Sun Microsystems Project Blackbox made a tour stop at the University of St. Thomas‘ Minneapolis campus earlier this week, and Technology Evangelist was there to cover it.
Project Blackbox is a portable data center built in a standard sized shipping container. It is a completely self contained system that is designed to give businesses flexibility and portability to their infrastructure. Initial uses mentioned include military (portability) and education (speed and flexibility tied to grants).
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Least
Dangerous Game kicks off tomorrow in Minneapolis.
What’s that?
Sounds dangerous, eh?
Least Dangerous Game is a Twitter-based
scavenger hunt where a Twitter users hides somewhere in town, then send out
hints via Twitter leading people to his or her location. Joining the game is as
simple as adding LDG as a friend at
www.twitter.com/ldg
Here is what participants have to look forward to:
“From noon to 6pm this Saturday, March 31st, I will be hiding out somewhere in
the Twin Cities. I will send updates to
http://www.twitter.com/ldg with more
clues to where I am, as the day passes.
The prize this week? Let’s see, I have $15 in my wallet. Looks like a $15
Target gift certificate, with a catch. You can not spend it on any Justin
Timberlake merchandise. It’s not that he doesn’t make catchy music. It’s that
I think he has enough money, don‚Äôt you?”
Least Dangerous Game is the product of Aric McKeown, a Minneapolis web geek
who also runs another techie community site,
MakeMeWatchTV,
where Aric asks the community to vote on what TV shows he should watch, then tapes himself
watching the community’s recommended shows.
McKeown came up for the idea for Least Dangerous Game last weekend while
Twittering his way around town while searching for beads. He explained, “I seem
to have most of my ideas in cars. Maybe I should become a semi driver.”
Things quickly went from concept to production:
registered it last weekend, built it on Monday, and still had time to read a
book outside in the 80 degree weather. It was the best Monday
possible.”
As of this writing, twenty nine Twitter users have signed up for the kick-off
round of the game tomorrow. For those participating, here are a few quick tips
from Aric on what it will take to be a LDG champion:
Cities history, be able to solve my stupid riddles, and have a wireless phone
for Twitter updates. Access to Google Maps would probably help as well, but
shouldn’t be necessary. Also, they should like to smile. It’s a game,
after all.”
If you’re not in the Minneapolis area, you can still hop on the
LDG Twitter
group to follow along from anywhere in the world.
What trip to the Video on the Net conference would be complete without a discussion with the Founder of VON, Jeff Pulver. Jeff talked to Ed about the some of the big announcements made at VON.
Jeremy Toeman from LIVEdigitally is living the jury duty lifestyle, and has filed the following report on the WiFi status in the jury waiting room:
- The good part is, the summons waiting room has WiFi.
- The bad parts are, it’s not free, it’s slow, and it drops connections every 10-ish minutes.
I wonder if Jeremy will come out ahead on his jury duty stipend after WiFi costs?
Yahoo’s getting crushed by Google in search right now, but maybe they’re on to
something with the interface they’re testing over at
livesearch.alltheweb.com.
The site offers real-time updates to search results as you type, so searches
become more relevant as you add words to your query. Remove a word if things
become too narrow - all without refreshing the page. Providing immediate feedback to queries as they’re created
has the ability to improve the quality of the search experience since it lowers
the bar on query refinement.
Here is an example search for Minneapolis Pizza. After finishing the word
Minneapolis, I saw one set of results. As I added Pizza, the results changed to
what you see below:
Compare that to running a search on Google, then thinking to yourself, “what if
I added one more word to refine my search?” Will you? It takes time to click
into the search box and add another word, clicking search, then waiting for the
results to display.
Alltheweb also dynamically serves up suggested search refinements, such as
“delivery,” “restaurants,” or “hut.”
The site seems to waste some resources by running queries on overly broad
searches for the first word typed. For example, my search for [Minneapolis
pizza] first ran a query for the word [Minneapolis] which wasn’t really
necessary. Hopefully, this doesn’t effect the click through rates of ads
displayed on broader terms I didn’t intent to search for.
Assuming this gets some traction, I could see Yahoo bumping this up to their
primary search site.
Joshua Kinberg, the founder and CEO of FireAnt, was at the Video on the Net conference showing off their latest upgrade. He talked to Ed about that and the differences between FireAnt and their competitors.
Outside.in,
as I’ve
written
about before, is a local news aggregation site where content from local news
sites and blogs are organized by city, neighborhood, and / or zip code to build
a create a unique collection of news from a wide variety of sources.
Local bloggers submit their sites to outside.in. The site then indexes the local
blogger’s sites on a regular basis and displays headlines with snippets on
outside.in, driving traffic back to the primary source for the full story.
