Observations from a Hill

Amazon mp3 widgets

Amazon certainly has the affiliate program down to a science. It will be interesting to see if this translates into popularity for their mp3 store...and ultimately dollars...

The new affiliate widgets are pretty cool...but, even with the wizard interface, take a bit of time to create.

I suppose the amortize the streaming costs within this widgets into various products and services but it still costs. Amazon offers a whopping 10% to affiliates for these sales (twice what iTunes offers). How much is left for them once they pay the labels/artists?

Sony acquires Gracenote ...finally

It was inevitable that someone would acquire Gracenote...particularly once Macrovision snatched up AMG. The big surprise, of course, was that it was Sony. Sony's digital music forays have often been closed environments (a la iPod) that failed.There's a ton of hate for Gracenote out there (still...as can be seen on the comments of this article) and Sony after the rootkit fiasco also has garnered its fair share of detractors. After the announcemnent hit, I read through comments on many blogs such as techcrunch, I was amazed at how many people were worried about Sony/Gracenote "spying" on them...seems so strange in the era of last.fm, MOG and ilike where playcount tracking is part of everyday life...where people put up badges of the cool stuff their currently listening to on all their social networking sites...

This aspect of the acquisition doesn't bother me in the least. I just find it odd that such a consumer brand would acquire a b-to-b service...sure Sony has other divisions that sell to business but i think this is the first b-to-b service from Sony.

On the other hand, it is not like Sony had anything going in the digital music space...as of late, their ATRAC format was a doozer, Sony Connect was shut down, the PSP has low sales compared to DS, their MP3 players are non-existant in US. Acquistion is the only route for them, really....

Yahoo! Media Player with HTML playlist

With the release of the Yahoo! Media Player there is a bit on an evolution of the XSPF playlist format into pure HTML...I wonder if this means that XSPF is abandoned by users and developers...Not that it was actively used anyway...sure Yahoo! and a few other websites like MusicDNS use it but the big music players like iTunes, WMP, Winamp still use m3u or their proprietary formats.

Camilo Sesto - Melina

Still, it is an elegant implementation as I just drop in a little javascript from Yahoo and then add anchor tag poining to a song...like Camilo's old ditty...( a little buggy as it produces some drawing issues with Movable Type 4 as you can see on the bottom of this page).

Convicto on Brightcove

Here I am playing with Brightcove's Pay Media feature...it allows content owners to protect WMV files and monetize them as pay downloads or rentals. It is a very easy way to monetize. One can even add banner ads to the player to have additional monetization through traditional banner ads. Payment is handled by Brightcove and disbursed to the content owners via PayPal. Easy ...nifty...I still don't like the asset/title/lineup paradigm in Brightcove but I assume large content owners find it useful.

Convicto

In the early '90s, I tried my hand at making some short films. Amateurish stuff really but a tremendous experience both in the complexity of creating stories as well as producing them. I made many mistake but definitely learned a lot -- from using the Bolex 16mm cameras to editing on flatbed editing stations -- all rendered obsolete by this all digital world.

Presented here for the first time, my first short - Convicto -- inspired by the death penalty sentence given to Robert Alton Harris, the first death penalty in California in about 25 years.

Ticketmaster Affiliate program

TIcketmaster started its affiliate program and it is disappointing to find out how low-tech it is...in its current incarnation, it is impossible to create there widgets programmatically. One has to create one like this:

and then update it from time to time. It is impossible to dynamically create widgets based on artist or venue metadata as these use some arcane IDs only known to TicketMaster...still, its a step in the right direction.

songza

Songza is a very interesting music site...or would you consider it a playback application? This is as clean an interface as you could want...it lets you search for band or song and it gives an amazing number of results ...clicking on each result, gives the user various options (playback, embed, email ,etc.)...

ultimately, nothing more than a toy...

not bad but I have to think too much...in other words, i have to think of what I want to hear (no hints from looking at my collection)...and the system doesn't give me recommendations a la Pandora on subsequent songs...

a little more investigation leads me to believe it is a YouTube de-videofier...i can't tell if ALL results come from there but there are strong indications it is...the Shitty Shitty Band Band video I posted a while back shows up as the lone result for this band which is way less than what shows up on Google...

