Aug

17

On my reading list

Filed Under Audio, Design, Education, Globalization, Media Players, Network, OpenSource, Reading, Streaming, TED, Technology, Web2.0 | Leave a Comment

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Looking forward to Larry Lessig’s new bookRemix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Larry has documented how the music and movie industries are turning students into criminals because they use cheap software, the internet and their creativity.  His presentation at TED hilights the core principals of his upcoming book.

The power and impact of the digital economy has placed copyright and the old guard clearly on the defensive.  Those aging companies still want the market to be “published” (in analog format) are unwilling to change to the new information economy.
–Well okay what I’m really trying to say is they don’t want to give up their revenue streams.

Okay maybe they do understand how the game has changed, yet I’m not sure the impact of how young people are wired has fundamentally changed their business model.

Actually I’m hoping Remix may also hilight how the RIAA should be chasing down the millions of pirates in China rather than students in America.  Larry is proving what everyone under 30 already has accepted as a fact of life…They have never been forced to purchase a majority of their entertainment in analog format.  Should be a great read!

Aug

15

Whats new is now old

Filed Under Design, Education, HighRes, Media Players, Network, TED, Technology, Virtual Reality, Web2.0 | Leave a Comment

Microsoft’s Photosynth was a hit at TED last year and looked to be really promising regardless of running only on XP SP2 and Vista (shame on you Microsoft) but the same team along with the University of Washington has moved forward with new photo, video and VR technologies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLLzV5qeKyk

This should be a very interesting mashup of multiple media formats.  Great work and a wonderful tool for education.

Tags: Photosynth, photo, virtual reality, panaoramic, globalization, trends

Jun

7

Sugar Labs is cool

Filed Under Design, Education, Globalization, Interactive, Media Players, Network, OLPC, OpenSource, Streaming, TED, Technology | Leave a Comment

sugar labs logoThe OLPC program is moving through a rough time right now with the announced departures of initial key members and the new Microsoft announcement to bring XP onto the XO Laptops.

Walter Bender, former President of OLPC has launched Sugar Labs to promote the use of Sugar on more devices. Sugar is open source and I’m running it on my Powerbook via VMware’s Fusion. Sugar Lab’s approach: children should not be forced to learning a legacy operating system designed for adult computer programmers.

Lets face facts. XP is not designed for the world’s children living in poverty. The design is simple and perfect for children:

Sugar on OS X

Read more

May

16

OLPC running XP

Filed Under Design, Education, Globalization, Interactive, Media Players, Network, OLPC, OpenSource, Technology | Leave a Comment

olpc xpWell the long wait is over. Microsoft Press Release has struck a deal with OLPC to offer XP on those little laptops. I’m not sure this is a good thing. Ask anyone who has Vista if they would like to downgrade back to XP (I did) and then you realize this is what will be introduced to millions of future Microsoft customers children around the world?

Lots of press here: Slashdot, NYTimes, CNET, Gizmodo,

I’m counting on the fact that behind the scenes Microsoft is helping fund OLPC. I’m not sure Sugar has what it takes to be the interface because OLPC clearly failed to market the story behind Sugar. And that’s a shame.

Tags: OLPC, sugar, Microsoft, XP, globalization, laptop, trends

May

15

Bandwidth for Schools

Filed Under Design, Education, Globalization, HighRes, Interactive, Internet2, Media Players, Milwaukee, Network, OLPC, OpenSource, Smartphone, Streaming, TED, Technology, Web2.0, WiscNet | Leave a Comment

A National Broadband Policy needs to be more than just a talking point. Schools in our country need to upgrade their internet bandwidth to 25 Megabytes per second. This is for every school — not just the K12 district who slices up the bandwidth based upon the total number of school buildings in the district. The technology and educational impact upon our schools: leaving them behind just when students from around the world are joining and benefiting from the broadband educational internet.

Playing catch-up
Today we find a majority of schools around the country in the educational slow lane. For some reason it does not matter if the school is remote or urban, many are connecting at just 5 Megabits/second. Its like teaching history with books that still recognize Russia as the old Soviet Union….oh how I miss Gorgachev.
Any college connecting at less than 10MB — shows a lack of understanding and vision for their students who enter higher education seeking not just a degree but an advantage to enter the global marketplace.

