Internet – Page 11

Sirius XM Bankruptcy: Told you so…

Next target, rock and/or roll..

When I published my thoughts on how the iPhone would kill Sirius / XM, I was linked in the Sirius XM financial messageboards (probably by some shorts). Needless to say some of the longs went after me screaming ‘this guy is a moron’ and some other harshness. Even today when I talk about how amazing it is to play radio on my iPhone, I get some radio purists come in an whine ‘but but but, HD radio is better because…’ or something like that. (It reminds me of the guy who told me mp3’s would never take off because they didn’t sound as good as CDs).

Anyway, SiriusXM are preparing to file for bankruptcy. Told you this would happen.

It’s not really the iPhone that is the killer, directly. It is the mountains and mountains of debt that were attached to Sirius. These guys borrowed BILLIONS to put their birds up in orbit. It just never made sense–NEVER MADE SENSE–to recreate the broadcast radio model up in space with a hugely more expensive infrastructure, not when a simpler hack together system is available to deliver more content easier (iPhone tethered to a car stereo). And with more and more 4G services being planned (wimax, LTE) I can understand why investors were running scared about satellite radio.

Sadly, a bunch of truckers are going to be really depressed. One of the strongest fan bases for satellite radio is long haul truckers who got their fix of news, information, music and even trucking stories no matter where they were in the USA. I suspect many of them are going to have some withdraw pains should the service shutter.

]]>

Faster than Drudge: Using Twitter for your Breaking News

TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/ is a beta application that sits on your desktop and updates every 2 minutes with ‘Twitter’ messages from the people you follow on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) It turns twitter into something like an Instant Messenger (though one you don’t have to be troubled to deal with a reply).

While you may think Twitter is kind of silly (”I’m going for a pizza”–”I’m going to the bathroom”) more and more professional organizations are using this as a primary communications device for ‘urgent and breaking’ news.

Right now, I’m now subscribed to several ‘breaking news’ alert services, which pop up on my screen anywhere from 5-30 minutes before they show up on CNN or other websites. With tweetdeck it just sort of ‘appears’ on my screen — an ‘ambient’ way to watch the news go by, but still be ahead of everyone else.

Here are a few of the ones I’m following.

http://twitter.com/BreakingNewsOn

You can find other breaking news services as well using Twitter search:

http://twitter.com/search/users?q=breaking

]]>

Text of Steve Jobs letter to Apple re: Medical Leave of Absence

Steve Jobs has announced a medical leave of absence until June.

Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal
with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health
continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else
at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my
health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to
allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have
decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and
I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As
CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our
board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve

]]>

2009-The Year of Networked Attached Storage (NAS)

Will this be under your tree next year?

A year ago the gift of gifts for Christmas was a GPS unit.

A few weeks ago, one of the surprise bit hits was the iPod touch (some Apple stores even sold out).

So what will be seeing next year? Well my guess is Networked Attached Storage (NAS) or in more plain English, a ‘home server’.

Techies have been running ‘home servers’ for years now. Taking old computers and gutting out some of the unnecessary items, they’ve loaded them up with hard drives and use them as ‘backup systems’ for the house, or as a central repository for all the photos, video and music that they play. These systems were nice and useful, but not exactly user friendly for people who have never opened a computer, and often resulted in higher utility bills as running a full desktop machine can cost quite a bit in electrical costs.

But in the last 12-24 months, we’ve started to see ‘made to order’ type systems be rolled out. Windows actually is a bit ahead here in having the Windows Home Server running on a number of devices from companies like Hewlett Packard with their Media Vault that lets you have a centralized data repository in the home. Apple has a small device called the Time Capsule that is used for their backup systems, and there are rumors of a new multi-drive device coming out soon from Apple (but it wasn’t introduced today at Macworld so we’ll see).

Data Robotics Drobo is a nice system, though limited at the moment by the fact it is a ‘tethered’ system rather than true stand alone (it connects to the machine via USB or Firewire, and the Ethernet bridge is sort of ‘iffy’). When Drobo comes out with a Version 3 soon (that is truly networked / Ethernet) I suspect we’ll see a number of these start selling.

As more and more people move entirely digitally (I myself have 30gb of photos and nearly 1TB of video) the need for a backup and storage system becomes more pronounced. As families start to add more and more computers to the house, realizing that ‘one is never enough’ you start to see a desire to share documents and sync data.

We’ll see what CES brings out, but I strongly suspect by Christmas 2009 you’ll be seeing quite a few NAS devices on the market and this being quite a thoughtful and wise Christmas gift.

]]>

Livestation going to the iPhone. Thank god almighty.

My Mac has returned (after 23 days)

23 days with the Mac Genius and it was solved by a random event.

Turns out the fan on the video card was not spinning. The card was ‘working’ when it ran through the hardware checks, but apparently that doesn’t check to see if the fan is spinning or not. The card overheated and the system shutdown.

