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October 25, 2005

On Choosing a Digital Media (Music) Adapter

These devices stream your media files from a centralized storage over the home network to the player (also called Streaming Media Adapter or Wireless Media Player). They are available from a plethora of companies from the networking side (Linksys, Netgear, D-link), consumer electronics side (Philips, Sony) and the PC/peripheral side (HP, Creative, Turtle Beach). The devices use an underlying device discovery and communication standard called UPnP AV.

I have been storing all my music (and photos though this rant is all about music) on a linux file server at home for about six years now. It is great to be able to access my personal media from all the PCs throughout the house. For the music, it would be great to have a small, simple device to put in smaller rooms, say my bedroom or bathroom, that could access and playback the music. Twonky Vision's TwonkyVision Media Server (gotta tell them to come up with a better name) is a Linux-based UPnP media server that is available for free but the device player side of things is seriously lacking. The only device that comes close from a feature standpoing (though not quality) is the Linksys WMLS11B Digital Media Streamer...which seems to have been silently end-of-lifed. It no longer shows up on the Linksys site through the standard user interface (only through a search). The only thing right was the feature list and price. The speaker quality was terrible producing a tiny sound and the UPnP implementation was so basic it made browsing painful.

The rest of the products on the market either must be attached via RCA (or optical) jacks to a stereo system or are very bulky (read: expensive) such as the Philips Streamium boombox. My biggest complaint with the traditional music streaming adapters is the size of display -- 2 or 3 lines of an LCD. It is so time consuming to scroll through 200GB of compressed audio on 2 lines of a display. The only usefulness of such a product is with content that is programmed elsewhere like the great Pandora or Internet radio stations. It doesn't help that the devices don't have any Flash memory to store the remote list of music and its metadata but has to retrieve it each time. Perhaps this is a limitation of UPnP. The Creative Labs' product overcomes the display size issue by putting the UI on the RF remote control and they give you about ten lines. Unfortunately, it only attaches to an existing stereo system.

I still haven't come across the ideal product that offers all-in-one (wireless, audio amplification and speakers), quality sound, a good and quick UI ...oh, and all a decent price. If you find one, please comment.

Posted by raza at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2005

Labor of Love or Fool's Errand

For the last three and a half years, I have been helping architect and market a series of XML specifications called MusicPhotoVideo(tm) or MPV for short. The specifications are designed to enable the exchange and interoperability of collections of personal media. Devices that capture and create digital media automatically add certain metadata and consumers add personalized metadata on top of this. They assemble subsets of their collections into playlists or slideshows. Yet when transfering these collections from device to device or to a services, the metadata or collection information is lost. MPV has been trying to solve this.

As a consultant, deciding how much time to dedicate to these industry standard bodies is a tricky game to play. On the one hand, you are regarded as an expert in the field and have the opportunity to engage with experts from large corporations. However, a lot of the committee work is done for free (OSTA, the trade association creating MPV, does pay me for some specific marketing projects). And what is there to show after more than three years -- a total of six companies have released products and all in the camera arena. So much for an über metadata standard.

MPV was hit early on by two setbacks -- a competing standard (HighMat) and the iPod with its playlist XML. HighMat brought the usual fear, uncertainty and doubt to the photo and disc burning causing them to delay activity (on either spec) and the iPod focused software companies on hacking the plist1.0 spec or into pushing their own proprietary format (WMP, RealPlayer both have their own playlist formats). OSTA plowed on crispening our position of open and extensible vs. HighMat and has seen successes in the photo arena but the MPV Music Profile has gone nowhere and is now just an ancilliary to photo.

Perhaps it was too ambitious and lofty a goal and the industry has other pressing problems to solve (file format interoperability, piracy). In the photo industry, the notion of albums or collections has a valid place and solves many issues. Adios, über metadata standard.

Posted by raza at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)

October 13, 2005

On Being Too Early

I just went through six months of trying to raise money for my latest venture. From the onset, we knew it would be a difficult task because it, for the most part, a tool (not VC friendly) and involved Hollywood (not Sandhill friendly). Having said that, I had the most interest from VCs than any other start-up I have attempted. That is to say, I had the highest ratio of email-to-meeting or phone-call-to-meeting than any other start-up. This is because the idea is quite visionary and, as most VCs, said the vision is right on. To boot, we have an experienced and well-connected team and, more importantly, a large customer. It is just that, alas, the vision is too far out for them. They believe in the vision but not our timeframe.

And this is the story of my "start-up career". I have a CD-R that is a pantheon of my (failed) start-up efforts -- all the investor presentations, business plans, financial models. Some of them are laughable but most were just too far ahead of their time -- there is Iquna which was my first effort with a bunch of colleagues in Munich which was an early variation on RSS...there was a music effort in 1999 which is exactly what Snocap does today. Then there was Earthnoise, a video-sharing community and infrastructure company, when there were only 17 broadband users and the list goes on.

The capital raising effort involved contacting over fifty VCs which in turn led to about ten in-depth meetings. Not all is lost though as I know have a great rolodex of VCs. The start-up is still limping along with money slowly trickling in from the customer. It's a tricky game to play with an erratic cash flow making it hard to hire and pay employees or contractors. The hope is that this painful effort will raise the valuation later when it is the correct time to raise money.

Posted by raza at 9:41 AM | Comments (0)

October 6, 2005

Survived Fall CTIA

I survived the Fall CTIA at Moscone. Not an easy task with all the free booze on the show floor and the inordinate amount of parties. There wasn't much memorable though and I don't think the reason was the excessive partying. I was expecting to see Skype phones, merging of cellular with Wi-Fi. Instead, it was just the same ol' "mobile platform for delivery of blah, blah, blah." The companies in this space clearly have a messaging problem as I often couldn't tell what they were about or what differentiated them from their neighbor. Maybe it's me. Not much to talk about from what I saw on the floor. I was impressed with Qualcomm's Media Flo but am always leary of proprietary closed systems.

Posted by raza at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)