Digitalwerks

Although I was pretty tardy about getting pre-registered for the DEMO Fall 09 conference in my home town of San Diego, I was able to check out the start-ups presenting there with the help of some friends (thanks Dan and Jami!).  There’s been quite a bit of press from the show already, but there were a few stand-out companies for me that deserve a bit more attention.  It was an impressive show, generally, both in how it was run and in what was presented, although with so many start-ups on one place it’s hard not to be a bit overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of ideas.  Most of the concepts were great, some of them were down right stupid, but I have to give credit to all the entrepreneurs there for having the gumption to have even gotten as far as they have.  I found it pretty inspiring actually, that so many people were willing to take a risk on a good idea and the chance to do their own thing.

From just the “that’s a great idea” stand point, Micello took high honors from me.  Promising to create “Google Maps inside a building,” Micello brings GPS mapping to public spaces (airports, malls, hotels, etc.).  Simple, but incredibly useful, especially for anyone who has found themselves utterly lost in an airport or some other massive building.  They told me that Google itself is not interested in doing it, so I’m glad to see someone recognizes the utility of this internal mapping, not to mention the business potential.

Lunchster is a fun product that I could see being really useful in certain specific contexts.  It automatically creates lunch dates for you with people already in your social networking circle.  Sounds easy, but if it can really foster relationships by taking the hassle out of lunch dates, and can get enough critical mass to make it a popular thing to do,Lunchster could actually be a great thing.  If I was working in a dense office-rich area like the Financial District in San Francisco, or in Lower Manhattan, I could see using something likeLunchster a lot.  [Total disclosure: the Lunchster team are friends of friends]

I also liked Radioweave very much, although it is currently only available for the iPhone, leaving us Android users out in the cold.  Similar to other audio streaming solutions such as Pandora, Last.fm, Slacker, etc. (and the not available in the U.S. but super awesome Spotify), Radioweave allows you to bring music to your smart phone, but it also integrates other audio sources including podcasts, tweets, news updates, messages from friends, etc.  Radioweave essentially brings one’s entire social network to their mobile device in an audio format.  As someone who spends a good deal of time in my car, and loves to listen to both .mp3′s andpodcasts but would love to get other more dynamic content as well, Radioweave seems to be a great solution..  As good as Radioweave is, however, it does share some negative aspects with a number of the more disappointing start-ups at DEMOfall 09.  That is, there were a number of companies whose entire value proposition seemed to be providing a slight improvement to, or nice but minor tweak to already established services and sites.  I would think thatSpotify could, without too much difficulty, add the base Radioweave functionality to their service if they wanted to.  I hope they do, but that does make me question somewhat the value of many start-ups I saw atDEMOfall09, that seemed to be essentially interface extenders for Facebook or Twitter, when you really boil them down.

One product did really intrigue me, although I have yet to actually decide if it’s truly genius or flat-out stupid.  A-List from Traackr is very slick and impressive, and absolutely fills a major need right now.  A-List promises to aid marketers and PR professionals in reaching the trulyimpactful social media “influencers ,” while also numerically measuring outreach.  One the one hand, what the CEO showed me was quite good, both in how A-List searched and indexedinfluencers from a variety of perspectives.  On the other hand, as a PR professional, I would have to think long and hard how much I would be willing to pay for something like A-List, as, theoretically, I should be able on my own to create media lists that are as good, if not better, than whatTraackr could provide.  After all, I live in and breathe the stuff of my particular industry, and bring an experience and nuanced touch (hopefully) thatTraackr’s algorithms could never automatically replicate.  From a business perspective however, I think Traackr probably has a very bright future, as the enormous hunger for finding and targeting those elusive “influencers ,” not to mention the demand for tools that can demonstrate some kind of PR “ROI” likely ensures a very steady stream of customers toTraackr’s doors.

Do Home Theater PC’s (HTPC’s) have a future?  If yes, how will they look and operate?  And if not, what will people use instead to bring Internet digital content to their TV’s?  Could there possibly be an HTPC in your future?

There are billions of dollars and thousands of jobs at stake in determining these questions, but it’s hard to say that the answers are yet apparent, much less already decided.  Having played and worked in this area for a while now, I thought I would jot down some ideas.  The timing seemed appropriate as a follow-up to Dave’s recent article on media streaming devices, and as I just finished building a couple of new HTPC’s (and also, sadly, retired my prized DivX Connected “Gej-box” media streamer).

