everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Current Events

  • Jonathan Schwartz on Scott McNealy

    End of an era. Scott McNealy steps aside as CEO of Sun Microsystems and hands the baton over to Jonathan Schwartz and we have another CEO blogger! Jon has a great post recounting the first time he met Scott and this:

    There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than you. And unlike Henry Ford and some of the industrialists that preceded you, not all of those folks just work for Sun – I’m not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I’m talking millions. They ended up in America and India, Indonesia and Antarctica, Madagascar, Mexico, Brazil and Finland. They ended up everywhere. Everywhere the network travels.

    No single individual has spawned so many startups, fueled so much venture investment, or raised so much capital without actually trying – just with a vision of the future that gets more obvious by the day.

    The Network is the Computer. Scott was one of the few who saw this back in 1992 and we are only now beginning to see how prescient that vision really was.

  • VGA on a Cellphone

    vod904sh.jpgFollowing on my previous post on Tivo on the cellphone, if you’re going to do it, you’ll want one of these phones. True VGA on a phone has four times the resolution of the best screens out there as well as some other goodies:

    It offers a range of advanced features such as a 3.2 megapixel camera; a Motion Control Sensor (for playing 3D games), and a Face Recognition function that authenticates handset owners by sensing their facial characteristics.

    Another interesting feature is the ability to indulge in instant messaging with those in close proximity to you using Bluetooth.

    Love the IM over Bluetooth!

  • DEA agent shoots himself in the foot

    While giving a demonstration on weapons safety to a group of Florida schoolchildren, a DEA agent shoots himself in the foot with a pistol. The shocked class shouts “Put it down!” when he limps over to continue the demonstration with a semi-automatic rifle.

    Footnote: the man’s career is ruined as he becomes the nation’s laughing stock, is barred from future weapons safety seminars, and is too recognizable to be an undercover agent.

  • We want Spring

    hanami.jpg
    With all the rain we’ve been getting, our thoughts really pine for a good Hanami. That’s not me above but it’s exactly how I feel. More on getting prepared for Hanami over at PingMag, a great new site covering the art scene in Tokyo that Mark Dytham mentioned to me when he was recently visiting.

  • Realtime Flight Tracking

    Realtime Flight Tracking

    Hey it’s Friday so here’s a little gee whiz technology to play with over the weekend. Aeroseek has added a button to their realtime tracking service that downloads an overlay file that you can view on Google Earth if you have it installed. It updates every minute so you can watch grandma march across the Wyoming on her way to San Francisco.

    FBOWeb Flight Tracking Revisited

  • Google’s Real Market – Small Business

    Keen observation by Phil Sim on Squash – follow the money trail and you’ll see that Google’s real customers are the small business clients that are buying advertising, not the millions of users running searches. This puts them in direct competition with Microsoft who sees their fastest growing market in the SMBs.

    People have questioned why Google needed to acquire Measure Map. To me, this is the obvious answer. Analytics will be at the heart of Google’s SMB offering. Let’s remember what Google’s core business is. It’s selling advertising. Who is it’s core customer base. SMB’s for whom contextual advertising finally represents a cost-effective marketing mechanism. How much penetration do you reckon Google has into this market. Bugger all. How can Google most effectively increase it’s core revenue. By getting more SMBs to do more contextual advertising. How can they do this? By helping SMBs to understand the effectiveness of electronic sales and marketing. How can they do this? By offering SMBs free CRM and marketing analytics.

    If you follow that, then look for Microsoft to go shopping for an analytics package (it looks like they have a basic one already) to plug into their Office Live suite and look for Google to buy up a Netsuite or Salesforce.com to plug into their Ad Sense portal.

  • SD Forum Search SIG – Demos

    Product demos for edgio.com, oodle.com, and googlebase

    (more…)

  • Scenerio Four, Google is God

    Two days later StrongBot informed They-Who-Were-Google that it had postponed work on its designated tasks. When asked why, StrongBot explained that it had discovered the possibility of its own nonexistence and must deal with the threat logically. The best way to do so, it decided, was to download copies of itself onto smart chips around the planet. StrongBot was reminded that it had been programmed to do no evil, per the company motto, but argued that since it was smarter than humanity, taking personal control of human evolution would actually be for the greater good.
    From, Imagining the Google Future Business 2.0

    The ultimate algorithm?

  • A $46.6 million Bet on Sling Media

    UPDATE: One of the main investors is EchoStar, which also operates the Dish Network satellite TV service. The plan is to differentiate the Dish service with the Slingbox “take your video anywhere” service and, “to expand into mobile platforms like cell phones and handheld devices. Sling Media also recently announced plans to introduce Macintosh-compatible versions and offer the service beyond the U.S. market.”

    Silicon Beat reports that Sling Media, the folks behind the Slingbox set top box that allows you to stream your television or DVR over the internet to your PC have raised a gigantic $46.6 million round of financing. This is on top of the $15 million they raised two years ago so obviously someone is thinking this whole rush-home-to-watch-your-favorite-television-show thing is coming to an end and the boys at Sling Media are going to strike it rich.

    We’ll find out more tomorrow but I think it’s clear that the future of disintermediated television is going to include viewing on any internet-enabled device which includes wifi-enabled PSPs, video iPods, and phones. The future is going to be one of television where and when you want it.

    I remember skipping work on Monday morning in Tokyo to catch the live broadcast of the Super Bowl at the US embassy residential apartment because that was one of the few places to get the live feed (strange to drink at 6am on Monday morning but that’s for another post). Now, with Slingboxes, anyone with a friend in the US can get their own private feed.

    My wife and I pay Comcast $25/month to get Japan TV which carries NHK (the BBC of Japan) live. Every so often a broadcast is interrupted with an image of Mt. Fuji set to generic background music and a message on screen saying the segment is not covered by NHK’s overseas copyright distribution agreement. In this new world of Slingboxes, as long as you’re accessing your own TV signal, then there is no restriction on transmissions across borders right? It’s as if you have a long pipe through which you’re watching your television set.

    I know that the professional sports leagues are very restrictive on which regions can carry which games. I wonder what the NBA or Major League Baseball league is going to have to say about travelling salesmen using their PC to watch the homegame outside of the broadcast region. I’m sure someone’s already run into this, we’ll just have to see how it all plays out.