How many times you have turned on the TV, only to find that there is nothing good on it. Unless you are watching during primetime, there is nothing worth spending your valuable time. Invariably you keep flipping channels and end up settling for something half decent. The problem is that, networks have shows on a pre-defined schedule, which works for them. However, it doesn’t always work for the individual who has to schedule his/her life around it. From top of my head here are some issues with the Cable/Satellite broadcast TV model.
- Timing on the network’s terms not the consumer
- Shows compete for the time slot, which means that the consumer looses if he/she has to pick one
- Consumer pays for items he/she doesn’t watch. This one frustrates me the most as I don’t watch over 90% of the content and I am sure lot of people are the same way.
- HD coverage is still spotty. Location is always an issue. Although this is getting better
So, what do I to work around these issues. With the Internet, there are multiple options on the table and I want to move towards one of those. Here is my ideal TV watching experience:
- All the content (shows) available when I want on my TV and not on my PC. I paid over $2k for my 50 inch plasma, I want to use it versus watching it on a sub 20 inch screen
- All shows available for rent or purchase
- I am a big advocate of the “Pay Per Use” model and would like that to be implemented for TV as well
- It’s only fair to pay for what you watch, versus paying for 90% of the nonsense you never watch
Such a model will allow me to watch TV on my terms and around my schedule. I will also end up saving money as I will only pay for what I watch. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you post tweets on Twitter? Do you upload pictures to Flickr? Do you post videos on YouTube? Can’t get enough blogging done in a day? Then FriendFeed is just the right thing for you and your friends.
Built with the same concept as “News Feed” on Facebook, FriendFeed let’s you aggregate your activities and subscribe to all the activities of your friends. Once configured FriendFeed accesses your activity from the external service(s) via back-end custom integrations. The data is retrieved periodically and aggregated into a unified stream of activities. Your friends and family then can subscribe to this aggregated feed and access all your activities across multiple services.
Unlike other RSS feed splicers, FriendFeed has implemented custom integrations to external services to offer access to various types of activities. For example once configured FriendFeed can access your blog posts, new media from YouTube / Flickr, new Diggs, new DVD selections at Netflix and many more.
As a user not only you can aggregate your feed, you can also subscribe to aggregated feeds of other interesting individuals. The service then allows you to comment on specific feed items or like / dislike it. This encourages community interactions between the users and their subscribers.
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This week’s carnival (#114) is hosted at Chetan Sharma’s blog. As always he has a great collection of posts. This time the focus is on the recently announced iPhone SDK. He was kind enough to include my post on the subject as well.
In addition to the arnival, do not forget to checkout his post on the 2007 US wireless market update. As always he has done an amazing job of collecting the most valuable insights into the US wireless market.
Thursday’s announcement from Apple was pretty impressive. I never expected to see such a complete execution of the SDK program. Apple really looked at this from a 360 degree angle and nailed almost everything:
- App Development
- Testing and debugging
- Deployment, distribution and discoverability
- Business model
- VC funding for developers
- Rich developer program and support
Apple’s approach to this makes anyone else look pretty pale. Compare this to Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile or any carrier’s development program. Almost everywhere else one has to deal with various parties and many restrictions before they can get their application on the phone. Apple has really offered a one stop shop to the eager developers.
However for me the fun part kinda stops there. The early excitement has somewhat waned at this point. I am sure you all know what I am talking about. The fact that Apple will not allow 3rd party background processes to run on the iPhone. This means that users cannot switch back and forth between applications seamlessly. Once you switch applications the previous one shuts down. This is a very realistic scenario where users can receive calls, text/email messages while using an application. Read the rest of this entry »
I was over at GigaOm and came across a post from the man himself. It was about the new calendar sync application from Google for BlackBerrys. Just to give you a quick background here, Google has been rapidly releasing mobile applications for the BlackBerry platform, for its favorite services. So they support GMail, Search, Picasa, Maps and News. They launched these services in early December.
So the calendar sync impresses me the most. They have smartly integrated the native BlackBerry calendar with the Google Calendar in a bi-directional fashion. So any entries added to the Google Calendar online shows up on the handset within the native view and anything added within the native view is updated online.
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Hot off the press, Amazon AWS has yet another new web service. This one is called DevPay and is squarely aimed at entrepreneurial developers. Frankly these guys are punching out web services by the dozen.
I particularly like this service as it allowing the developer to further focus on the applications and leave the business aspects to DevPay. Developers can enable applications using other services like S3, EC2 and SimpleDB. Once the apps are ready they can use DevPay to sell them with creative business models.
Many web service providers end up using credit cards or PayPal, which require some effort to configure appropriately. Not to mention security and privacy hassles when dealing with credit card transactions. Seems like DevPay simplifies all that.
Go ahead and check it out yourself. With these new offerings, the AWS portfolio is getting quite potent and headed towards next generation of hosting. I may have to follow-up with a detailed post.
Tim O’Reilly of the Web 2.0 fame posted a great article on the NYT. He talks about the fact that mobile handsets are gradually becoming more and more like wireless PCs. This change along with the movement within the service provider community is forcing the”Open” mantra within the mobile landscape.
He reflects disappointment behind the fact that even though carriers are beginning to listen, they have not welcomed this with open arms (no pun intended). I am in complete agreement with his recommendation to the carriers to adopt the well established internet/PC business models.
I have mentioned this in a previous post. Carriers are inching towards the “Open” thought process versus taking the bull by the horns. Its simply a strategy where they are hedging their bets with a safe approach.
Yes I understand that they do have a lot of responsibility with the service. Even if they get past the thought that going “Open” won’t hurt their business, they are still worried about security and privacy. Carriers are concerned about the fact that Open models will lead to malicious content on the device, which results in a bad experience and increased customer support calls.
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