The latest media streaming devices that Dave looked at included a digital media adapter from Netgear, a networked Blu-Ray player from LG, and another networked Blu-Ray player from Sony.  Despite how new they are, they still seem to be hobbled by the kind of issues that have faced basically all streaming devices since they first appeared a few years ago.  These devices are inevitably limited in what they can do, either in terms of playable file formats or by a particular digital distribution systems (i.e. Netflix, Amazon VOD, YouTube, etc.).  None of them have proven to be “universal players,” despite some of the marketing copy them employ.  And as Dave noted, the context for such devices is still somewhat dominated by gaming devices such as the XBOX 360 and Playstation 3, that also have very strong streaming options, but still share a number of annoying limitations (some dictated by hardware, some by business decisions).

Fundamentally, these networked media devices are asked to do something they are just not fully designed to do, no matter their particular pedigree or price point.  They are supposed to recreate the video experience of a full-fledged computer on a TV.  Their promise is to bring all the variety and immediacy of Internet video to the comfort of the home theater (or at least to the couch over the office chair).  And, inevitably it seems to me, that is where they always come up short.  The guiding assumptions behind the design and user experience of all these devices is that a). consumers do not want computers in their living rooms and b). that they do not want a computer-like user interface on their TV.  And even Microsoft, which has fought very hard against the former point with its Windows Media PC initiative absolutely concedes on the latter point.  As someone who has used both PC’s and streaming devices over the last few years, I’ve come to the conclusion that neither points a). nor b). actually hold much water, and that a PC, even with a “standard” OS, can work pretty well in the living room.  For unlike all of these myriad streamers, extenders, networked players, etc., only an HTPC can actually recreate the desktop video experience in the living room, and therefore might end up the ultimate winner of this battle.

When I worked in Marketing and PR for DivX, it was incumbent upon me to explain why consumers would never accept having a PC in their living rooms.  They were expensive, awkward, challenging to operate, and as my friend Jerome “Gej” Rota used to energetically demonstrate, they were far too loud.  (He could make a great “whoooshing” sound in a number of different languages).  And at that time, all those criticisms were generally valid of HTPC’s.  As is often mentioned on the very active AVS HTPC forum, building a Home Theater PC can be more of an on-going hobby than a one-off event, requiring a great deal of tinkering and updating.  Nonetheless, the situation has changed a great deal over the last few years, particularly as Intel and AMD have become far more conscious of heat and energy consumption issues with their chips.  Better, more efficient chips has led to the creation of PC’s that just don’t require the extent of cooling as previously (which is the root of the sound problems, for the most part).  As we are seeing with the Atom and Ion platforms, and I would argue the whole Netbook/Nettop phenomenon, a cheaper, lower powered PC is actually quite sufficient and allows for some very interesting designs, particularly on the smaller end of the spectrum.  The old image of a bulky and annoyingly loud PC in the living room is just not an issue any longer

Just to give an concrete example, I recently put together an HTPC for our bedroom.  It’s based on a mini-ITX motherboard with built in nVidia graphics, which is key as it allows for hardware acceleration of video decoding.  By off-loading the video work the PC requires then only a very minimal (and less hot) CPU and not much RAM, even to display 1080p content.  With this particular build, I used an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, which is actually overkill for my purposes, but I had one laying around, so in it went.  I put in a very small and quiet notebook hard drive, undervolted the CPU fan with a fan controller, and connected it to my network via a USB N adapter, and now have a perfectly silent and tiny PC tucked away behind our bedroom TV.

Even my wife who is normally very picky about such things, and has a very low tolerance of my computer experiments with her TV, is very happy with it, mostly because she barely knows it’s even there.  And in comparison to a media streaming device or extender, even very good ones like the Popcorn Hour for instance, this HTPC is pricier but is capable of doing far more in terms of format playability, web video streaming (including Hulu), web surfing, etc.  If your computer can play it, show it, or listen to it, then so can this HTPC.  Additionally, my other HTPC, located in our living room, has a video capture device and functions as our PVR, with the h.264 720p HD captures available throughout the house via the wireless network.  And unlike most media streaming devices, HTPC’s are not limited by future developments .  If some, as yet unnamed format or file container becomes popular, then an HTPC can be updated by either software or hardware to deal with it.  If I decide I want to game seriously with an HTPC, then all I have to do is drop in a beefier video card and that becomes a possibility.  Right now I don’t have much interest in Blu-Ray discs, but if that were to change I could easily install a BR-ROM device.  The options are essentially limitless.  (Although considering the torturous history of getting CableCards actually available for HTPC’s, one should never assume too much).