The guys had the machine open and just noticed it wasn’t spinning. Sometimes a quick look is better than an extensive diagnostic.

]]>

Blue screen of death and kernel panics on my Mac after 10.5.5

Sigh

My Mac is at the Apple store after making an upgrade to 10.5.5. I awoke the other morning to find my computer stuck in a ‘blue screen of death’ (yea, it was actually a blue screen) that came on after the original grey Apple and spinning wheel. It was quite annoying to say the least.

I started to do a debug (as I’ve done a few times before) but then I realized ‘hey, this machine is still under warranty.’ I was also worried their might be some hardware issues so I decided to take it up to the Apple store and get them to work on it. I removed the extra storage hard drives (for security reasons) and dropped it off with the genius bar.

After about 48 hours, they came back with the answer I suspected (i.e. their default answer)–there is a problem with the 3rd party RAM. This is the usual answer they give for most hardware problems (whether or not it is totally to blame is another matter). They took it out, reinstalled 10.5.5 and did the updates/data migration and pronounced it good to go. And as fate usually has it, I brought it home, put my drives back in, turned it on, and boom–kernel panic. Reboot, and the blue screen.

I then threw in a new drive, did an install (clean, on a clean drive) got it up and running with 10.5, but when upgraded and migrated, again, the blue screen of death. I took the drive out of the slot and moved it to another–BSOD. I put all the drives in–BSOD, and all the drives out–BSOD. Clean reinstall-BSOD.

So I said screw it–back to the store. It’s there now (what Apple calls a ‘looper’ in that it looped back in after a previous ticket) and I’m waiting to hear from them.

After doing some research, it seems that 10.5.5 is causing a number of problems with other users. Apple’s support documents are rather sparse (they love to blame one thing, not always every thing that causes a problem). The discussions are showing quite a few bugs with 10.5.5 and I’m digging through trying to find if there is a solution in the complaints on the forums (USB seems to be a big suspect).

]]>

Livestation is a simple app that does some cool things.

I’m a news junkie, especially from non-US sources. Unfortunately, watching TV from Europe or Asia is hampered by a big problem–the curve of the Earth. The satellites that hit Europe and Asia are not exactly positioned to beam their signals down to the US. While I have the big dish to get some of the content, that is still reliant on the broadcaster ‘double bouncing’ their signal through an Earth station somewhere and not encrypting their feeds.

Online options are dispersed. Most of the good peer-to-peer programs like Sopcast and TVAnts are Windows only, and going to 100s of different websites can be a real pain.

So I’m pretty pleased to find Livestation. This is a small downloadable app that gives you a standard interface to a lot of different content from around the world. I’m watching Orange Sports from France right now, and can flip to Euronews and a few other feeds of interest. Right now I’m watching Al Jazeera English service (which is funny in the bias that it shows).

Try downloading it. Works on Macs, Windows and Linux.

]]>

Tonchidot is AMAZING

Remember this name.

Ok, you’ll have to take my word on it until you see the video, but a company in stealth mode called Tonchidot / Sekai Camera did a demo at the Techcrunch 50 show in San Francisco and wowed the hell out of everyone. Basically, you take the iPhone’s camera and point it down a street. It picks up the GPS from where you are located and then coordinates with a server, telling you what each store is and what others have said about it (tags). You look down a street and it shows phone stores and videos and restaurants, and then you can read the tags associated with that store that other users have put on.

Imagine your iPhone as a ‘virtual reality’ viewer into a real life street. Aim the phone at a wall of phones and get reviews of the different phones and comparison prices. Aim it at a restaurant and read reviews from your friends.

There website is stealth http://tonchidot.com but that won’t last for long.

As soon as the demo video is up I’ll link to it.

UPDATE: Here is the video of the VC’s talking about it (about 1 minute in).

Here is the Demo Video:

UPDATE 2: A number of people are already asking what is the business model. I can see two right off the bat.

1) GPS based ads. Taxi cab signage companies do this. If a cab drives by a restaurant they display an ad based on the location. Imagine the same here. Aim down the street and get ads for stores that have sales and whatnot.

2) Military. The other market, back to my government days, is military. Imagine if you could integrate something like that with all the ‘red-blue’ data you get from various intel sources so you could aim the phone over a sand dune and get back a real time report ‘Six T-72 tanks-Engage when ready’ and another sand dune that said ‘Local Village–do not shoot’. Integrate electronic intel, drones, human intel all into one network viewable realtime over an iPhone device. The Pentagon would buy it by the truckload.

UPDATE 3

]]>

Seinfeld to be the new face of Vista.

Windows has announced a $300 million ad campaign to convince people that Vista is really a good product. To do this, they’ve hired Jerry Seinfeld (not as funny as he was five years ago) to plug the Vista software (not as good as Windows from five years ago). I guess it is a good match.

]]>