The good folks over at iLounge are providing live coverage of Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld 2006. What’s interesting?
Neat-o.
O’reilly Radar reports that Yahoo! has made another acquisition in their drive to transform the company’s web properties into a Web 2.0 über-community. This time it’s the music playlist community Webjay created by Lucas Gonze.
Yahoo! seems determined to be a player in the Web 2.0 world, and they just might succeed.
I often hear people talking about how Yahoo! is buying up Web2.0, but i don’t think it’s just that. It’s not only about tagging, social bookmarking, sharing, etc. It’s about rethinking the innovation process when handling social technologies. Take a look at some of the characters recently hired/acquired – Caterina Fake, Stewart Butterfield, Joshua Schachter, Andy Baio, Cameron Marlow, Chad Dickerson, Tom Coates… These aren’t even your typical Web2.0 crowd – these are creatives with attitude who have no problem telling corporate what they think and pushing for changes that they feel are essential.
What is the glue that holds all these many seemingly disjointed pieces together (Flickr, del.icio.us, Webjay, etc.)? The people, first of all. People with innovative ideas and the drive to express them. What about from the perspective of the community member? Well, there’s authentication, something that Yahoo! can help unify. There’s commenting and discussion. And there is tagging.
A KM Digression
I had a conversation last week with Darryl, Randy and Kevin about tagging. Not the folksonomy-style tagging familiar in the Web 2.0 world, but old-school taxonomy. Specifically, how much emphasis structured taxonomy (i.e. tagging with a predefined vocabulary) should have in an enterprise knowledge management environment, and whether there is a place for folksonomy in such an environment.
People clearly “get” the value of tagging. As they use web sites like Flickr, del.icio.us and Last.fm, they see firsthand how tags add value on both a personal and a community level. The debate is whether free-form tagging can apply inside the corporate firewall. I believe there’s a place for both. Structured tagging (taxonomy via vocabulary) by knowledge managers; folksonomy tagging by everyone else. Imagine being able to see three levels of tag clouds: enterprise, community, and personal. At a glance you would see what matters most at each level. Color coding could make it more revealing. Corporate tags (vocabulary) gets green; community tags get grey; personal tags get blue.
Are you with me?
CES pits thousands of exhibitors with tens of thousands of products against each other — each vying for your limited attention. The cavernous exhibit halls are crowded with flashy displays, loud music and lots of tongue-wagging. But amid the hype I stumbled across an unassuming display at Sony’s booth that I nearly overlooked: the new Sony Reader.
In the simplest terms, Sony Reader is a digital book about the size of a paperback (or a DVD case, for those youngsters unfamiliar with the concept of books). It can store hundreds of books using a Memory Stick or SD flash card. What makes Reader so interesting is the display technology. Instead of LCD, it uses high-resolution “electronic paper” technology. It’s not backlit, but produces flicker-free, readable text even in sunlight. It’s something you have to see to believe, but it’s really remarkable. Interestingly, displaying a page doesn’t draw battery power; only refreshing (“turning”) the page does. So instead of measuring battery life in terms of hours, it’s measured by page turns. How many can you get? About 7,500 page turns on a single charge — equivalent to a dozen novels plus War and Peace.
Sony will be selling Reader compatible e-books via their Connect website. Books will typically retail for less than their physical counterpart. You’ll use your PC to manage your library, and transfer books you want to carry with you to your Reader via the included USB dock (which doubles as a charging station).
Sony Reader isn’t available yet. Sony claims it will be available around the end of the first quarter 2006, with a retail price between $299 and $349.
In addition to their own e-book format, Sony Reader can display Adobe Acrobat PDF files, JPG images and RSS feeds. You can also use it as an MP3 player, although that would obviously drain the battery faster.
Sony Reader was one of the few products at CES that really amazed me, but it’s not without concerns. I’ve yet to see what sort of digital rights management scheme they’ve used. Hopefully they’ve learned their lesson from the CD-Audio root-kit debacle, but judging by what I’m hearing about “unauthorized” games on the PSP, I’m not entirely sure. If they can produce something that protects the digital rights without getting in the way, I think they’ve got a winner.
Web site: Sony Reader
I’m back from a marathon trip to Las Vegas for the International Consumer Electronics Show, better known as simply CES. I’ll write up detailed analysis on some of the products that really caught my eye, but I wanted to give you a quick overview.
First of all, CES is HUGE. I heard that 250,000 people attended CES, and I probably bumped into half of them as I elbowed my way through the crowds. The exhibit halls are enormous. The larger “booths” are more like city blocks.
Secondly, judging by the exhibit halls, there must be a TON of money in car audio. The entire North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center was full of tricked out exotic cars and trucks with stereo systems that easily cost five figures. Made me wonder… am I in the wrong business?
