Content and services

The clash of the Titans is on....Netflix and HBO are taking the gloves off in Northern Europe. Both content companies are ditching cable and satellite TV to offer their movies and "TV" shows as IP-TV offerings. No cable or satellite TV subscription required. Meanwhile there are bunches of small start ups that are negotiating "channel" line ups for a pure IP-TV offering; their plan is to offer bundles of niche channels (e.g. The Food Channel, the Golf Channel) at a very low monthly subscription price.

I hope other iCloud users are having better experiences than I am. From my perspective, it's a mess that makes its mostly awful predecessor, MobileMe, look pretty good by comparison. Here are the problems I am having:

Shop for groceries at the bus station? That's something you can already do in South Korea, where the traditional grocery store is being nudged out of the way by an interesting new approach to shopping that combines a large "aisle" display and QR codes. A kiosk shows a typical array of products that would be found on one aisle of a grocery store. You hold up your smartphone, scan the QR code of the product you want, and that item gets added to your virtual shopping cart.

Twitter was apparently down for some time on Thursday. According to this article, Twitter addicts were devastated: "...my life is over." Really? Your life is over. Here's a clue: You don't have a life.

Someone sent me a link to a new cloud-based service that takes your scanned receipts and stores them all in the cloud. Really? Really? As a long time business owner, I'll cheerfully admit that I do not enjoy keeping track of receipts, but I've never, not even once, thought, "This would all be a lot easier if I stored all these on a server far far away." Because we are reasonably well-organized from a bookkeeping perspective, all the company receipts get filed in one of a handful of file folders. Not even once a month do we need to dig a receipt out.

Here is an interesting article that highlights what Apple might have planned for the Apple TV. Anyone that thinks the cable TV companies are going to automagically solve our broadband problems should read this.

Peek You is an information aggregator service that tries to pull together as much publicly available information as possible about someone and package it up neatly. Many of the items it will list take you directly to other sites that provide even more information. The service tries to list all of the available social media connections as well (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc.).

Walmart has announced a partnership with Vudu. You can take your DVDs and Blu-ray movie discs to Walmart, and pay $2 to have them "converted" and stored in the cloud. If you want an HD (Blu-ray) version, you pay $5. Walmart does not actually read your discs; instead, they verify that you actually have a physical copy, then just enable that movie for your account from a previously stored digital master.

In Sweden, home security offerings have been an important service on their open access networks, and start up companies have very successfully taken business away from the "big" security companies, which were slow to adapt using an IP network rather than phone lines. The network owner (e.g.

A lot of new phishing schemes are popping up....a family member mentioned that she got an email "from US Airways" telling her to check in for a flight....I've gotten hundreds of those in the past week.

In what has to be one of the most important publishing and content stories of the decade, Mad Magazine has announced you will be able to read the magazine on the iPad, beginning April 1st.

Really. April 1st.

The magazine goes to the trouble of assuring readers it is NOT an April Fool's joke.

I, for one, welcome our new Mad Magazine overlords to the digital world.

The buzz that Apple will introduce an Apple TV sometime this year continues. Speculation about the product includes claims that it will incorporate Siri voice recognition so that you can just talk to it and eliminate the remote control. Other theories include the idea that it will look and behave much like an iPad, and that it will essentially be a big iPad, with the ability to run most iPad apps.

If Apple does introduce a new "TV" device, I am pretty sure it will:

Comcast has announced its own streaming video service, called Steampix, to compete with Netflix. It only costs $4.99/month, but if you have Comcast's triple play package, you get it for free. Comcast, because it owns the network infrastructure, can dish out streaming video more efficiently and for much less cost than Netflix, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Read this report of a recent visit to an Apple store and how technology is changing the customer experience. Apple has spent a lot of money to focus on helping customers, rather than just ringing up sales at an old-fashioned check out counter. And if you look at Apple's stock price, it is obviously paying off.

I had to read the first sentence of this article twice because I thought it must be a joke:

Teens, after being friended by parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles on Facebook, have moved to Twitter to get a little more privacy.

Trading Facebook for Twitter? Really?

A guy named Jake Reilly dropped all electronic communication, including the phone, for ninety days, calling it "The Amish Project." This story is really interesting, as he ran into all sorts of logistical challenges, some of them amusing. For example, he'd meet a girl in a bar, she would give him her phone number, and he'd have to explain he could not call her. And the girl would think he was lying to avoid telling her he did not like her.

The truly awful SOPA and PIPA bills have been stalled, but Rep. Darrell Issa of California has introduced OPEN, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act, in the House. OPEN has been written more narrowly to target only offshore counterfeit and bootleg sites, and does not give the Federal government the expansive powers to arbitrarily shut down any site; SOPA and PIPA managed to eliminate both due process and free speech in a single bill.

I just stumbled across SmartFlix, which is the education and training version of NetFlix. You can rent a wide variety of training and education DVDs by mail, just like NetFlix. They have many different topics available, ranging from the mundane (cooking videos) to the more sophisticated and esoteric: welding, machine lathe operations, and knifemaking. A lot of the skill-related topics (e.g.

Here is an interesting statement from the Roku folks:

"Generally we recommend a network speed of at least 1.2 Mbps, but to view live events, like Major League Baseball games, you’ll want at least 3 Mbps. For HD viewing, we recommend 5 Mbps.”

Facebook is now going to give Politico every singe public AND PRIVATE Facebook posting that mentions the name of a Presidential candidate. Supposedly this will be done anonymously, but there is no way to opt out. So either you never discuss anything political anymore or mention a candidate's name in every single post to make the whole exercise worthless.