One of the challenges with this model is a lot of local writes don’t
consistently write about local content. It’s, in fact, very common for people to
write about a new restaurant they checked out, a concert, or something related
to local politics, with a mix of Dilbert cartoons and other non-geographically
significant content.
I found this out first hand when I submitted my personal blog to Outside.in. It
was accepted at first, but they eventually grew tired of my random observations.
This poses a challenge because when I do write about local events, I’m creating
exactly the type of content outside.in is looking for, but the rest of the time,
it’s junk from their stand point.
There are three solutions to this challenge:
1. Submit individual stories to Outside.in. Once you’ve posted a
geographically significant story, go to outside.in, click on the Submit Story
link on the right column, and paste in the URL of your story. You’ll then be
asked to provide a location for the story, such as the city/state, zip, or
address relevant to the story along with some tags to help sort it. That’s it.
By the way, the stories don’t have to be about where you live, but about some
location, so stories about vacations could be tagged with appropriate locations
as well. The biggest problem with this approach is remembering to do it.
2. Use FeedBurner’s Outside.in FeedFlare.
After burning your blog’s RSS feed with
FeedBurner, tack on
the Outside.in FeedFlare. This will add a “Geocode this Post” link to the footer
of each post in your feed (or on your blog). Once a post goes live, you or your
readers can click that link to geotag appropriate posts. Clicking the link
passes the post’s URL to outside.in, basically taking you directly to step 2 of
the geotagging process. This cuts a little time out of solution #1, and gives
you a reminder to geotag posts.
Flare > and check the box for the outside.in flare.
3. Categorize posts and submit categories to
outside.in. Rather than manually geotagging each post, how about
automatically submitting appropriate posts to Outside.in based on the categories
you assign to them? This guarantees that appropriate posts from your blog will
be indexed by outside.in in a timely manner as long as you include them in
appropriate categories. To do this, create a category of your blog for your
city, neighborhood, or zip code. Next, create a feed for that category.
Wordpress example:
http://www.yourblog.com/
and you have created a category about Minneapolis, the category URL probably
looks like this by default:
http://www.yourblog.com/category/minneapolis/
The feed for this category can be found by simply adding “feed” to the url,
like this:
http://www.yourblog.com/category/minneapolis/feed/
Take the feed URL, and submit that to Outside.in as a web site. Outside.in will
choke on it a bit, but it will take it. Once submitted, whenever you categorize
a post with that category (in this case, Minneapolis) it will automatically
syndicate onto Outside.in.
You can do this for more than one location by submitting more than one category
of your site as “sites” to Outside.in.
NOTE: The FD FeedBurner Plugin for
Wordpress may redirect category feeds to the blog’s primary feed, forcing you to
choose how you’d like to handle this. I worked around this by turning off the FD
plug-in and updated the RSS feed URLs in header.php to solve this.
Movable Type: I haven’t tested this on
Movable Type, but
here
is a link to instructions on how to create category-based feeds. Once
created, follow the steps listed above.
One of the latest trends in user generated video content to hit the scenes at
last week’s Video on the Net Conference was user generated testimonials. The
idea being that video is hard to beat when it comes to generating authentic
reviews.
Two companies going after this market from different angles are
RealityAdz and
Qoof.
Steve Harmon from RealityAdz made a presentation where he explained that
consumers are sick of hearing typical corporate spin churned out by PR firms and
would love to hear the stories of real customers who have experience with the
products or services they’re shopping for. As an example, he showed ad from
Hughes Network
Systems for their satellite Internet service where actors giving glowing
testimonials about how fast and reliable the service is compared to the dial-up
connections people in rural communities continue to rely on in many areas of the
country. That was followed by this RealityAdz review of the service by a Hughes
customer who taped the response time of Hughes’ service while complaining about
the speeds.
The point being that the actual consumer testimonial is more more credible,
although it’s a few million impressions behind the Hughes produced and
distributed spots at this point.
RealityAdz appears to be trying to become the clearinghouse for videotaped
consumer complaints.
Qoof appears to be going after the exact opposite end of the consumer reviews
spectrum by collecting reviews of products consumers love. Users tape themselves
praising products they love and upload them to Qoof. Once loaded, the videos are
tagged with an Amazon affiliate link, so people clicking through from the video
to Amazon.com and purchasing the product (or, for that matter, purchasing
anything on Amazon after clicking through) will generate revenue for the Qoof
user to the tune of ~5% depending on product category and sales volumes.
The Qoof booth was taping product demos during the VON conference. Here’s one
they did with me for the Canon SD800 camera.
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Qoof’d reviews can be shared via email or embedded into other sites. Look for an
upcoming interview with Qoof on Technology Evangelist over the next few days.