Third, I really NEED a couple things — an XBox 360 and a large, high-definition, flat-screen TV.
What else was cool? Well, there’s so much “stuff” there, you quickly reach your technology-saturation point. So I’ll stick to just the few things that really stood out for me. I”ll elaborate on each of these later today:
Stay tuned for details, and meanwhile you can check out my photos on Flickr.
I’m off today to check out CES in Las Vegas. I’ll be checking on the latest goodies from Google, Microsoft, Skype, and related hardware gizmos and gadgets. Be ready for a full report this weekend.
Until then, here’s a little tiny bit of humor to lighten your Friday…
There is a big question in the computer world if computers should be referred to as male or female. Two groups were formed to make a determination. One group was all male and another was all female.
The group of women determined that computers are definitely male because:
The group of men determined that computers must be female:
I did warn you it was a little humor.
This week’s Photo Friday theme is panorama. I enjoy creating panoramas and have posted a few on Flickr. But for this theme, I thought it would be fun to share the very panorama I used to create the header image you see in my blog.
I photographed this sunrise over Lake Elsinore on my drive to work about a year ago. I didn’t use a tripod, just eyeballing it with my 3Mp digital camera (the very one I lost at Versailles last year) and stitching it together with Photovista Panorama. Most people who see it assume it’s a coastal view, but actually it’s looking east over Lake Elsinore, from a lookout point on Ortega Highway. The clouds are hanging low over the lake, and the lights you see on the right side are the headlights of my fellow commuters, snaking their way through the Cleveland National Forest to work in Orange County.
Most people don’t bother to stop and soak in the view. What a shame.
Bill Gates kicked off CES last night with a rambling presentation that would’ve put me to sleep had I not been on my stationary bike at the time. CES is the world’s largest consumer electronics show anywhere; bigger and badder than pretty much anything else you can dream up. Over 250,000 people will attend this five day geek-and-gadget fest. This year, I’ll be among them.
But back to Bill and his lackluster keynote. The keynote outlined some new products we can expect this year, as well as his vision for how technology (Microsoft’s of course) will make our lives better real soon now. The “new” products included a music download service built atop Windows Media Player and in conjunction with MTV (yawn); new games for the Xbox 360 (which I might give a damn about if you could buy one); a demo of Flight Simulator for Windows Vista (seriously!), and HD-DVD movies via an external drive you can add to your (probably non-existent) Xbox 360… and just in time for Christmas ’06. Be still my heart.
Thinking about Bill’s day-in-the-life vision of how technology will enrich my life, I wondered — how much can be done right now?
He started his day looking at a massive, portrait-oriented flat screen that reminded me of a framed bathroom mirror. He had drawings scrawled by the kids displayed in one area, the family schedule in another (complete with real-time GPS location for each member), and a TV feed in yet another. Most of this is possible today, although the cost of a large format, touch screen type device is prohibitive (unless you have a budget like Bill). More cell phones are now including GPS capability, so tracking location isn’t a long-range reality.
Watching the TV, he saw a news program that caught his eye, and gave it a “follow me” instruction. This rerouted the video to his mobile phone for his trip to work. Presumably he won’t be behind the wheel. Whether you call this “location free” viewing (Sony) or “place shifting” (Slingbox), it’s very nearly possible today. I’ve been using Slingbox for a few months now to do this very thing, although I’m still waiting for the Pocket PC version of the player. What’s still missing is the convergence part that let’s my home PC tell my PPC to start receiving video. Oh, and I’m signed up for the PPC beta, but waiting for the call from the good guys at Slingbox (hint-hint).
At work, he’s got a killer display screen that even blows away the one on my lust-list. The stuff he showed (video conferencing, drag and drop from his Tablet PC to his desktop) didn’t impress me. Maybe I’m jaded, but it wasn’t inspiring. More interesting was his hypothetical wait at the airport. He placed his cell phone on a specially equipped table, authenticated using biometrics, and was able to view a full-screen window for email, apps, even scanning business cards. Interesting, but unlikely to happen in the near future. I’d rather have my own personal, portable screen. It would comein a flexible form like a piece of cloth or perhaps mylar. I could roll it up when I didn’t need it — and use it wherever I wanted — so I wouldn’t be dependent on the availability of one of those fancy-schmancy tables he demonstrated.
When Gates was finished, I couldn’t help but wonder — is that the best he could think of? What does your vision of the future include?
I’ll be at CES all day Friday and will try to cut through the smoke and mirrors and bring you my discoveries this weekend.
technorati tags: CES, Bill Gates, web services, Microsoft, slingbox
