other industry players that a given service/feature will have huge adoption rates in the US or other countries.  The phrases sound like this: “The Japanese play 3 hours of video games a day on their handsets, and spend $1023 per month for social networking services and content, so we need to bring this to the US as soon as possible!”  For the most part, it’s a lot of malarky (is that really a word?). Why?  Well, if let’s say you have one country/culture in which 2-4 hours per day of train-based travel is the norm. And you have another one in which the average commute is done by car and is under an hour.  Sounds like you don’t have much of a match, doesn’t it?  So a few years back when the discussions of mobile TV first started blossoming in the US, I was personally a bit of a skeptic.  And then I helped design and build SlingPlayer Mobile, and I saw the light.

I’ve used SPM (as we were known to call it) to kill time on the tarmac.  I’ve programmed my DVR from the long lines at Starbucks.  I even watched some of the NHL Playoffs last year on my commutes home (yes, my wife drove, I’m not that bad).  Funny thing is, I was once quoted as saying “Nobody’s going to watch the entire Super Bowl on a cell phone.“  And while I stand by that statement, for this year’s game I did have my PPC6700 showing the game live in the bathroom so nobody would have to miss a minute’s action (go Stillers!).

As was announced today, Europeans (starting in the UK, spreading outwards in 2006) can soon have the same joy.  Instead of Heroes they’ll be watching Eastenders.  Instead of the Superbowl, they’ll do the World Cup (in a few years).  Instead of The Office, they’ll do.. oh. well… The Office.  Hmm.

In an interesting twist, Sling Media launched SlingPlayer Mobile in Europe with a mobile operator, 3.  Now 3 is going for some kind of quintuple or octuple-play by bundling a few other options and services with their new X-Series offering (live Webcast tomorrow), and you can read more details about it over at the SlingCommunity site (or Unwired or Gadgetell) .  Seems like an interesting play, but I’ve gotten spoiled I guess, since I’m a Windows Mobile user, and the extra services are all available to me on the 6700 I use. 

The other interesting element here is this is the first time the Slingbox is viewable from a non-Windows Mobile device.  The handsets for the launch are the Nokia N73 and the Sony Ericsson W950i.  I think it’ll be interesting to see the performance comparisons as more and more users adopt the service.

Good thing the Internet rumor mill didn’t go too far after Blake mentioned something about a mobile carrier at last week’s Web 2.0 show.  Check out speculation at Unwired, MocoNews, and Engadget.  It doesn’t take too many hops in the blogosphere to go from “idle comment” to “solid fact” these days.  Either way, congrats to Sling and 3 for putting together a great relationship that brings smart value-added services to their customer bases.

Well, time for me to get back to playing 3D interactive multiplayer video games on my mobile phone with built-in GPS, DVR, MP3, and waffle-making capabilities.  I’ve got a long way to go to get to Akihabara.

I like Flickr for storing and sharing my online photos (I like Zooomr too, but Flickr is my current home).  Works great, easy to upload, easy to use, easy to share.  I’ve made my sets, tagged some pictures, and organized the majority of my pictures there.  I’ve even taken the time, for reasons yet to be clear even to myself, to “geotag” many of my photos.  Geotagging is cool, but until it’s built-into more cameras, it’s mostly a waste of time.  Why do I say that?  Because, in my opinion, to gain true mass adoption of advanced organizational tools, they need automation.  Enter Polar Rose.

Polar Rose has something in common with my old couch and some shelves in my kitchen – it’s from Sweden.  The company has technology that allows for automatic facial recognition in digital photos.  A more techie version of this can be found here:

Collective intelligence is a key part of the Polar Rose technology. It will be used to improve search for photos and search algorithms, according to the company’s founder and CEO and Chief Technology Officer, Jan Erik Solem.

This all translates to something like this:  the more people who positively identify faces in pictures, the better the whole system works.  This creates a nice rosy image (ugh, what an awful awful pun) of the future for better organization of pictures.  Don’t get it yet?

Imagine you and your friends take a bunch of pictures on your road trip.  Now your well-organized, almost-OCD-like friend takes the time to tag all the pictures.  Then you upload yours, and every picture you are in is automatically labeled with your names.  You never have to touch them.  Ever again.

They received $5 million Kroner US in funding, and if they can even pull off a rudimentary version of what they are promising, I can only envision a… yes… it’s coming… again… wait for it… rosy future!  More on the funding news today at Red Herring, StartupSquad, and Digital Media Wire.