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May

4

Laptop orchestra to Beijing via Internet2

Filed Under Audio, Education, Globalization, Interactive, Internet2, Media Players, Network, Streaming, Technology | Leave a Comment


Stanford’s Laptop Orchestra will perform via Internet2 to Beijing, over 6,000 miles away via HD video and audio in a performance marking the annual Pan-Asian Music Festival in Palo Alto on Tuesday May 5th.

Tags: Internet2, laptop, orchestra, community, globalization, trends

Apr

21

SlideRocket Beta

Filed Under Design, Education, Globalization, Google, HighRes, Interactive, Media Players, Network, OpenSource, Rich media, Technology, Web2.0 | Leave a Comment

I have been beta testing SlideRocket, a new online presentation tool. It has a very Keynote like approach to creating presentations, or should I say is also at the exact opposite end of the PowerPoint scale of slideware. Thanks be to God for Edward Tufte.

SlideRocket Beta

The beta period looks to be stable for the short term, but SlideRocket will give Google’s online slideware tool a bit of a hard look, but I just do not believe it will be enough to move the masses to SlideRocket.

SlideRocket is a Adobe AIR application supporting Flickr photos and the ability to directly import Google Spreadsheets. The beta tag sticks because I was not able to get accurate results on my Flickr search on three attempts. It also borrow’s from Adobe the deep grey design UI of the program. Read more

Dec

12

NBC: Reconsider iTunes

Filed Under Education, Globalization, Interactive, Media Players, Network, Rich media, Smartphone, Streaming, Technology | Leave a Comment

NBC logoSo NBC has been forced to refund advertisers an average of $500,000 each due to low ratings. One hopes they will workout an agreement with iTunes to again sell their TV shows.  NPR news article here.
At some point someone at NBC Universal will realize all those millions of dollars really add up to something….What were they thinking?

Tags: NBC, iTunes, low ratings, trends

Dec

3

Why DRM is failing

Filed Under Audio, Education, Globalization, Media Players, Rich media, Smartphone, Streaming | Leave a Comment

walmart amazonDigital Rights Management or DRM, has been a controversial snippet of software embedded into music files for a long time. Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM wrapper or Apple’s FairPlay for iTunes it appears the coming death of DRM is from two powerhouses in online sales: Amazon and Wal-Mart.

Funny that Microsoft’s own DRM software will not run on their Zune product. Wal-Mart ditched DRM music in August and a month later Amazon’s site launched DRM free. With larger numbers of online shoppers, the control over digital rights now sit in the hands of the big resellers and not the music industry or even technology companies.

PS - The disappointment with Wal-Mart is their decision to NOT support Mac or Linux systems for downloading music.  Not a good sign for a lot of users.

Tags: Amazon, Walmart, music store, music download, Fairplay, PlaysForSure, The Long Tail, trends

Nov

20

Amazon wants to rekindle your reading

Filed Under Design, Education, Globalization, Interactive, Media Players, Network, Reading, Technology | Leave a Comment

kindleYou cannot shake a stick today without hitting an article about Amazon’s new Kindle wireless reading device.

10 ounces and able to ‘carry’ 200 books.  A price tag of $400.00 + the cost of content?  Well if it drives people to read more … than I call it a success, but it’s not the same model of the iPod approach to consumer devices and digital content.
–Too bad Apple’s design team didn’t get a crack at designing this device…its a bit stale looking.

And my latest read is taking a bit longer than usual. An MIT study about globalization … worth every page. Stay tuned!

Tags: Amazon, Kindle, wireless reading device, digital paper, reading, trends

Sep

27

Amazon’s new music store

Filed Under Audio, Education, Globalization, Media Players, Network, Smartphone, Streaming, Technology, Web2.0 | Leave a Comment

Today Amazon opened the beta door to their new music store amazonmp3beta and as the name suggests, everything is available in mp3 format. In comparison Apple’s iTunes format is AAC for all those millions of iPods.

Amazon MP3 offers the top 100 songs for 89 cents each and the top 100 albums for $8.99, with most albums priced from $5.99 to $9.99.

