Category: technology

The New Nickel-Tube: Google and YouTube

So Google purchased YouTube. US$1.65B in shares, paper-work money or an entry in an SEC filing.

In cold-hard numbers: YouTube has a reported 100 million viewers per day; based on the purchase price, each view equates to US$0.0452 over a year. Or, another way to look at it: as long as Google “earns” US5c for each pair of eyeballs for a few minutes, within a year it is financially ahead.

Considering the current cost of both text-advertising and TV advertising; and the oncoming onslaught from competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo!, US5c per view seems rather attractive.

Opportunity cost of not owning YouTube: a competitor would have purchased it, first. Fox had already purchased the young Myspace eyeballs; and Microsoft is serious about the online world and has all those XBoxen, Vistas, Zunes to capture other eyeballs. YouTube was obviously on the block for sale, and each viewer is valued at US$0.0452. US$1.65B is not too much compared to a competitor getting the brand. YouTube maybe the “text breakout” and single product weakness that dogged Google in recent months. (Robert Scoble has a perspective on this, too)

Looking into my crystal tube: Google’s Video Future: It is all about about the advertising. Potential changes to Google Adsense:

  • Text links inside an ad (transparent text on bottom); through to top+tail video or sound bytes
  • Throw more smart maths at technology to recognise the content inside video and then attach appropriate a like advertisement
  • The original publisher of youtubes (another verb coming on, here?) self-categorises, so advertisements could similarly be targeted.
  • For youtubes posted on blogs or other non-Google web sites; understanding the context would permit smarter targeted Adsense ads

Instead of crawling the internet, Google is becoming the internet. This is rather a scarily thought that crossed my mind when reading this Wired article (The Information Factories) on their new data center in Washington state, US. Ultimately, it may have been cheaper to buy YouTube than create a backing-store to hold indexed video and sound.

So next: watch Apple and Google. Not sale or purchase, just closer ties. Apple needs the content, Google needs the hardware. Microsoft is the common competitor.

PROCEDURE DIVISION. RUN END_OF_WEEK. Stop Run.

Developing systems in COBOL is the next major leap in Agile programming. Or maybe not. Returning to serious programming:.

First topic: Why Microsoft’s Zune scares Apple to the core

“Apple faces the prospect of competing not with the Zune alone, but with a mighty Windows-Soapbox-Xbox-Zune industrial complex.”

Speaking to a new XBox360 user on Friday, he stated that the Media Center-XBox360 interconnect works just like Apple stuff. Seemlessly. The Microsoft Industrial Complex that all competitors fear. Adding the advertising announcements, which also state the platforms, it is going to be an interesting 2007.

“The iPod is the soul of Apple’s entire business. Apple has been relatively successful at winning converts from Windows to Mac OS X, for example, in part because its whole product line basks in the glow of iPod’s success, hipness and ubiquity.”

Microsoft has started to come out the IT geekdom of making things more complex for the sake of making things more complex, and entering the world of coolness by design: XBox360, Zune, Live.com.

And Zune is going to be a range of products. Wireless is the killer technology; whilst initially hobbled by peer-to-peer only; in the future this could really go over the top.

Wireless connectivity, initially peer-to-peer, fortells significant platform innovation:

  • imagine playlist compatibility checking and proximity checking. find your perfect partner, just by the music you like!
  • zunehubs; retails stores where you can go to a safe location, buy more points and get free music
  • last.fm + zunetags automatically uploaded
  • go to a live music gig; a zunehub emits sample/rare music tracks for attendees. Or maybe points for attending.

Would I buy one? Probably not. Firstly, no availability outside the USA. My SCRLTT (the red MINI) has an iPod connection inside; and I have yet to fill my 40Gb Revision 2 iPod. Then again, I am not in the target demographic.

Secondly, from the sublime to the workoriented. In the now distant past (earlier in 2006), I was a major spreadsheet user: Excel was used as much as Outlook as a means of decision making and communication. Now disconnected from the old job, I still have a need for spreadsheets: but not big old clunky spreadsheets.

Enter Google Spreadsheets and something I only tried yesterday: EditGrid. Save my spreadsheet as .xls from Google, open in EditGrid and I am away.