People have used YouTube for this purpose in the past, including to complain
about the JetBlue runway fiasco in February 2007. Is this a market that needs
stand-alone sites like RealityAdz or Qoof, or will this become a sub-section of
YouTube?
What do you think? Do video testimonials bring more credibility than written
reviews? Have you ever sought out video reviews or created one?
VoIP service company Vonage last week suffered another setback in its patent
litigation with Verizon Communications when a judge entered a permanent
injunction against Vonage using disputed call-handling technology. Vonage
said it had a work-around for the Verizon technology but still faces a $58
million fine and possible other damages.
In my opinion as an observer of high technology companies for 30 years, Vonage
is toast.
If they had a work-around that was easy to implement and had adequate
performance, why did the company wait until now to announce it?
Vonage is scrambling, facing a potential liquidity crisis with convertible
shareholders and may well be forced into bankruptcy. OR it may be forced
into the arms of its opponent, Verizon, which might well covet Vonage’s 2.2
million customers, one of whom is me.
We’ve been here before, the last time being when Verizon took on DSL provider
NorthPoint Communications back in 2000 and 2001. NorthPoint is long gone,
you’ll note. And yes, I was a NorthPoint customer, too.
The biggest issue in the story is this: The days are probably numbered for
almost all VoIP providers that overlay their services atop broadband ISPs.
Net neutrality be damned, the local MSOs are preparing to give priority to their
packets over others in the event of “network congestion.”
On the cable TV side, for example, both Comcast and Time-Warner Cable (probably
other MSO’s as well), are already changing their IP packets to priority bit ‘1′
(default is ‘0′) in their networks (from the Cable Modem Termination System back
to the edge of their network). They aren’t setting their routers to treat
the priority bit ‘1′ to do anything YET, but, when or if they want to give their
own packets preference in cases of congestion on their own networks, it’ll be a
flip of a switch…..
Now let’s look at this in the context of Net Neutrality. For the cable
companies, at least, it probably doesn’t matter. That’s because while
cable Internet service and cable VoIP service both use the CMTS, it is easy for
the cable company to configure its VoIP product as completely separate from its
Internet product. IF YOUR CABLE OPERATOR WILL SELL YOU VOIP SERVICE
WITHOUT INTERNET SERVICE, THEN NET NEUTRALITY DOES NOT APPLY. If excess
Internet traffic causes problems for the VoIP services of these cable companies,
they can prioritize their own VoIP packets with impunity because VoIP isn’t
defined as an Internet service. And for that very reason, packet
prioritization can — and will — occur even if the broadband ISP has signed an
agreement promising net neutrality.
The next level of this ploy is to validate the un-Internetiness of the VoIP
system through public service interconnects like 911. “Should calling the
police get priority treatment?” will be the question and most courts won’t say
“no.”
Even if network congestion requires priority packet handling a small percentage
of the time, it will be enough to nuke Vonage and its direct competitors, though
the potential impact on Skype is less clear.
The only question I am left with is where to transfer my Vonage numbers?
The great challenge of video on the web is how to make it fair for
everyone. Viewers want content that is cheap or free yet retains high
production values. Producers, networks, and movie studios want to be
rewarded by ALL viewings of their works, not just the first one. The ways
we have attempted to resolve these dissonant desires haven’t been very
successful. Viewers sometime illegally copy or share video content.
Producers, networks, and movies studios do all they can to make such sharing and
copying technically difficult and legally perilous. The sad part for the
U.S. is that we have twisted our laws in ways they were never supposed to be
twisted, generally to serve the interests of content creators, which is often
not in service of the public interest as copyright law was intended to be.
Can’t there be a simpler way?
Maybe there is.
Hiro
Media, an Israeli startup, thinks we simply ought to add commercials to TV
shows and movies, thereby changing both the associated business model AND the
balance of power. If shows come with ads attached in such a way that they
can’t be easily removed, then why be opposed to copying and sharing? In
fact copying and sharing should be ENCOURAGED.
The drag, of course, is the ads, which in Hiro’s case are not only difficult to
remove, they are difficult even to skip or fast-forward through, unlike
TiVO. You can fast-forward the show in the Hiro system, but NOT the
commercial. And those commercials change every time the show is
played. If an Internet connection is available at the time of playing, the
ads will even be coordinated with a database and targeted at the interests
of the viewer.
Those who have seen the technology say it is both unique and impressive.
It has been in trials for a year in both Israel and Australia and will shortly
begin trials in the U.S. with NBC on one of their lower profile shows with the
idea of expanding it to their other content. A second test will shortly begin
with Turner Broadcasting, with most of the other major players looking on.
Now if Hiro can only survive the Joost PR blitz.
