Joost P2P TV

Just received my invitation for Joost, the creators of Skype. These guys are working on what can only be described as a kick-ass P2P Video TV Streaming client. Interface and Controls seems very reminiscent of OS X applications like iPhoto, QT, etc..

Steve on DRM

Like the opening sequences of the Outer Limits which starts out -- "There is nothing wrong with your television... We are now controlling the transmission.... We control the Horizontal and the Vertical".

Steve Jobs thoughts on music, deserves some attention. For me this is classic Jobs.

Listening to some of the bloggers out there, i feel people have been a bit disengenious to Steve Jobs. So the reason im adding to the views of Scoble, JP Rangaswami, Bill Thompson (of the British Broadcasting Corporation no less!) is to get some sense of balance to this discussion and present it for what it really means to the industry.

But before i do, lets remind ourselves of that Wayne Gretzky quote that Steve gave us at the MacWorld 2007 Keynote. "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."

That should reveal a lot to us.

- Lets be honest, digital content requires Digital Rights Management (DRM). Whether its music, videos, movies, books, photos. — In an increasingly digital world - we need such a framework, to suggest otherwise is pure folly.

To all the nay-sayers that suggest that we don't need DRM because its restrictive or its anti-libertarian, i ask them what are the alternatives? What do we tell the artists? DO we have a solution for them? Are we going to use an advertising model for music? Seriously. We need to have a better solution before suggesting that DRM sucks.

As long as the DarkNet exists, filesharing and tools like BitTorrent means that this problem will never go away. So we do need DRM to protect Digital Intellectual Property. This is not a question of ethics or morality or fairness, its a question of economics.

- Secondly, the consequence of this digital distribution means that one day record companies wont be selling CD’s. We all know that day will come and when that day arrives -- and Steve Jobs knows it will — we will have no choice but as consumers to pay with DRM.

But that day hasn’t arrived today — nobody wants to cannibilize sales or shrink the PIE. So we obviously live in this uneasy past and future worlds. The past, CD's (non-DRM) and the future, Digital(DRM). -- Steve Jobs knows that and he knows that the record companies know that!

Which is why he said what he said, because he is now the champion of the consumer cause -- fighting the evil-DRM, but at the end of the day, he knows that the record company can ill afford to do without it and so they became the bad guys. Steves' hands are tied he can only do what the record companies tell him.

All these side discussions about well he could release non-DRM stuff on iTunes or licensing the DRM to other companies -- are just side issues. The industry is still immature, its still growing, we are not ready for that debate yet, we need to agree that DRM is right or not, and if it isn't we need a soution for the artists. Figure that out first and frankly i don't think Steve Jobs cares, thats the recording companies problem and they already know the answer.

In the short run, let all these mindless journalists continue to discuss (on SecondLife - duh?) that the world doesn't need DRM and let them re-direct their attention to the European record companies. In the long-run, well, i think we need to go back to that quote from Wayne Gretzky. :)

MacWorld '07: Seems like 1984 all over again...

For those not old enough to remember "1984"

I Miss You, Though I'm Not Quite Sure I Love You

"I miss you, though I'm not quite sure I love you.
All I know's I like my music sad.
Crystal days I'm pensive, thinking of you,
And while you're gone, I'm never really glad.
I think of love as some enormous sea,
Tempestuous or still, but never ending,
Something that once there will always be.
But that is not the message that I'm sending.
Missing you, for me, is something new:
An opening into my changing heart.
Love is something that I won't yet do,
But feeling what I feel for you's a start.
Love, like prayer, should not be lightly said,
So I'll just say, "You're in my heart" instead!"

Saul Williams - Poet or Rapper?

actually who cares.... this guy rocks!

rapper


poet

Get this video and more at MySpace.com

Amazon Unbox: they just don't get it do they?

Why Amazon should stick to SOA and not waste time (here, and here, and here) with selling Movies to the consumer..

leave it to companies that do get it...

Amazon S3: Data Storage Services

Its happening quicker than you and i probably realise.

Many of us are still struggling with laptop hard disks that are filled to the brim. We all carry our own USB keys. Many of us have bought unwieldy External USB hard disk enclosures and Network Attached Storage (NAS) that are now an emerging too fill the SOHO market segment.

But all of this is just, a precursor to where were heading. Which is online storage. No need to rely on localised hard disk storage.