Video "Access"

My kids are installed in this beautiful house in Patzcuaro, Michoacan in Mexico. Patzcuaro is a old colonial town of about 50,000 high up in the hills of Michoacan about 4-5 hours West of Mexico City.

Flicker set of them hanging in Patzcuaro and vicinity

I skyped in to check in on them and they were watching the Simpsons Movie which they had bought for $5 at the mercado. The night before they watched Ratatouille. The quality isn't so good but it is easier to watch the new releases in a small village in Mexico than here in the US.

Internet Tablet - Nokia N800

I received a Nokia n800 Internet tablet sample today ...it is a fun device though only for early adopters...By far the coolest feature is the ability to control my music collection over wifi. I have a network-attached storage in the basement with zillions of GBs of music...in the livingroom, I have a Roku Soundbridge M1000 attached to my stereo...the hassle with the Roku out of the box is that it has a two-line LCD display...rifling through long lists of artists and albums was tiresome. To boot, the remote was infrared...so I have to be relatively close to the Roku to control it with the original remote control.

The Nokia N800 has a software called Media Streamer (which I had to download and install, mind you) which finds my NAS through UPnP (the great TwonkyMedia server is installed on it) I can then use the larger UI (ten lines) to rifle through my collection, select albums, songs or playlists to add to the song queue and send the music to any UPnP "renderer" ...in this case the Roku Soundbridge but I can all send the music to play to any PC in the house. Now I can lounge on the couch and control my music collection...It even shows the cover art and all...no need for an expensive Sonos!

The original software that came with the N800 (the creatively named Media Player) crashes trying to load my collection (huge) so I had to search out and install the aforementiond Media Streamer which worked like a charm...they're both from Nokia so I am not sure why they don't have more distinct names and aren't both pre-loaded onto the device. Even the Media Streamer UI could use some improvements...it is easy to use but they don't make use of the screen's real estate very well. They could add buttons for often used tasks since there is a fair amount of UI real estate.

Another cool feature of the Internet tablet is its ability to Skype...very cool...I was pleasantly surprised to find the device has a cool video camera...but I wonder why they didn't support the video in Skype...One can use the video camera with Google Talk but I don't know anyone who is on Google Talk (other than Google employees) and can't find another software that uses the camera...

The device is Linux based so presumably developing software is straightforward. However, the installed base is miniscule and I can't see many (brand name) developers focusing any effort on releasing software for it. Well, at least it makes a cool remote control.

Buying a Nokia Phone

Have you ever tried? I am a big believer in unlocked phones...which are not readily available in the standard consumer electronics store as they are all supplied and locked by the carriers. So i drove to the outer sunset today to hit some of those small-time wireless shops on Irving St that sell unlocked cell phones...came home empty...

it is really hard to settle on one as I find myself paralyzed by too many choices...it is hard to find the right cell phone with all the necessary features (of which there's many now) at a
price one can swallow...to complicate matters, after doing some research on the Internet and settling on a few possible models, one then finds these shops don't have all in stock...

given the increased amount of email and SMS, the qwerty keyboard is moving higher up on the feature list...from nokia, this leaves me with the N70 or the N61i...both of which they didn't have...i played with the N95, N93, N80 and N76 which are all cool phones but lack the qwerty...

and then there's the price...i don't know if I can swallow the $750 for the N95 (i have a long track record of losing phones)...moving down from there price-wise leaves one with some cool choices as well (N93, N80) but as you start getting into the $500 range, one starts thinking iphone...but the lack of 3G gets ya...or does it? it is one of those features that you don't necessarily crave but once you have you wonder how you lived without it.

i checked out the sony ericssons at the store but they're short on wifi...which will start becoming necessary once Skype is ported to all OSes including Symbian...Sony Ericsson has cool phones if you're focused just on music (walkman) or just on photo(cybershot) but lack in the other departments...

arrrrrrrrrgh! iphone, is it?

iPhone and 3G

Presumably, every techie blogger has written extensively about the iPhone by now. My interest the iPhone turned out to be out of necessity not any passion for Apple products or techie curiosity:

I lost my cell phone riding around on my scooter.