From Team and Concepts in Hong Kong, it has some extra coolness missing in Google Spreadsheets. Remote data (share prices, exchange rates) NetVibes integration. And it looks better.

Thirdly, as predicted here, Microsoft is releasing the latest “CTP” of Visual Studio code named Orcas as a VirtualPC package.

So, into the 10th month of the year. Hoping for a better month than the last, this end of the blog-posting and wishing well to all readers.

New York Times Reader Trumps Adobe Reader

The recently released New York Times Reader (http://www.nytimes.com/mem/reader_regi.html) is what the Adobe PDF Reader should be today. Small, data-driven, dynamic, interactive and skinable.

Scott Hanselman states this is a precursor to WPF based RSS readers. I am going to go one further and state this is the future of dynamic publishing for large, paper-based publishers. A territory traditionally marked by Adobe as their home soil.

Adobe, the old leader in this space with PDF, has missed the ferry to New York and may be stuck on the island for a while. Even Macromedia (now married to Adobe) has missed this boat.

Small:

Times Reader will requires .Net Framework 3.0. Today this is a hassle. In the future, with Vista and wider deployments the base Framework, the comparative size of the downloads will become very noticeable.

The installer is less than 1Mb, installing an application that is 2.5Mb.

The Adobe Reader is larger (21.5Mb).

Data-driven:

Rather than the content being bound up with the presentation, something that IT professionals constantly consider bad architecture, with the Times Reader these are kept separate.

The display resizes correctly, but within the bounds of the New York Times look-and-feel. Designing for this style of layout is not simple today: it requires the smarts of a developer to generate. I believe there is a market to wire backend services to custom publisher-centricinterfaces in a mechanism non-experienced programming designers can grok.

Maintaining the ownership of the content, even in a creative-commons mantra world, is critical. There is a significant investment in infrastructure to run a publisher, and this must be paid for. Adding value is the only way a large publisher can charge for their premium content. Whilst the Adobe Reader has mechanisms for, cough, DRM, inbuilt – it is another barren wasteland in daily publishing worlds.

Dynamic:

The central dogma/mantra of the Adobe Reader is to retain the original designer’s intent (including fonts) Acrobat does have limited reflow and resizing ability; mainly tacked onto the Reader to permit accessibility. There is an under utilised feature of Acrobat called the Article Tool. Ever used it? It has been in there since the very early versions.

The Times Reader permits resizing of the application and correctly reflows the text; in a composition mechanism that Adobe has living in InDesign, InCopy – even PageMaker. Why can’t these be bolted into an Adobe Reader? InDesign could be turned into the frontend design tool; Coldfusion is at the backend. Maybe this is too old ground for Adobe?

Interactive:

Searching in the Times Reader is a pleasure, and surprises you. With dynamic searching; that is the relevant articles appear under the search box as you type is way excellent. The Topic Explorer is worth the price of entry, alone. It reminds me of Apple’s MCF/Hotsauce/Project X.

Topic Explorer

Skinable:

New York Times owns the interface, lock-stock-and-barrel. The experience is theirs. Being a newspaper of record, this is critical. To change the interface to match their corporate standard is something that the Adobe Reader should permit.

As Scott Hanselman states, the Times Reader is the current poster child for Microsoft’s WPF technologies. The only arrow I can aim at its heart is the Windows XP/Vista only nature of the Reader. Come on Microsoft, release a MacOS version! Having .Net on the Mac platform is probably the friendliest Unix you guys are going to get since Xenix.

It also happens to trump the old king of type and presentation: Adobe. Will Apollo save Adobe’s reputation? Let’s hope its Apollo 11, not Apollo 13.

foreach { blogpost in blogpoststhisweek } closeloop;

Panasonic does a deal with Connexion, specifically so you can GSM/GPRS whilst Qantas flights.

Peter Jackson to direct “The Hobbit” movie? Oh the horror!

Parallels for Mac is now at build 1910. For those who want to keep their feet in both worlds, you can run Windows XP and Vista at the same time.

Vista RC1++ (alias build 5728), the “show and shine” / “spit and polish” or most correctly, the Rule#12 “Fit and Finish” releases have started.

Microsoft Office 2007 Beta (and the followup Beta 2 Technical Release) is now available for Australians to download. Australia was missing for the first month or so.