 

amazonmp3

However I believe the breaking point will be what is available.
Search for U2 and you get:

Read more

Sep

20

NBC: slap yourself in the face

Filed Under Education, Globalization, Interactive, Media Players, Network, Rich media, Streaming, Technology, Web2.0 | 1 Comment

Well after three weeks of questions regarding where NBC would move its digital television programs after breaking ties with Apple’s iTunes. I blogged about their greed. Well NBC Universal “announced” many popular shows would be available for free download.

But hold on. They are pulling a fast one. In attempting to fight the TiVo generation (watch TV programs when, where and how you want) NBC has decided on the following conditions on their new NBC Direct program:

Shows available for one week only following broadcast.
Playback on computer only - no transfer to mobile devices.
Commercials included: viewers cannot skip through ads.
Shows will “degrade” — become unwatchable.
Windows only support - Mac and iPod support later in 2008

So you download The Office and have only seven days to watch it before it “implodes” rendering the video useless on your computer. This seems to imply re-downloading…but maybe NBC is taking the position you have just one week to watch the show or else.

Even industry analysts are calling it a stretch. A blunder is more accurate.

But this idea actually gets “better” for consumers. At some point in 2008 (if ever) NBC will sell you the same shows without commercials and allow them to be moved to mobile devices … yea it’s called iTunes. Who is running the store over there…Jack Donaghy???

Tags: NBC, iTunes, tv show, download

Sep

1

NBC: slap the iTunes hand that feeds you?

Filed Under Audio, Education, Globalization, Media Players, Rich media, Technology, Web2.0 | 1 Comment

nbcApple’s iTunes music store has been a benefit to NBC and other TV networks selling episodes and full seasons of their television programming worldwide. A number of NBC shows and special programming events have been online for $1.99/episode.

To prove money greed makes the world go round NBC has broken off relations with the iTunes music store over their demand to charge $5.00/episode … more than double the current episode download price point.

Shame on NBC for pulling such a greedy decision. Exactly who is going to provide that revenue (and successful download solution) tied to all those iPods?

Tags: NBC, iTunes, tv show, download

Aug

9

The new iMac makes a leap

Filed Under Design, Education, HighRes, Media Players, Technology | 2 Comments


Apple has released a new iMac generation that has a couple of more powerful features that you may have overlooked by it’s visual design: HD video and internal hard drive capacity of 1 terabyte in size. And built-in support for optical digital audio too.

I’m not sure anyone else is shipping a consumer system with these features…it’s their high end configuration but clearly demonstrates the penetration of these features for ‘home’ users. My first Mac shipped with 512K RAM and NO internal hard drive…How about your first computer?

Well today moving forward its 1 Terabyte capacity. Yup…Terabyte.

Tags: imac, HD, terabyte, design, innovation, trends

Jun

19

Designers: Core Animation

Filed Under Audio, Design, Education, Globalization, Interactive, Media Players, Network, RSS, Rich media, Smartphone, Technology, Web2.0 | 1 Comment

Lets face it: Today many graphic designers are programmers. They have been moving into the coding world for a number of years. Most cut their teeth on Web 1.0’s plain old HTML. With one foot in Flash’s ActionScript and JavaScript were clearly the sign to jump in with both feet. This acquired knowledge and new creative energies have paid off handsomely for many designers.

CSS was the next logical choice that continues today as designers create smarter webpages and blogs with strong visual impacts. Even WordPress‘ own website correctly states: Code is Poetry. These skills have proved to be required tools for today’s successful graphic designer.

falling pinsThe next step may well be Apple’s Core Animation. Look closely at the new iPhone commercials - you will notice a bit of Core Animation: Google push pins drop from the sky onto a map. Good bye static pins!

This small example should really open up the interactive space for designers. Core Animation clearly shows just the tip of the graphical/animation iceberg that will become more robust moving forward.

Designers will jump on this new technology and adapt the necessary code to implement designs on phone and webpages. Apple needs to empower more than their die-hard programmers. Give designers the right tool for the job and we will see amazing interactive graphic elements on the web and our iPhones.

Tags: Core Animation, graphic design, code, iPhone, information design, trends

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