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A Blink in the Race

by Andrew McCaskey
Google Netbook and ARM

Rumors of the emergence of a Google Netbook – introduced some time about the same time as the ChromeOS next summer – have just emerged. And, as Michael Arrington of Techcrunch proclaimed that there is a very good chance that there is no Intel Inside. The ARM processor that has proven its worth in the iPhone 3GS could have just enough power for the combination of ChromeOS and limited netbook functionality, that the phrase “only the paranoid survive” made famous by Intel Founder Andy Grove could well come true.

Just like a fatal lapse of attention in the final turn of a race that has gone on for hours, a driver in first place might provide an opening for the car on his tail to make his move.

Add in the actions last week by the Federal Trade Commission investigation into Intel market practices and market share anti-competitive posture, and the stock car race image takes hold. Google (and ARM) might have an opening that could upset the balance of power along more than a few dimensions.

Maybe Intel has reason to be paranoid. You are not paranoid if it’s true that powerful forces are out to get you.

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Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Mag+ : Possible Future for Magazines

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Right On, Roku ! Oprah May Come Calling

by Andrew McCaskey
The First Step for Oprah ?

Early adopter that I am, I’ve had the Roku box for well over a year. And I have to admit it was a $99 curiosity for the first six months or so – offering VHS quality video. But around December of last year, a firmware upgrade installed a new codec and it was suddenly a new ball game. It’s not as sharp as the AppleTV but from a business standpoint, the price is right.

The Channel Store launched today is one of the most exciting opportunities to come down the line – and potentially, it is going to be huge for anyone who is involved in New Media. The efforts by Netflix to get their silicon into BluRay players, flat screen TV’s and through affordable players like the Roku are going to represent a critical mass in destabilizing of the cable industry.

All of the publicity in the “Oprah Leaves Network Television” saga mentions the shift to cable by the Oprah Winfrey Network. She is certainly astute enough to seize upon some technology to cover her bets in case she wants to move beyond the technology that the purchase of the Discovery Network offers. Don’t be surprised if one day she gives away a Roku box to everyone in the audience. Not as exciting as the Pontiac, but with Oprah’s blessing, it would most certainly be around longer than Pontiac turned out to be.

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First Google Production Server

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ChromeOS a Narrow Hit

by Andrew McCaskey
But Not the Mass Market

With all the discussion on Google’s Chrome OS – I think that this first set of devices is going to hit a portion of the mobile professional market, but is going to miss the mass market. Two reasons: Price and Familiarity. A true mass market is going to take several years to develop, and mid America is going to continue to vacuum up replacements from the Walmart, Sam’s and Best Buy channels to gradually replace their aging WindowsXP systems, and they are going to do that with the familiar, not with the evolutionary.

A very large segment of the population has just moved in to computer literacy and are at the stage where the ability to function in Microsoft Word and Excel are proudly hard won skills. While many of us with technical skills and early adopter attention spans are freely moving to Windows7 ,OSX or the latest Ubuntu distro, many people have only recently climbed on to XP. Even though Chrome is the logical choice (considering the amount of work that is actually done outside of a browser), the ability to toss in a game from the Walmart discount bin for the kids or to have one of the teenagers in the house stock up an iPod with iTunes is going to be a killer if it does not work on the next PC as well as it has on the one that’s five or six years old and being replaced.

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Zeppelin by Renault

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NetFlix Explains ISP Economics

by Andrew McCaskey
And a Lot More

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings shed a little light on the actual costs of streaming at the NewTeeVee Live conference today in San Francisco and had some words on the idea that ISPs are suffering from higher costs to deliver video to end users. He pointed out that the cost of bandwidth and capacity is falling rapidly due to Moore’s Law. He pointed out that Amazon charges about 5 cents a gigabyte for bandwidth — or about a nickel a movie — as proof of the low costs. and that few users are able to use enough bandwidth to pick up the $60-80 a month they are paying for a 20Mb/sec connection.

Hastings also pointed out that Netflix may compete with cable and IPTV video providers on the video side, but that services like his streaming video offering are driving demand for cable’s high-speed Internet products. Calling it a halo effect, and comparing it to Apple’s ability to sell more Macs after folks snapped up iPods, Hastings said the primary reason for anyone to subscribe to 20Mbps service is to watch video, not send emails faster.

Fair enough. I have to wonder where the middle ground lies, between the claims of Verizon and Comcast that the few bandwidth hogs are making their investor’s lives miserable, and the Netflix perspective. I pay around $80 a month (being forced to buy a basic Cable TV subscription that is not even connected) but get , on a good day, 20Mb/sec down and 5Mb/sec up. I have it mostly for the convenience, and for those times when I need to run simultaneous video, Skype, Voip sessions – maybe once every six weeks.

I know that Comcast is making some serious money off of me – since I am buying the peak speeds, not the heavy throughput. If I had kids in the house watching movies, it might be a different story.

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Boxee Quick Overview

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Pricing Human Nature

by Andrew McCaskey
Setting Broadband Rates

It only seems fair – With broadband, as with other utilities such as electricity and water, people should pay for what they use. Apparently, none of the ISP’s are considering doing this, because they have a more profitable way that taps into human nature.

It’s the same little quirk that sells laptop and cellphone batteries, because we keep them on the charger far more than they really need to be. You want to have plenty to go, to keep them topped off. We are afraid to run out, and that’s exactly the fear that the new “metered” services (which are not metered at all, but are sold in tiers) are designed to tap into.

Demand and use of the Internet has risen faster than capacity can keep up, which means that the all-you-can-eat model of unlimited broadband per month no longer applies. ISPs’ version of metered broadband isn’t priced like your water or electricity. Carriers would never want to do this because it would actually reduce their profits. Broadband will instead be priced like a cell phone plan.