I wanted to get some kind of pun pertaining to the polar part, but it’s not as easy to roll in as rosy was.  One could call it, in fact, the polar opposite.

As is becoming more and more of the case these days, a new site or service launches, and it’s all anyone is talking about.  And here I am, following in the footsteps.  Sigh.

Over the last couple of years I’ve met senior executives from virtually every major electronics (and mainstream) retailer, and have learned a tremendous amount about consumers and how they shop (both online and offline).  For example, did you know that in traditional, married households the so-called “head of household” (read: man) makes less than 5% of all major purchasing decisions alone, whereas almost 90% of the decisions are made solo by the wife?  And I’m not being sexist here, I know there are tons of people and lifestyles that don’t fit this pattern.  But in the majority of US households, most spending in the home is done by the woman, without consulting the husband. 

Want another neat data point?  Men buy things based on features, descriptions, etc.  Women buy things visually.  You know how most online retailers work today?  Lots of descriptions, text, features and benefits, complemented with a few pictures. So what does this all add up to?  Most online shopping sites today are missing out on the majority of buyers.  What’s missing? The visuals.  Welcome to like.com.

Like.com (from Riya) is a visual shopping system.  There are a few hands-on reviews and commentary you can read (pick your favorite: ZDNet, GigaOm, TechCrunch, BusinessWeek, Robert Scoble, Thomas Hawk).  I’m going to skip the usual rigamarole of anaylizing how good their algorithms work, go check out one of the others’ for that.  Whether it’s perfect or not today, I generally have enough faith in engineers and entrepreneurs that they’ll continue to improve it to the point where it works as promised.  And if they don’t, well, someone else will come along instead.  Instead, I’m a bit more interested in the launch itself.

Right now, they have focused on fashion (a move Don Dodge likes).  If you go back and read above and recall that the biggest category of shoppers in the US is women, I think this is a phenomenal move.  I’ve seen other newfangled attempts to launch online stores, with wikis and whatis and kiwis and whatnot, but at the end of the day, in my opinion there is no opportunity for doing this in the tech market.  If you want to buy a digital camera or a Slingbox or a plasma, buy.com + amazon.com + cnet is sufficient for 90% of the market. 

But if a woman wants to buy shoes or purses online, the current offerings are in every way unsatisfactory.  Yeah, there’s some pictures and all, but it’s not enough.  It approaches the sale from a male perspective.  Like.com is the right approach to this huge, untapped market.  So now the question is, can they market the service correctly?

Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington give them praise for their methods of swamping the blogosphere (more details from the CEO himself).  I agree with them, they did hit the bloggers and hit them perfectly.  But my question is – did they hit the right blogosphere?  They sure got the Web 2.0 and technology bloggers abuzz.  And I’ll bet they got a ton of guys to hit the site today.  But I have a hunch their sales numbers are going to be dismal compared to their traffic.

Like.com needs to do some very aggressive viral and traditional marketing, and they need to do it to the right audience.  The traffic from today’s spike may well diminish to nothing very very quickly, unless all us technophiles are out there telling their wives and girlfriends about the site.  I’m sure they’ll own the term “visual shopping” in Google for a while, but who cares?  It’s not as if there are flocks of women googling that term right now (otherwise you’d already see different results from that term than you do today).

So congratulations on the launch, team Like.  You have built a potentially huge success.  Executing on it is a big challenge, and hopefully you’ll set your sights on the right market, because the one you are after did not hear about your site launch today.

UPDATE: Robert Scoble pointed out that in his interview with Munjal Shah, Like.com/Riya’s CEO, Munjah mentions an extensive press tour with fashion and consumer magazines.  Scoble also did a video demo of Like.com which you can check out as well.  But unlike Maryam, my wife does buy stuff online (and sells stuff too), however she didn’t have a great Like.com experience today – but I’m sure I can get her back to try again… 

I’ll start by being a little upfront about something here – I’m not a “Mac guy.”  While I don’t really identify as the “PC guy” from the commercials either (although the spoofs are great), I don’t own a Mac, and probably won’t get one any time soon.  I have no problem with the Mac folks out there, and appreciate all the ingenuity Apple brings to their products.  But I’m not a Mac guy (or an iPod guy either for that matter, but for a totally unrelated reason).