Buying a new cell phone is proving to be a very difficult task. Cell phones integrate so many important technologies that are becoming mission critical. It is becoming extremely difficult to decide which are the most important to you and it is becoming impossible to find a single device that does all well. Mission critical features:

- good phone capabilities (needless to say)
- QWERTY keyboard
- 3MP camera
- high-speed data (3G)
- easy integration with existing email accounts
- solid java VM
- good music player
- WiFi (to save on the data plan)
- plethora of 3rd party apps

I had expected the iPhone to be the device with all the necessary features ...for under $500, that is...it seems to be the best at those features it does have but is missing the 3G and, for now, the 3rd party applications. It probably is still the one to buy as there doesn't seem to be a phone that does do all these things...well, for under $800 like some of those Nokia N-series phones...$800 for a phone...what a notion!

Mamireinas widgets

The Latin American market coupled with the Latino market in the US is becoming an increasing large target market for broadband Internet application as the youth market with broadband and mobile access has increased dramatically over the last few years. Sites that are advertising-based are becoming increasingly lucratable like www.mamireinas.com with its cool widgets:

IODA's Promonet

no discipline when it comes to writing here. not that there is a shortage of things to say or things happening in my professional life...just no discipline. I have been playing with IODA Promonet. It is a cool start but is a service just crying for some sort of API. You can browse and preview music from independent artists and labels and then blog about them... here is a plug for Sonny...

Let's see if this works:

Download "Way To Go" (mp3)
from "This Is My Story, This Is My Song"
by Sonny Smith
Jackpine Social Club

Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at eMusic
Buy at Napster
Buy at Rhapsody
Buy at GroupieTunes

HD over-the-air

I bought the Pinnacle USB HD tuner stick and played around with it over the weekend. Friends in Europe have been using this type of device for some years now on their laptops since space is limited and stations have been transmitting DVB-T for yonks. However, I never saw much use of one here...

On the positive side, there are way more HD channels broadcasting over the air than I thought these days. It was a welcome surprise to see so many channles (about 30) available over-the-air in digital format. In particular, PBS has multiplexed five channels over their allotted frequency...this is very nice as there is an all-day kids channel and an all-day World news channel (BBC and the like). In addition, Univision which transmits from Vallejo (can barely see anything on analog) comes in nice and clear ...so I can watch Mexican soccer (though Cruz Azul, my favorite team, was eliminated over Thanksgiving weekend)

Otherwise, the product pretty much sucks...The software crashes quite often and takes about 30-45 seconds to initialize (not like a TV). Performance is also an issue. The channels very often drop frames and get all blocky. Strangely, the software default was to NOT use hardware acceleration. I turned it on but I couldn't really see much improvement. The software that interfaces to the device has an incredibly lame UI. Here are some examples:

]]> The list of recordings only shows the first letter of the day of the week so Saturday is indistinguishable from Sunday. The columns for each field can't be changes..It also doesn't grab the important metadata such as Title and add to the list!

another example is the calendar...for some reason, it only shows six days of the week!! Saturday is missing in the UI and I can't make the window bigger

The device crashed after the first scheduled recording (I set it to record 4 football games over the weekend) and I came back to find it couldn't find the hardware after the first recording). The default settings of the software are to have the recordings to be at the highest quality. Although this is seemingly good, a recording of a football game (3 and 1/2 hours) ended up being 25GB!!! So, I ran out of free space on my laptop. I didn't realize this till Sunday. I finally changed the default settings and ended up with a football game in 4GB. I have two other files that are 25GB and 18GB that I need to re-compress to a more manageable format (or buy a blu-ray recorder along with stock in hard drive companies!!)

The EPG doesn't let you sort by genre or search so to set up a recording of an event when you don't know the channel (which was my case with the football) is very painful. You have to check each channel individually.

The good news is that it is supported by Media Center but not out of the box. One has to download a different software from the Pinnacle website for this. I just discovered this so might attach the device to the Media Center and play around. The Media Center UI for EPG and recording is quite nice so it may change my view of the product.

Playing with Brightcove

overly complex user interface but I suppose not so much so for professional video web syndication dudes. Some new concepts like Lineups...I got too lazy to act like an affiliate for my own videos so I could play around with the syndication features.