What Does Pownce Have to Do With Bogus Internet Movie Rentals?

Maybe my point about Pownce got lost in a larger, broader, and more academic argument. That's fine; I'm glad to see Ted Dziuba (yes, uncov) pretty much made the same point about Pownce. He has a larger audience than I do. My larger point, of course, is that we're not always the hiking-in-redwoods, biking-to-work, inventing-computers-in-the-garage, tossing-whole-industry-paradigms-out-the-window-with-our-wicked-code folks that our narrative says we are. We're as ridiculous, self-absorbed, and self-referential as the folks we take swipes at on our blogs.

What does this have to do with Internet movie rentals? Well, Internet movies -- and VOD in general -- is one of those always-coming-never-here technologies. Even if does arrive, it'll be 10-15+ years into the (U.S.) broadband-penetration era, meaning it will kind of dribble out the exhaust pipe of innovation as an incremental use case long after its revolutionary potential has disappeared. But Netflix (with LG) and Apple are back to the baccarat table for another round of tech's most pleasant losing gamble.

While Apple and Netflix have made little gains, big ol' Safeway is now selling a wad of recent hit films at 2-for-$6. On DVD. With a non-revocable license to watch in perpetuity, carry around, re-encode (if you're "careful" how you do it), and pass on to one's heirs for the next 1000 years. Or you can just rent the films for $0.99 - $1.49. The studios aren't going to hassle Safeway about "$3=watch forever" pricing (and heck maybe Safeway is paying $2 for those DVDs), because it's a retail supermarket. They understand it and it makes sense in their world. The same reason Joe Teenager can sign up with a record club and, if he works his deals optimally, pay a better per-track price than Apple does (maybe 30% of retail).

The house will have the advantage as long as tech keeps thinking like a player (and believing its own mythos) and not like the casino (the other that it tells stories about). Who's the "house" ? ... well, studios, producers, broadcasters, cable networks, telcos, CE makers (guess what, they don't think of 'tech innovation' the way software folks do), even government ... and that's just a start.

I made this point before. Now I'm gonna take it a step further, and talk about one way to move forward.

If you're an innovator in one of these areas, and you need to get a foot in the door, take on another perspective in addition to your own. Try and find a place to live in the other industry's model of the world (their value chain/web/network). I don't mean philosophically, I mean literally. Think of it as hacking their worldview, if it makes you feel better.

Here are some examples:

• When ecast needed legal clearance to get running with a digital library of songs in 1999, "MP3" and "Internet download" were conversation killers with record labels. ecast needed to be a jukebox, don't worry about the gears and levers inside, nothing to see here, move along. There were some hiccups in licensing until they shifted to the latter approach. Record labels know what a jukebox is and how they make money. Problem solved.
• Mediabolic ended up taking a different course, but at one point when the firm was working on  VOD with a set-top box, they looked into subleasing excess digital broadcast spectrum time for moving their data. What does that mean? It meant they would have been in some real sense a broadcaster using TV spectrum to reach customers. Which is a whole different conversation with content owners from the "renegade startup conversation."
• When Skip Interaction focused on travel data management, and mobile transactions, I advocated becoming a travel agency. While Skip would not likely have made much (any?) money on bookings, it changes the conversation with airlines, travel agencies, and companies whose employees travel a lot. Skip would have appeared as a "known" entity in the industry. All of a sudden, instead of requiring custom arrangements to do anything, Skip would have had a huge pile of boilerplate data and access to work from.

These examples are just from my personal experience -- I'm certain that this strategy is not at all uncommon. But we don't hear about it a lot, because it doesn't fit the plotline we want.

Post-structuralism for Dollars in Silicon Valley

On the eve of one of our grand theatrical spectacles, featuring one of our industry's undisputed showmen as emcee, let's pause for a minute and imagine that we've got our mental map of the tech world all wrong. We've been drawing lines not just in the wrong places, but where the model isn't about lines at all. As a result, we're misunderstanding ourselves and a lot of other stuff. And, since the economy doesn't care about our degree of self-awareness, it means we all -- entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, designers, marketers, journalists -- are leaving big money on the table.