Who says this better than Google: "With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc), .... We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today..... the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache"

Today, the only real large scale provider is Amazon. Amazon's s3 Web Services, provides a pay-as-you-go utility model for buying and using storage over the Internet. Essentially you need to sign-up for an Amazon S3 account, you are provided with your own Access ID and Secret Key for encrypting and decrypting your files on the network. If you lose it then you've lost your files its as simple as that.

Anyhow, i downloaded client tool (which relies on Amazon S3), called Jungle Disk (they even have a Mac client), and use that to connect to the Amazon service.

Its a fairly rudimentary client, but looking at the sheer size of resources behind Amazon S3 (e.g. Microsoft may be outsourcing some of their storage to them and smug-mug pass over 10Tb of pictures through Amazon S3) you kind of realise that this is a pretty sophisticated operation.

Am i ready to drop my iTunes music over into the big cloud, not yet. But its certainly the starting point for me to rationalise and make my content better shared between machines.

Mumbai 7-11 Blasts: "Govern or get out"

After the killing of 190 and injuring 650 people in Mumbai -- this the outcome of 8 highly targeted bombs on the Mumbai metro during rush hour, one wonders how much more should the citizens of India take?

The choice of Mumbai was not designed to unsettle the financial capital, but really meant to raise communal tensions between the Hindu majority and muslim minority. The riots in Gujarat are still not forgotten by the locals and lets now forget about the Mumbai blasts in 1993.

We don't need to look that far back, only last year Islamic terrorists bombed the holy Hindu city of Varanasi.

It beggars belief that India now has a Prime Minister who is completely at ease at talking about macroeconomic and how the diaspora can be unleashed across globe, but yet when slapped in the face countless times with blatant attacks on Indian sovereignty, can only meekly state: "Do not be provoked by rumours. Do not let anyone divide us. Our strength lies in our unity."

Its time for India to step up and deal with these Al-Qaeda terrorists. Both Lashkar-e Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad are part of the terrorist infrastructure that has many sympathisers in Pakistan. This continued passive, tacit and turning a blind-eye support for terrorism must stop.

Opposition party, Advani, summarises it well about the situation for the Indian PM: "Govern or get out".

On another sad note, still lingering from the tragedy of the Mumbai bombs, im surprised at the lack of news coverage from the British press, in comparison to the London and Madrid bombings. Picked politics, captures my sentiments more succinctly, "clearly the death of nearly two hundred and injuries of thousands of wogs was not good enough for the Dail Mail, Daily Express or the Metro to make it front page news. Fuck them. "

This is a timley reminder, for me at least, of how important it is to continue blogging.

Time to move on....

first Robert Scoble, then Bill Gates, and now Om Malik.... all within the space of a week....

is there some kind of cartel or collusion hapenning, where everyone agrees to ditch in their job at the same time for maximum news exposure?

I guess Gateas has realised that curing Aids in Africa is more important than the next operating system. But, why-oh-why, did he not make that noble decision about 5-years ago? -- it would have been better for everyones sake!

An inconvenient truth

i think its time to wake up, i think its time to realise that guzzling chevs' and over heated Google datacentres are a no-no...

"How cool is that?"

I have an article featured at Deepak Chopra's blog.

My personal blog has become way too techy over the years... perhaps it will change now :)

thanks
Suresh.

Apple MacWorld 2006: Lets start taking bets.....

You can see Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld 2006 here (from Tues 10ths Jan 9pm Pacific Time)

1. Replacement of the iPod Shuffle with a Nano variant? (e.g. Shuffle with screen or 1Gb Nano)
50% probability

2. Full length wide-screen iPod 6G
20% probability

3. Mac-Mini on Intel + Front Row 2.0
90% probability

4. iBook on Intel
100% probability

5. 42" and 50" iMac Intel + Front Row 2.0 (although possibly not branded as iMac)
SK: 80% probability

6. iTunes 7.0 + QuickTime 7.0 (its been a whole 6-months after all!)
SK: 60% probability

7. more video and tv and movie content on iTunes (including and we can only hope -- the full catalogue of Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears music videos).
SK: 100% probability (not sure on the later)

8. iLife/iWork '06 Updates (This is a given stable of MacWorld -- im informed by Jody)
100% probability

9. Aperture price reduction (to take the fight to Adobe)
50% probabilty

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 + Extensions

Over the last 2-months, ive been really getting into Firefox, ive found some quite useful extensions and scripts that extend the browser to my specific needs. For the hardcore browsers out there, download in the following order:

Firefox 1.5
The latest version of Firefox released in November 2005.
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Google Toolbar for Firefox
The best way to surf and browse the internet.
http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/