I may have killed SVG off too soon, or at least taken an “Adobe-centric” view; and AndrewS comments that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Flash is bogus. Reading some of the posts from the FlashForward Conference, the current, modern mechanism is to use SWFObject.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) Deprecated.

RIP Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

Deprecated equals don’t use it. The momentum in the web-world has slowed to grinding halt.

Whilst SVG is a W3C technology, not owned by Adobe, the original specification came from PGML.

Sad, there was much potential for SVG. All it would have taken was Adobe to make a standard programming model and builder application and SVG really could have taken off. SVG is an example of good technology becoming cannon fodder, lost in the charge to an enemy: rather than technology being used for good.

Today, we have two XML-based model for generating rich interfaces: MXML and XAML. One is in the operating system and a part of a download, the other requires a bolt-on application in the browser.

SVG pre-dated these technologies by some years. A standardised widget library; extension into 3D and co-operation by large companies could have advanced the world of rich, connected applications.

Standard file formats invite competitiveness in software applications. Consider open, standardised file formats like world-free trade. The most efficient and best survive. A darwinian selection for the best.

Better luck next time.

Desktop metaphor, Gone Wild!

Some months ago, BumpTop appeared from Anand Agarawala. “Physical Desktop Interface” using physics to replicate and show what will be possible in the future.

Today, Sony has this cool video demonstration of the future of the desktop expanding from the laptop screen to the desktop.

With the emergence of devices such as holographic projectors, the ability to show light outside a device without heavy and battery draining optics will drive the user-interface beyond the flat screens we have today.

TechZone recently published an article looking at games technology, and its application to the desktop.

My opinion is that we have yet to see the next “metaphor”; the power and the base abilities are there in the operating systems; but the application is languishing behind what is possible.

Here comes the future.

Our Valuable Virtual Meta-verse Future

In 1988 Mitchell Waite sent me a small paperback to read: Vernor Vinge‘s True Names. I was a mere, lowly Hypertalk programmer from Adelaide, South Australia. He was an important person.

This book has stuck in the neurons, and now the virtual is becoming real. It really goes to show how hard science fiction depicts a future that current living humans will not see. Based on some work I was doing to Tricks of the Hypertalk Masters, creating what would be now known as a “skin” over CompuServe; the book was just science fiction.

True Names published in 1981, describes a world called “Other Plane” were people interact online. The premise of separating your online from your physical indentity; and the concept of a future Singularity pervade my personal world-view today.

Thanks Mitch.

Now, what does this have to do with today?

Second Life. It’s more than the technology; it is also about the platforms involved. It is also how it impacts real people: such as Dave Wallace. Second Life is what I visualised as “Other Plane”

Watch the first half of this video: Jim-Cory-SecondLife.wmv, Lang.NET Symposium.

The first half of the video is light on technology; but heavy on the economics, and wider-world impacts of the virtual world. The user creation rate (Writeness in the Read/Write equation) is over 60%; compared to the web which is less than 10%.

A key reason seems to be the economic value attached to virtual objects scripted in Second Life. As items in the SecondLife virtual world are intellectual property; an item can be created, sold and purchased.

Ensuring that intellectual property is valued is going to be one of the toughest challenges for upcoming generations.

Is the scripting in Second Life the new HyperCard?

On10.net

On10.net.

Microsoft on design; but more than slicing and dicing Photoshop. The big kahuna/picture. More than what it looks initially too.

I am an avid watcher of Google’s EngEd videos (eg: Grid-based Integrated Bioinformatics Systems for High Throughput), and Microsoft’s Channel9 videos (eg: Model driven development in Dynamics AX); these provide a visual perspective on from people who are involved in stuff you may not ever need to know about. But learning is good.

Now waiting for Channel 11 that goes up to 11.

Into that goodnight, GoLive?

A part of the Acrobat 8 launch today, Creative Suite Premium is getting a revamp.

And not just with Acrobat 8. Goodbye GoLive, hello Dreamweaver 8.

GoLive Systems, a small Hamburg Mac-only developer, was purchased by Adobe before the dotcom boom. Sadly, it might have been the boom’s first casualty as it languished behind Dreamweaver.

No surprises here.