I'm hoping that last sentence might catch someone's attention, especially that of the VCs who have a lot to gain or to lose based on their understandings or misunderstandings.

Where do we draw lines by mistake? We live in a structuralist mythology that we make up because it's easy and it's a shared set of beliefs that we can use to argue (in circles sometimes):

• The "new" versus the "old" is of course the big daddy duality
• How about Client / server, Startup / enterprise
• Geek / management, Engineering / marketing
• East Coast / West Coast, Stanford / Berkeley
• Open source / proprietary
• Content / code
• NorCal / SoCal, Hollywood / Silicon Valley
• Entertaining / Functional

These just scratch the surface -- you can probably think of fifty pairs of your own now, along with examples of how they are convenient, self-reinforcing, and yet ultimately invalid.

They are a cliche, but they own the conversation. I want to talk about the last few pairs: think of the narratives we make and live inside, as regards Northern California vs. Southern California, Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley, and Entertaining vs. Functional.

Now look at Steve Jobs, an entertainer who could get his fans to poke out their own eyes and get in line for an iPatch. Apple is theater, the Apple store a set, a Disney experience for people who feel superior making snarky comments about Disney. Do you really think computer geniuses work at the Genius Bar? "Space may be the final frontier / But it's made in a Hollywood basement" -- and in this case the fans have already reserved tickets to the sequel.

But, wait! I'm not bashing Apple or Steve -- that would be buying into the very dualism I'm pointing up here...

Now consider also: we have another award show, the Crunchies, coming up. Before you laugh, remember this event isn't intended as a joke. And donating money to charity doesn't make you serious, just generous.

We have our gossip writers, our A-lists and even our stunts that get a third of the Valley looking self-consciously at the floor, embarrassed at having to wonder whether Carly Fiorina or Leah Culver has set feminism back further, a third watching our great-standup-with-the-dirty-mouth pretending they all get the joke, and another third just saying the heck with it and jumping on.

Ya know, maybe we're not so far away from our SoCal cousins as we think. And just to keep it clear: I'm not saying there's a middle position, a compromise, where we're all gonna end up. I'm saying that the duality itself is a fiction. So there is no middle. Until we get this, we're going to continue to have a heck of a time getting some things right. Or making money with them!

Like what? Like things that aren't quite code and aren't quite content. We never got SVG right, because it didn't fit into the categories we thought made up the world.

Is a Flash media code or content? When my mom gets an e-card, she thinks it's content, not an app.

We don't have a cross-platform vector graphics standard in 2008 (!) ... because practical vector graphics in the real world means some logic as well as geometry.

Why can music acts sell (via the carriers) all manner of wallpapers and ringtones for cold hard cash to technically unsophisticated folks, and we still can't get the average person to install or run a mobile app on their phone for free? We're playing that game wrong and we can't see it.

We have every manner of "media center" -- hardware, software, open, closed, expensive, free. Even Microsoft has been in on the act for five years now. And I still don't know any regular folks at all who use any of them.

We have tons of great ideas on the shelves because we can't understand 'the other' well enough to make the deals we need on content licensing. (They don't understand us either.)

Three quarters of "Web 2.0" is not about any kind of functionality at all; it's not even about interaction design. It's about the glossiest thinnest veneer of user experience. It's about buttons and realistic smoke ... the kind of thing that some folks refer to as "production values." Moreover, three quarters of it is free and ad-supported. Not unlike most radio and television. Unlike radio and television, its reach is minimal. Ask your aunt in Duluth what del.icio.us is. Before we spend another session making fun of the studios for not realizing where their business really is, we might think about what an adjustment in ad rates will do to our own.

One last time for the folks in the cheap seats: it's not about right or wrong, steak or sizzle. We're just not where we like to think we are. We're somewhere else. To get a better idea where we are, we need to do some demolition on our usual Monday morning narratives. It's uncomfortable. The good news is, there's a ton of opportunity. And eventually it feels good to realize we've outgrown the notion that the world is flat.