Funny enough, back when I worked at Sling Media, I was a huge proponent of enabling SlingPlayer Mac support for the Slingbox.  I believe the Mac community, as a whole, appreciates the convergence of computing and media, and tend towards early adoption of most new media technology.  I think the iTV product is more likely to succeed in the “get your home media collection from your computer to your TV” vision that so many others have failed in delivering in the past.  With any luck, Apple will help open the “digital home” marketplace for many others to come participate in, as none have shown success to date.

Back to the matter at hand: Sling Media made SlingPlayer for OSX available in beta today (here’s the download).  There’s already a flood of conversation on the SlingCommunity, and even a great note from Blake himself talking about the issue.  I’m thrilled to see the build come out within the adjusted schedule (here’s about 900 or so posts on the topic if you want some backstory on the issue), and I know the team back at Sling HQ must be pretty happy with the launch – way to go y’all.

As I’m not a Mac guy myself, I don’t have a review to offer up, but it’s already being mentioned on TUAW, RealTechNews, and my friend Dave Zatz managed to get a post up just before sneaking off to bed (poor East coaster).  To get an unbiased account of the software, check out the very in-depth review one of the beta testers wrote here. 

Happy downloading!

For those of you who live in caves, up on trees, or under rocks, Google launched a Custom Search feature this past week (lots more coverage here). The basic concept is this: anyone can go to Google co-op, login, and create a new custom search with their own favorite sites and some predefined search categories (called refinements).  So here’s the LD Gadget Search:

Try searching for some kind of, well, gadget.  Go ahead, it won’t hurt.

Ok, if you don’t want to do so, I’ve gone ahead and done some searches to try it out.

For my first test, I tried PPC as my search term.  In gadgetland, we know PPC means PocketPC (search results here), but check out if you search for PPC in all of Google.  Pilgrims Pride??

Second try, searching for the Slingbox.  LD Gadget vs Google general.  Well, in this case the search sites are basically news/reviews/blogs/pricing sites, and don’t include any manufacturers, so my custom search did not outperform the generic one.

Third test, searching for iPod prices.  I used the ‘Prices’ refinement (which I built with a few comparison and shopping sites) to get these results, versus searching for ipod prices on Google.  I think my customization here gave significantly worse results, and will need to go see if its something I should do different (bad grammar out of courtesy to the Apple marketing department).

Fourth up, looking for Zune news.  I figured I’d try a hot term, and built a ‘news’ refinement (results here) to compare against Google.  Now these results are quite interesting, as the generic search surfaced the dozens of new Zune news sites which have popped up.  Personally, I prefered the custom results, as I am more interested in Engadget’s update than I am in adding ZuneNation to my news sources (no offense or anything to that site, I just don’t feel like adding more sites to my already overlong bookmarks and links lists).

I’ll keep working on the LD Gadget Search to see if I can make it a really useful resource over time.  In the meantime, please feel free to add any suggestions to the implementation.  Also, in the very nature of the “co-op” it’s easy to have additional folks come in and edit the sites and settings, so come on in, the water’s fine!

While at a media event last night, I got my first in-person dose of the PlayStation 3.  Without any question, the games looked amazing.  Uh-MAY-zing!  Here are a couple of pictures I took (by the way, if anyone knows what setting I need to put on my camera so the ‘fast-action’ is good enough to get video games, please let me know, because “NBA Ghost Basketball 2007″ doesn’t quite look right to me):

It was also my first time to actually see the PS3 unit in person.  I’ve got to say, I’m not as big a fan here.  It seems like there are a few different design teams at Sony, and whichever one is pushing out these new vertical “split-shell” (I made that up) styles, well, it doesn’t do it for me. 

First and foremost, any device that is going to get touched a lot should NOT have a high glossy finish, because it turns into a big CSI fingerprint lab (the Samsung Q1 has the same problem). 

Secondly, I found the unit itself much bigger than I was hoping and expecting.  I haven’t seen it with an Xbox 360 side-by-side, but it looks bigger and more intrusive.  Not exactly what I’d really like to plop down next to my Pioneer Elite plasma (you know, the one I don’t have, but if I did, well, you get the point).

Keep in mind, those comments are more about the design of the unit than anything else.  Gameplay looked phenomenal.  Fast fast motion.  Beautiful HD picture.  Awesomeness on that front.  I wonder how Kaboom would look on it?

