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Switched On: Fond memories of CES Press Conference #417
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment: CES Press Conference #417 [Cue montage of extreme demographic stock video. Panatoshnysung CEO Akira Steurenberger walks on stage.] Good morning and welcome to the 2005 CES press conference for Panatoshnysung. We are pleased to introduce our new amorphous corporate slogan, "Live the Digital Lifestyle." We believe that this will communicate our vision of empowered entertainment far better than our previous slogan, "The Digital Lifestyle. Live it." 2004 was a great year for us. We greatly expanded our brand, made progress with major retailers, and were the market share leaders in 50-inch+ DLP televisions that cost more than $3,500 and sell through the A/V specialty channel to Australian monkeys.
Switched On: Consumer electronics companies need to step up their software
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment: If you're looking at something in Las Vegas that is shiny and aglow, either you're standing next to one of the Parliament-puffing sexagenarians forging a deep personal bond with a slot machine or you're at the International Consumer Electronics Show. Particularly since the demise of Comdex that it helped to accelerate, CES has been positioned as the launchpad for all consumer technology in North America. While the mammoth convention includes a healthy representation of PC-related keynote speakers, such as Bill Gates, Carly Fiorina, and Craig Barrett, it remains to be seen whether the show will truly come into its own as the focal point for the consumer PC industry. Indeed, most of the agenda-setting for the future of the PC occurs at Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference and the Intel Developer Forum.
Switched On: TiVo should skip ahead and kill subscription fees
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment: The sworn enemy of the savvy consumer is the asterisk. This pesky punctuation can sweep the wind from the sails of enthusiasm around a product. At best, it connotes a complication. At worst, it signals that something here is too good to be true, the company is overpromising, and that you better watch your back – particularly the pocket in which your wallet rests. For TiVo, it's been an albatross preventing more consumers from enjoying their well-designed digital video recording product. The asterisk explains that – after you purchase a device - a subscription is required. TiVo, which was founded in 1997, did its business planning during the height of the dotcom era. The desire to create recurring revenue was a dream that reflected the overly optimistic investor enthusiasm at the time. TiVo saw some future threats, though. It knew that, despite its patent portfolio on recording digital video, other DVRs would come to market. Positioning TiVo as a service would allow it to work with a variety of products from different hardware companies. The company also had its eye on the cable and satellite industry, and a monthly fee would make it easy for those companies to resell a DVR service.
Switched On: iPod flash wouldn't realize downmarket dreams
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment: The last Switched On discussed how MP3 has been slow to come to many traditional audio products, with many home and car-based offerings from traditional audio companies pricing north of $1,000. Ironically, digital audio, which has been widely heralded as democratizing music, has remained elusively expensive for most consumers, and that assumes that they already have the requisite PC. Of course, MP3 is not really the villain. It's the storage media. While hard disks offer better price/performance than flash, they still have a minimum price hurdle that currently translates to about $250 for a portable player. This is why there's been so much discussion of the possibility of Apple entering the flash market. There are a few good reasons why Apple should stay away, though.
Switched On: Audio companies should plant seeds, not pick Apples
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column that covers everything related to digital convergence, the connected home, and all those other multimedia buzzwords that marketers are tossing out these days: Undoubtedly, the greatest impact that the digital music revolution has had upon consumer electronics has been portable devices. Whether you choose a flash memory player such as the Rio Cali, a 1-inch hard disk-based player like the Creative Zen Micro, or an 80GB Archos AV480 with DVR capabilities, there is a wide variety of form factor tradeoffs from a strong field of vendors available. While there are many fine portable players out there, however, the one to beat has been the iPod. Rarely have such a wide array of companies, including rivals such as Sony and Microsoft, worked so earnestly to unseat a market leader. The Game Boy and its progeny, for example, have attracted plenty of competition in their 15 years of marketplace dominance, but rarely have more than one or two appeared for any specific generation of the device. Rather, Game Boy competitors have been like the anonymous minions in old kung fu movies, patiently waiting in line for their turn to get clobbered.
Switched On: RoboSleepingIn
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column that covers everything related to digital convergence, the connected home, and all those other multimedia buzzwords that marketers are tossing out these days. Last week he looked at the Juice Box, Mattel's new personal video player for kids, this week he talks about the robot gap: One of the greatest gaps in popular technology application exists in robotics. Depending upon your definition, robots have been used for decades in manufacturing, helping to automate assembly lines. In terms of intelligent robots, though, the adoption has been much lower; in fact, they've been largely confined to the entertainment, toy, and education markets. From the high-tech Aibo to the lowbrow Robosapien (pictured at right), hobbyists embrace consumer robots not for what they can practically do. Indeed, many eight-year old boys will happily provide a belch at least as robust as Robosapien's for free (and dance as jerkily with enough sugar and caffeine).
