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Thursday, March 28, 2002 |
 Newsweek. On the reception Wesley Clark got at Esther's conference. Jeeze, five years ago military types were treated with contempt. The assumption was people with military experience couldn't think their way out of a paper bag. True BS. But it is amazing how quickly that can change with a little success.
>>>" One more star emerged from the conference. The after-dinner speaker Monday night was Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme commander of Europe. Now a private citizen hawking a book about his experiences, Clark gave a stirring speech about modern war, focusing on policy aspects, not the more geeky aspects of high-tech weaponry and its effect on the battlefield."<<<
9:25:45 PM 
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Reuters. A ruling by a Dutch appeals court to throw out charges against FastTrack (the P2P music sharing technology provider) could make it impossible for the music and movie industries to continue on their present course. Prepare yourselves for an all you can eat digital media subscription service coming to a PC near you. As I pointed out below, it's inevitable. This ruling just accelerates it.
5:29:02 PM
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Adam writes about Instant Outlining.
2:28:22 PM
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Paolo's very stylish work-space. Nice.
1:14:27 PM
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Another reason why filling personal storage capacity is the key to next gen digital media business models: bandwidth to the home isn't on a fast doubling rate. It's been frozen (read: held hostage) by regulated monopolies that are still trying to figure out how to insert themselves as the toll-collectors of digital media distribution (remember ITV in 93-94?). For the foreseeable future, on-demand digital media systems are a pipe-dream.
In the meantime, media companies should provide me Gb of music and movies, charge me a monthly fee, and let me decide how often, when, and how I utilize the media I store. Keep it up to date. Max out my DSL or cable connection piping new content to me every night. Give me the tools to sort through it and organize it. Give me reviews, playlists, and insight into what I should watch and listen to. Help me manage my time -- the only truly scarce resource as we blunder into the 21st Century.
11:38:45 AM
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BBC. MIT scientist develops robo-reporter to get footage of front-line battles in world hot-spots.
10:51:46 AM
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Here is a local Boston company getting squashed by the rapid increase in personal storage capacity.
8:53:33 AM
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The browser in five years. Wayne has a screen shot of the new RealOne media player. He notes that there is an integrated browser. I think this is where we are headed: apps that integrate the browser as a component in a richer environment. In five years, the stand alone browser will be seen as impoverished. What are the drivers of this?
- The ability to move a service to icon status on the desktop and out of the overcrowded bookmarks menu.
- The desire to combine native desktop apps with web apps in the same interface.
- The need to improve the browsers basic functionality beyond what is provided by a sluggish monopoly provider.
8:19:23 AM
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Storage and copyrights. There is little doubt that the current copyright system, and how copyright owners sell their poducts, is in freefall. The reason for this is the rapid growth in storage capacity.
The PC is, and will continue to be, a device that augments an individual's mind. It provides mental leverage. It makes people more productive. The PC also self selects users. People who have a voracious appetite for extending and enhancing their minds use PCs.
In this model, unutilized capacity is an anathema. Spare processor cycles, unused storage space, and unused bandwidth are an invitation to expand a PC users mind. Like an entrepreneur, the mind finds ways to fill or use this excess. This is perhaps why Americans have a love affair with the PC and have resisted using interactive phones. American's are entrepreneurs. To us, a smart phone looks like a child's toy when compared to the PC's power and capacity to extend the mind.
With this in mind, it's easy to see that the real driver behind the attack on digital media copyrights is the rapid expansion of storage space on PCs. It is doubling faster than Moore's law. The standard $2000 PC today sells with 120 Gb of storage space more than twice what was available on the standard PC last year at this time. This unused space asks, no demands, to be filled. What are people filling it with? Music. Movies. Digital media.
The entertainment industries greatest fault is that it isn't finding ways to fill this unused capacity with their products. They want to keep a system in place that slowly dribbles digital media to customers in a tightly managed way, in spite of the fact that customers demand, and can easily absorb, a firehose of digital media. Until the entertainment industry finds a way to open the floodgates they will be the losers in this battle. Personal leverage through the use of technology is the greatest trend of all time. Fighting that is not just stupid, it's insane.
7:36:08 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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