I did a little reading up on the PS3 this morning, and I was stunned to read about the market predictions for the system:

According to the study by Los Angeles based Interpret, 8.9 million U.S consumers ‘are prepared’ to pay full price ($500 or $600) for the PlayStation 3 this fall, compared to 5.7 million consumers who are willing to buy Wii at $250 and just 800,000 people who are willing to pay full price for Xbox 360 ($300 to $400).

Wow.  I can’t tell if this is just a “polling error” or if that really indicates the potential success here.  Without delving too far, I make well above the average income in this country, and have HDTV at home, and would never ever ever spend $500 or $600 to buy a video game console.  And I like video games!

Unfortunately, I think Robert Scoble is right when he posts:

Let me tell you how it works in the US of A. You walk into Best Buy. Ask for a credit application. Fill it out. They approve you for $10,000 on the spot (as long as you’ve paid all your credit card bills on time). You head over to the big screen department, pick out your $4,000 big screen and your $600 Playstation 3, and a $500 HD-DVD drive. Then you pay something like $140 per month in payments.

At first I thought he was being ironic, or satirical.  But I don’t think he is (although Robert, if you are, nicely done).  The sad truth in “the US of A” is poor and average income households are going to get themselves further into debt this fall, just to get their kids a prettier looking video game. 

So, first glimpse of the PS3:  beautiful picture (Sony guts!), but I sure hope there’s a rebate offer or a set of free steak knives when you buy it!

I’ll share my own thoughts on this amazing new phone from HTC/T-Mobile in a few days, but reviews started trickling in from Engadget and Gizmodo today, and at least one of them is a must-read.  I’ve felt BlackBerry was living on borrowed time when the legal snafu happened last year, and while the Pearl is hands-down a solid device, I see the juggernaut that is Microsoft (via Windows Mobile) coming down the mountain.

The HTC Dash (aka the Excalibur) is basically a smaller, nicer, and in almost every way better version of the Motorola Q phone.  The Q has the edge by using EVDO instead of edge services for Internet connectivity, but the Dash wins in every other category.  It’s coming soon, it’s under $200, and you’re gonna love it. And if they have a UMTS or EVDO version next year, I’m gonna adopt one myself.

By the way, it’s a lot better looking in person, it might be the best-looking, least-photogenic phone I’ve ever seen. 

To avoid those moments of sheer panic that occur whenever you discover you’ve left something important behind, consider attaching one of theseto your bag/PDA/dog/toddler and put this in your pocket. The Mini Reminder transmitter will alert the receiver to start making a vibrating, beeping racket if you move more than your specified distance away from it. I need this thing. How many times have I raced back to a restaurant to admit sheepishly that I’ve forgotten my bag on the back of that chair? Yes…the one you’re sitting on…thanks.

via SCI FI Tech

For those moments when your computer is lagging so badly you’d like to take a hammer to it, or when the realization that it just ate your term paper creates a deadly longing to chuck the whole damnable thing out the window, there’s a way to end it all. Presenting the Self Destruct Button USB! Three easy steps to total annihilation and…four extra USB ports. OK, so it won’t really kill your PC, but it looks like it will! Maybe someday you’ll really mean it, but for now function gets along with form in this sweet trigger-happy sort of way. The big red button will be available for desperation pressing starting the end of this month.
via SCI FI Tech

This is going to be a special edition of the “thunk it” as my mail box has been flooded, completely bamboozled with inquiries as to when I am going to review a product that caters specifically to the cel phone crowd. There’s been everything available to the cel phone lover; computer-phones, video-screen phones, that wacky blue-tooth technology which I still don’t have a clue as to what is, but nothing…NOTHING is nearly as advanced as this next fascinating product. How do you show off to all your cel friends? Is it by boasting about the most advanced technology? No…it is by showing them the latest in retro phone…stuff. Ladies and gents, I introduce to you….

the cel phone handset

Isn’t this amazing? I mean who needs the convenience of a small portable phone when you can have the nostalgia of the old days?

Now this isn’t to be confused with this other handset concoction

The “Please Hold” Handset is available for use for most phones, even the blackberry and is available at amazon.com for a mere 22.95$. I know I can’t even use another cel phone again unless it has the old fashioned headset. If I had to describe this product in one word, that word would be….beautiful.

Coming to you with another wacky and useless product, this is Merv