Of course, an HTPC is more expensive than most standalone media streamers, and the likelihood of something going wrong and needing to be fixed at an inconvenient time is pretty high.  However, I’ve found many media streaming devices to be pretty finicky when it comes to their network connectivity, so they are far from hassle-free themselves.  The other widespread criticism of HTPC’s is their need for a suitable UI, but I truly believe that issue is just not relevant any more.  For one thing, there are quite a few software interfaces available, from Microsoft’s Media Center to the incredible open source alternatives from XBMC and Boxee.  What I have found, however, is that with a sufficiently large display of around 37 inches and up (pretty common these days as HDTV’s become ever cheaper), then even a relatively standard OS works fine, whether it’s Windows XP, Windows 7, or Ubuntu.  Settings can be tweaked if a 1080p display makes text too small, of course, and for 720p, it really shouldn’t be a problem at all.  Further, the use of a “standard” OS makes them very familiar to all PC users.  My wife recently needed to find a particular file on our (admittedly byzantine) home network, something she would have had a hard time doing via Windows Media Center or my old Gej-box, for instance.  However, doing so with Windows 7 really wasn’t that difficult, as she was so used to the Microsoft interface, even though she had not used Windows 7 before.  At this point, the need for an amazing “10-foot UI” seems very unnecessary.

I saw Netflix CEO Reed Hastings give a talk last year in which he described his vision of a future television.  It would consist primarily of a web browser as the UI and a Wii-like device for input.  With some of the more innovative remote/mouse hybrids available even now, Hasting’s vision is pretty much already a reality, at least at our house.  Ultimately, I assume much of this functionality will be absorbed into the televisions themselves, but until they are able to replicate fully the flexiblity and breadth that HTPC’s uniquely provide, there will continue to be a computer in our living room.

[And for anybody interested in trying this out for themselves, I highly encourage spending time at both the above-mentioned AVS Forums and the Silent PC Review site and forums.  They are amazing resources for building home theater PC's, or just kick-as computers in general.]

An oft-mentioned aspect of the digital comic discussion at the San Diego Comic Con this year was the role of intellectual property rights, as both a source of revenue for creators but also as victim to widespread comics piracy.  As with so many popular artistic endeavors, the creators themselves often expressed ambivalent feelings towards intellectual property conceptions, especially in light of technological changes radically undermining the traditional business models of comics publishing.  Many of the most interesting comic book creators I heard at the Con seemed to recognize that new distribution models, digital comics in particular, could create innovative avenues for exposure and revenue, even if every digital copy was not purchased in the same way a physical comic book would had been.

On the other hand, every publisher I encountered at the Con seemed to have the precise opposite opinion, that physical and digital property required the exact same treatment both legally and economically, despite the fundamental differences between an economy of scarcity and one of ubiquity.  At one industry insider panel I attended a publisher appealed to comic artists to create characters and stories that above all contained licensing potential, as a way to ensure revenue streams for “you and your family for generations.”  Needless to say, what I did not hear from many industry representatives was any notion of humility towards the power of intellectual property laws, or a recognition of the incredibly messy history of comic creation and ownership (as the current Superboy lawsuit continues to demonstrate).  At the same time, it seemed so ironic to me for industry professionals to ignore, at Comic Con of all places, the countless ways in which it was the intense interaction and involvement of the fans themselves that have enshrined comic characters with such value. The power of a Spider-Man does not come, as J.K. Rowling might have it, merely from what the publisher puts out every month, but from the intense embrace fans give him, whether through a hand-made convention costume or through all the online discussions, wikipedia entries, fansites, etc. that have helped to sustain Spidey for the decades since his arrival in 1962 via Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby.

Of course, now that Spider-Man is the property of the Disney, one can only imagine the intellectual property structure that will be enforced around him.  Not to say Marvel was very progressive in such matters, but there is no one more aggressive and powerful about extending both the terms and the lengths of copyright than the Mouse.  Which is unfortunate given the state of the digital comics evolution.  As we discussed in a previous post, unless the comics industry truly begins to loosen its grip and take innovative business models seriously, the rather extraordinary levels of comics piracy will continue with no real alternatives presented.  With Disney now entering the field in a dominant fashion, I have little optimism, however, even if the creators themselves are interested in expression far more than locking in revenue streams for “generations.”