Switched On: Mattel's Juice Box Enters The Matrix
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column that covers everything related to digital convergence, the connected home, and all those other multimedia buzzwords that marketers are tossing out these days. Last week he argued that Microsoft's Media Center Will Save Television, this week he looks at the Juice Box, Mattel's new personal video player for kids: While the portable video player may be a big question mark for adults, it has already become a hit in the children's market. It all started when Hasbro released the portable, disc-based VideoNow player, which used a proprietary format to play back grainy low-resolution monochrome video at a low frame rate. Despite skepticism that black-and-white cartoons had been passé since the days of Steamboat Willie (or at least the 1985 a-ha video for "Take On Me"), Hasbro sold 1.4 million units in the first year. It followed up with the VideoNow Color, which uses a proprietary format to play back grainy, low-resolution, color video at a low frame rate. Hasbro's arch-rival Mattel faced two choices – either release its experimental army of flesh-eating life-size Barbie robots or develop a competitive product. Given that the last time Mattel tried the Barbie robot army approach, a FOX producer discovered them and created the television series The Swan, Mattel's designers came up with the Juice Box.
Switched On: How Microsoft's Media Center Will Save Television
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column that covers everything related to digital convergence, the connected home, and all those other multimedia buzzwords that marketers are tossing out these days. Last week he looked at the "thin data", today he talks about how Microsoft's Media Center Will Save Television: Microsoft released the latest version of its Media Center software in the context of everything it's doing within entertainment media; the company emphasized music and video although nearly all of its products support photos as well. The 2005 edition of the not-ready-for-prime-time Windows XP front-end has a number of enhancements that range from easy photo cropping to limited support for high-definition TV. To demonstrate its digital music prowess, Microsoft played a clip from its hometown success Modest Mouse. Rodents, however, were not the only modest creatures at the launch. The Windows wizards repeatedly noted that offering media flexibility was the result of many companies' efforts, but that smacks of regulatory posturing. Media Center PCs and their immediate supporting "ecosystem" may be expensive, immature, and not even wholly reliable, but Microsoft deserves credit for being the first company to put together a holistic media-distribution system in the home that mostly works on commodity components.
Switched On: Change in the air for thin data
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a weekly column that covers everything related to digital convergence, the connected home, and all those other multimedia buzzwords that marketers are tossing out these days. Last week he looked at the iPod Photo's slippery slope towards video, today he writes about "thin data": Nowadays, most of Microsoft's competitors have reached détente with the company. TiVo has apparently tuned out Media Center and PalmOne has tossed its Pocket PC baiting into the charging cradle; both companies need to focus more of their attention on service providers. About twice a year, someone at that iPod company in Cupertino will quip about Longhorn, but mostly Microsoft has been on the defensive in the digital music space. How curious it was, then, to find a small band of flyer-wielding protesters outside Bill Gates's 2003 Consumer Electronics Show keynote from an MIT spinout called Ambient Devices. Their beef was Microsoft's SPOT initiative – since commercialized as MSN Direct - which uses FM subcarrier technology to beam thin data to fat watches. Ambient was turning as red as one of its stock orbs in a downturn over Microsoft co-opting its "glanceable" technology; basically, the devices respond to pager-like broadcasts of factoids such as sports scores, stock and weather updates, and (useless as this may be for a watch) the correct time.. Really, though, the idea of using FM subcarrier predated Ambient's revenge and reached back to the days of Yar's Revenge.
Switched On: The iPod Photo's slippery slope towards video
We really lucked out. We convinced our good friend Ross Rubin to write a new weekly column for us called Switched On which'll cover everything related to digital convergence, the connected home, and all those other multimedia buzzwords that marketers are tossing out these days. Fortunately, Ross knows how cut through all the marketese and get straight to the heart of the matter, as he does with his inaugural column about the new iPod Photo: There are many good reasons to pre-announce products in the technology industry. You get all the excitement of having something new without the burden of having to actually produce or manufacture it. However, you'd think that in an industry that is famous for such embarrassing pronouncements that 640K ought to be enough for anybody (well, maybe for your camera's firmware) or that there is a world market for about five computers (perhaps in every person's pockets), companies would tread cautiously in announcing that they're not going to create something. While that's not exactly been the case with Apple and a video-enabled iPod, the company's derision of portable video has certainly signaled that we shouldn't expect such a device before, say, the next major Earth-smashing asteroid threat. There are two primary reasons for Apple to create a video iPod. The first would be that the company believed that there is real demand for such capability, though Apple has signaled that it sees anything but (the second I'll discuss later). There are a number of strong arguments for this, including the user attention that video requires, the content acquisition dilemma, and the poor experience that a 3.5-inch LCD provides when compared with enjoying the Finding Nemo DVD on the 60-inch plasma in your Gulfstream V.
