Month: July 2008

Georgia Tech to run triple option?

One of the Bowden kids is talking about the potential for former Navy coach Paul Johnson to utilize the triple option next year with Georgia Tech. What worked so well for the highly disciplined, but physically smaller Navy football has always been regarded as basically impossible at the BCS level (or the NFL). (Basically, in the pros, the cornerbacks and linebackers are simply too fast and can cover a larger area of real estate, thus negating the ‘unknown’ quality that the triple option brings to the game).

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More on the iPhone's radio applications and the threat to radio.

My posting a week or so ago about the threat to XM and Sirius has been picked up, echo’d a bit, and expanded upon in a few articles this week.

First was Doc Searls who wrote about it in his Linux Journal Blog

Then he had another piece that cited a CBS News guru who discovered much of the same things that I did while playing with radio (i.e. it’s really really cool).

The concept of Internet radio replacing terrestrial radio has been around now for nearly a decade. The hold ups have been many, including the difficulty in bringing in hardware at a reasonable price point. But Apple’s massive power in just ‘adding this’ as a function to the iPhone is going to really shake up the radio industry. I don’t care that uber geeks had this power with a Blackberry or a Nokia–no one really cared or used it. But with Apple making it as easy as a few swishes and viola, the landscape is about to change in ways not many can predict (though I’ve been trying now for nearly a decade).

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iPhone Internet Radio applications – Review

Well it’s been a week and I’ve been playing with nearly every iphone radio application I can get my hands on. I thought I’d take a moment and write down a few thoughts on what is out there.

AOL Radio

This is one of the top free downloads for the iPhone nearly every week. It allows access to AOL’s in-house radio network along with access to CBS’s national radio network, with stations pretty much in every state. The display also pulls up album and song tracks from the meta-data of the stream. It, by far, has the best looking user interface.

My only rub is a) it’s not available internationally last I checked and b) some of the stations are not amongst my favorites. I never used the AOL Radio application as my main player (though I liked some of the stations) so it is going to take me a bit to get used to them and start listening regularly.

Tuner

Tuner is probably my top choice for an Internet radio application. It pulls directly from the Shoutcast.com directory of stations, which gives you access to about 15,000+ stations or so I’d imagine. I’ve been able to find some of my Shoutcast favorites utilizing the SEARCH function they have on the site. You can bookmark and browse by genre or popularity (but not by location).

On the down side, the listings that come up are not separated by your bandwidth capabilities. For example, you can be on an EDGE connection and pull up page after page of 128k or above streams, which are probably a bit too much for EDGE. It would be nice if we could start to see a limiting capability, showing us just the stations we could use given the bandwidth we have.

allRadio

Very similar to the Tuner application, with one major and glaring exception–no search. This is something I hope they sort out quickly or they’ll lose market share to Tuner. One nice feature about this application is the ability to see radio stations by location, such as ‘International–UK’. I’d hope this capability gets enhanced as they get better information about the regional locations of the stations.

Pandora

I’ve had a Pandora account since I first heard of them, and never ever used them. That changed dramatically once I got the iPhone. First, the sound quality, even on EDGE is pretty good. Comparable to FM easily. Second the algorithm they have definitely pulls in content I like from the assorted mass of songs (I have about 6 preset stations right now).

Last.fm

Mac v. Windows, Canon vs. Nikon, and Last.fm v. Pandora. There are so many battles like this. To be honest, I haven’t give Last.fm enough use to comment on it at this point. My database there isn’t as built up so I’m not sure what I’d be hearing.

Random Radio

Several individual stations have small applications so you can listen to their stations. Nice feature, especially when we start to see them for the stations we really like. I suspect we’ll see hundreds of these as the app store grows bigger.

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BBC Radio on the iPhone

Yea, I don’t know how to do it yet either…

BBC Radio has about 80 different channels of content, from the big dozen or so national feeds to zillions of local feeds across the UK. Unfortunately, the BBC is tied up heavily with Real Audio and has recently done (a heavily criticized) deal with Windows for their content.

What this means is that iPhone users, who can handle streaming mp3 content, are currently out of luck for BBC streaming radio on their iPhone.

This is really quite annoying. Granted mp3 is technically a proprietary format as well, but it’s a standard that works on Real and Windows media players (not to mention Winamp, Shoutcast, VLC and nearly all other audio software programs). That the BBC (and NPR and other public radio stations) continue to utilize these locked up formats is a considerable pain, especially as more and more devices and mobile phones have improved playback for mp3 streams.

The BBC has their podcasts in mp3, and they have built a version of the iPlayer that works with the iPhone (alas US people cannot access the videos though). I think it is only a matter of time before the Beeb comes out with an application to put their content on the iPhone and iPod touch.

But wait! There might be hope. Some folks have found a way to create a BBC 1 relay that converts the stream to an mp3 stream.

http://blog.garryrenshall.co.uk/bbc-radio-1-stream-on-the-iphone

Unfortunately I just tested it and it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment.

We’ll keep monitoring this one.

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German companies to sue so they can pollute the Olympics

Yea, I don’t get it either.

But the Spiegel is reporting that several German companies with factories outside of Beijing are considering legal action so they do not have to close their operations during the Olympics. The Chinese government has ordered nearly 1,000 factories to halt production during the games in a last ditch attempt to provide clean air over the city, but the Germans are having none of that.

The five companies are among some 1,100 businesses, many of them located up to an hour away from the city center, which will have to put production on hold for the duration of the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games immediately following. In addition to Beijing closures, some 267 companies in the industrial city of Tangshan north of the city will have to cease operations and 40 factories in the nearby port city of Tianjin are closing, according to Reuters. Factories in three other provinces will also have to shut down.

Of course, only Americans and Chinese are polluters in the world. The Germans probably have some excuse why they should be allowed to operate whereas the rest need to shut down. I wait for yet another example of European “Do as I say not as I do.”

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