Google Blogger Web comment for Firefox
A dynamic list of wesbites/comments that people have made about the current page that you are browsing. http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/webcomments/index.html

Tabs Session Saver
Re-opens previously running tabs before your browser was shut/closed.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=436&application=firefox

Tabs Mix Plus
Provide a much detailed control of tab behaviour, a must for hardcore surfers.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1122&application=firefox

del.icio.us Toolbar for Firefox
A great way of tagging and bookmarking your favourite sites from any machine
(A pity that Yahoo have bought them)
http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1532

Greasemonkey Script Manager
A javascript engine which enables developers to write simple scripts to manipulate your web pages.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=Popular&numpg=10&id=748

Greasmonkey script(s)
Hundreds and hundreds of user developed Javascript plugins for Greasemonkey.
http://userscripts.org/

Update:
One other one to keep an eye out for is AllPeers, its a file sharing extension which uses one of the Peer Networks (possibly BitTorrent) -- its not available yet.
http://www.allpeers.com/more_f.htm

Ray Ozzie memo: Microsofts Services strategy

Dave Winer has posted 2 e-mail memos, from Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie, on the next step forward for the company.

Clearly Ray has had time to talk to the product teams, senior management and developers and has finally taken stock of the situation.

Ray Ozzie mentions some key tenents:

1. The power of the advertising-supported economic model.
2. The effectiveness of a new delivery and adoption model.
3. The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that “just work”.

Fundamentally, Ray's memo is a more than just a call to developers and product teams about service-enabling their assets. Its a an action-plan. Driven by end to end user-driven scenarios, something that Ray is very good at, from these use-cases, he will drive architectural design decisions and map that to current and fututure products/services.

I think this is not a good time for Microsoft, yet you can't but feel that finally they have someone at the top of Microsoft that actually gets it. What Mcirosoft has delivered as Ray has said is a 80% solution. In the post-"Vista/Office12" wave we will see a fantastic level of seamless integration of technology that weve not seen before, his past efforts with Notes and Groove should give us some inclination of the potential.

I have still some doubts though; Microsoft needs to balance Enterprise revenue models with Consumer/advertising revenue models. There needs to be harnomy between product and services -- the old mindset to lock-in services and products just won't cut it.

Windows "Live"

Fantastic! -- Reported by TechCrunch. Its Windows even when its not Windows! "Windows Live (beta)" is Microsofts go-to-market branding that will encompass its next geneartion SAAS (Software As a Service) strategy.

Its the harmonisation between Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office applications, and Microsoft Services (Windows Live). We have seen this brand used in "Live" Meeting and XBOX "Live".

As Ray Ozzie mentioned here, the iPod and the Blackberry were "perfect examples" of how to create a tightly designed user experience from hardware, to software to services.

I think we will see a great example of that with the XBOX 360, a huge investment by Microsoft which goes beyond just gaming, it could easily become the centre-point for many of Microsofts other strategies around building tightly coupled hardware/software/services.

In terms of the announcements yesterday?
- early 90's - Microsofts energy was put into creating Windows "New Technology" (NT)
- mid 90's - Micorsofts energy was put into embedding Internet/Media experience into Windows.
- 2000's - Microsofts energy was put into .NET and Web Services strategy.

They stumbled a bit after that, and had this grand vision of connection people, devices, and services through "hailstorm".

The last 5 -years has been painful partly through trying to converge technologies streams into a big bang product roadmap, most of which will be released soon, .NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, Vista, SQL 2005.

But in the next 5-years, we'll see Microsoft tinkering less in that space, with putting more of a concerted effort on the User experience (not User Interface / not Product!) but my Identity, my Devices, my Work, my Perrsonalisation and my Events.

We will see a new abstraction of "the Windows API". It won't be Win32 or WinFX. But more likely WinLive Web Services API. All XML based contracts.

Ray Ozzie spent a long time talking about Ad Revenues being a $150bn industry by 2015. So wheres the lock-in? That bit is not clear. You'll still need Windows to truly use these Services. Microsoft needs to tread carefully here, but i suspect they are realising that lock-in through their software platform (to generate license revenues) isn't going to run in the long-term (not outside the Enterprise anyway), its going to be about converting users into revenue generating consumers for advertisers.

MSN used to be a place where Microsoft used to place executives before retirement. If i were to believe how Microsoft is positioning MSN against Windows Live, its clear to me one is designed for syndicated content (where current advertisers are at) and the other eventually will become the place for contextualised content (and where advertisers might go to in the future.)