In wireless, if you use around 450 minutes a month, you want to make sure you don’t run over and get extra charges – so you opt for the 600 minute plan. Your usage – and those of most people will still stay around 450 minutes. You are buying assurance that you aren’t going to get cut off or run up a big bill. But in fact, the probablity that you will consume up to the next limit is low.

If you paid a large price for “unlimited use” per month, your calling patterns would have to change drastically to seriously impact their network – and the difference is almost pure profit.

Broadband is going to be the same way. You are not paying for bits, you are paying for peace of mind. And there is always a market for that.

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3D Parallax Television

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Mobile at Blogworld Conference

by Andrew McCaskey
Mobile Mode

SDRNews will be in the mobile mode for the remainder of the week, while I participate in the Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas. The original show for Podcasters – The Podcast and New Media Expo was held in Ontario, CA for three years, and last year was held here in Las Vegas. The owners of the show sold the event to Blogworld – and so this is the first year of a combined effort. It’s a new perspective on new media – and is going to be a very interesting three days. We will have some reports from the TPN crew – and possibly some live streaming from the show. Please monitor Twitter @axmc and #bwe09 for details.

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10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

10/GUI Multitouch Interface Concept

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Net Neutrality: FUD Never Goes Out of Style

by Andrew McCaskey
FUD is Never Out of Style

Ars Technica seems to disassemble the Wall Street Journal’s editorial line by line – and points out that if you are going to argue the points of a technology related case, you might want to have some basic understanding of the economics of the creation and distribution of content. Especially when pointing fingers at deployment of edge servers – presented as a more equitable solution for Google and Microsoft to share the burden with ISP’s – with the idea that instead of campaigning for net neutrality in the political scheme, they should be taking some steps to do the heavy lifting in delivering the bits.

It’s such a good idea that in fact all sorts of organizations have been deploying edge servers to speed delivery of content to customers. The very openness that the ISP’s claim to fear is in fact already offloading their network’s traffic – all for the reason that an open net permits exactly that sort of placement. Without the guarantee of net neutrality, that creative work around would be off limits.

You can bet that in the bad old days, there would have been no placement of “foreign attachments” to the all powerful telco pipes. That battle was fought 41 years ago in the Carterphone decision. We don’t ever want to go back to those days.

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Courier User Interface from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

New Microsoft Courier

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Setting the Bar Low

by Andrew McCaskey
FCC Gets the Cable ISP Answer

The feedback is coming in for the Federal Communication Commission’s request for a definition of broadband. The cable trade association said that “The Commission should continue to look at maximum advertised speed rather than some measure of ‘actual’ speed,”
The FCC noted that “For example, advertised throughput rates generally differ from actual rates, are not uniformly measured, and have different constraints over different technologies” .

Comcast said “it’s out of our hands” and that ” the actual online experience of any particular consumer at any particular moment in time involves a wide range of factors, many of which are outside the control of the Internet service provider.” Given this, the cable ISP suggests that “the ‘provisioned’ speed

AT&T goes for the functional approach: For residential customers, that minimal set of applications should include the ability to exchange e-mails, participate in instant messaging, and engage in basic Web-browsing,” AT&T says. “It also should include the ability to engage in Internet-based education programs, interact with Internet-based government services, and participate in online energy, healthcare, and public-safety programs.”

If you are planning to aim low and hit, words like “participate in”, “Engage” and “Participate” are just the sort of linguistic cover that will allow for the sloppiest marginal coverage – not much better than the practice of coloring a county as served by broadband if there was one person in the county with some degree of connectivity above dialup.

The rest of the world is laughing and we are content with this sort of competitive posture. We will look back to the “good old days” when the US was #18 in broadband service. We are firmly on the charts at number 18 with a bullet. Fasy moving but unfortunately headed the wrong way.

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Jira and the Lincvolt Project

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LinkedIn Connections

by Andrew McCaskey
Leveraging the Power of the Network

SDRNews has been produced from Boston for this past week, complementing another project. Mobile production always has a number of challenges mostly in time and energy – even if there is good connectivity. I am glad to be heading home after a long week of video work in the Boston area. I might mention that much of the work has involved the use of LinkedIn for business purposes. It’s going to be of business interest to a number of SDRNews listeners. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, if you think that your professional network could benefit from contact with other SDRNews listeners, please send along an invite request.

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Update on IPV6

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–Your Comment Title Here–

by Andrew McCaskey
Telcos Looking for a Nail, Holding a DSL Hammer

The notice from Qwest announcing 40Mbps service (20 up) in some areas looks enticing, until you examine the fine print. Due to the nature of the system, the speeds drop in direct proportion to the distance from the Central Office. The new announcement is basically moving the CO to a remote node via fiber that is closer to the customer, and then replicating the copper based delivery service that has been the hallmark of telco services for years. The issue is the same, just moved a few miles closer to the customer. Qwest was unable to tell how many customers, or to estimate by some rule of thumb the number of customers who would actually receive the full 40 MBps speed. Once again, if you are trying to get high speed service, the incumbent telcos are not your friend.

Having just priced out some Qwest services, and living in a non-FiOS area of Verizon, I can tell you that Selling 1Mbps downlinks ($19.99/month with two year contract and phone lock-in penalty) is not high speed, unless you are using technology that is fifteen or twenty years old.

And today, faced with competition from DOCSIS 3.0 in many markets and FiOS in some, Qwest is making the best play that it can with a poor hand. And Verizon is just simply looking for the ignorant in hopes of stopping the bleed of residential phone service to wireless or VoIP competitors.

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Vanish Screencast

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