Now go to Macworld and enjoy the, uh, show.

Lifecasting will be Prevalent, and has a Down-To-Earth Future

Lifecasting is one of those things that is interesting on a theoretical, academic, political, and artistic level. Yet, right now, it's pretty boring in "real life."

But there is a big bourgeois, commercial opportunity coming for lifecasting, and with that will come low prices, ubiquity, and all sorts of new content also relevant to the avant-garde. In the same way that cellphone cameras now catch politicians off guard and police beating protesters, the surveillance (sousveillance?) society will take a quantum leap forward.

Walgreen's sells a low-end USB web cam for $14.99 today, and for well under $100 one can get a higher-end unit. I predict that in 2-5 years, I'll be able to drop $40 in Walgreen's and get a wearable cam/mic with an 8-ounce belt-clip battery that will plug in to my cell phone ... and I'm in the game with justin.tv.

This is not live-without-a-net futurism here, either. I'm making a modest argument by extrapolation on the hardware side. The original justin.tv rig was a hassle to put together with today's technology. The biggest challenges involved upstream mobile bandwidth, battery power, and data compression.

With EVDO Rev B, HSUPA, and WiMAX, bandwidth looks to be less of a problem than giving customers a reason to buy it. As MPEG-2 fades away in favor of MPEG-4 flavors like H.264 and 3GP, cheap hardware compression is already becoming less of an issue. In fact, many of today's low-end smartphones are most of the way there in terms of a basic lifecasting rig. Battery power will remain an issue for anyone wanting to go live 24/7. But for a few hours at a time, several ounces of lithium-ion will keep the camera, compressor, and radio humming.

So what are the bourgeois, commercial applications?

• Conferences: organizers won't love broadcasts of the content, but, at least in tech, they are desperate to find some way to keep the shows compelling. I can see a lot of organizations sending one delegate to lifecast while others back home watch and interact, including talking to vendors, visiting hospitality suites, etc.
• Meetings: an interactive lifecast of a remote meeting would be a more productive way to participate than just a conference call or even a traditional web/videoconference.
• Social events: suppose your school reunion is far away and not nearly exciting enough to make the trek. But a friend who lives in the area goes, and you can ride along via lifecast? That could be a riot. And if it isn't, just close the browser.
• Education: how cool would it be sit in on some virtual flight lessons, tuned in to a lifecast from a CFI giving a real student a real lesson.
• Remote Personal Assistant: Instead of a worrying about wearable computers with smarts, you go about your business while a remote assistant tracks your lifecast. Need directions? a pickup line? a reservation? instant info on anything? Your assistant, sitting somewhere comfortable with easy access to all things cyber can do the virtual legwork and send you what you need in real time.

The monetization platform is already here, as early adopters have jumped out ahead. Phone hardware (which will serve as the workhorse for the system, just as it does now for millions of phone-cam snapshots, videos, and mms messages) is moving at a rapid pace. That just leaves a few more parts to design and sell to complete the picture. With the amounts of VC money flowing today, I don't see that last part as a problem.

Watch Everyone: Realtime Google Streetviews Coming Soon

Or so I claim. Here's why:

It would be killer app, albeit a controversial one, for Google.

But live street-view data will be available sooner or later and the American trend is to let the private sector gather the data, then sell the data to the public sector (even when the data is highly suspect). So I'm sad to say that I doubt privacy and security advocates will suddenly triumph over the live street-view concept.

Users will contribute data from their homes or from their cars as they drive around (similar to the Personal Weather Station trend). Why would they do this? Some will do it just because they like being part of the initiative. Others might need a little more persuasion.

Hmm... Persuasion... Like what?

The obvious incentive is free mobile data service, via Google devices and spectrum, as long as the user's cam is communing with the the grand data center. A lot of folks would gladly put a bug-eye camera and GPS tracker on their car roof to save upwards of $60 per month for tethered high-speed mobile net access.