Almost any computer on sale today will come with an embedded Webcam. But how many of us actually use them?
New services that enable video tweets on Twitter might be the democratizing force that drags Webcam use--and by extension, video chat--into its rightful place in the technological pantheon.
If you've never turned on your built-in webcam, who's to blame you? They produce unflattering images, and most of us aren't too keen on staring at ourselves even in the best of lighting. Even though popular chat apps like Google Talk and Apple's iChat offer video chatting built-in, I don't know anyone who uses these tools regularly; they're alternately awkward and surreal. Forward-facing cameras on mobile phones haven't caught on yet for what I suspect are the same reasons.
Vidly may help change all that. It's a high-def video sharing service that works with Twitter, allowing users to post short clips instead of textual tweets. Hot on the heels of its video-sharing iPhone app, the company is launching first with Twitter support, with planned support for Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace coming later. (As VentureBeat points out, the National Geographic tweet-stream is a good example of how the service works.)
Other services have been at this for a while, among them Radar.net, which lets users record video status updates and repost them to Twitter and other social networks. Should there become a critical mass of users who start linking Twitter with video, we might all come around to video-based communications. But perhaps not until laptops start including vanity lights.
Apple's iPhone division cleared $1.6 billion in operating profits in Q3 of 2009, leap-frogging Nokia as the world's premier mobile money-maker, according to Strategy Analytics and GigaOm. (Chart below courtesy of GigaOm.)
That's an incredible feat (for Apple) and an incredible indication of mismanagement (for Nokia). The Finnish phone-maker shipped 60.9 million smartphones last year and holds onto nearly twice the marketshare of any other mobile phone maker. With roughly 44% of the market, you'd think they could make a few more bucks than Apple, which holds just about 10% of the market, depending on whose numbers you believe.
The difference may be accounted for in Apple's vertical sales model and its posh brand image. Apple just opened its 277th store in the concourse of the Louvre art museum in Paris.
Nokia may have a difficult time turning the tide, even if new app phones like the N900 are runaway hits. As GigaOm notes, Android and iPhone OS devices are more profitable than so-called "feature phones" like the N900, dollar for dollar, thanks largely to their vibrant app stores. At least, that's the assumption Motorola has staked its future on.
CNBC is predicting that Apple may top Microsoft as computing's most valuable firm. But that kind of success might be self-defeating.
As CNBC rightly acknowledges, Apple has a long way to go before it can dethrone Redmond, but estimates that the guard may change as sooner than anyone could have predicted just two years ago. While Windows still wins the marketshare battle with around 90% of all PCs, Apple's annual revenue has more than doubled in the last four years, while Microsoft is growing more slowly.
Thanks largely the the iPhone and iPod, Apple is selling more Macintoshes every quarter. But what is good for the brand and the company might end up being bad news for the customer. As TUAW says: "Using the example of Microsoft, getting too big too fast degrades your ability to offer quality service. It doesn't mean that their products are horrible, it means that you have to bring in more people to fill the gap--people who aren't necessarily the most qualified to help."
If anything TUAW understates the potential for a crisis of customer service. The more standard Apple hardware becomes, the more sought-after its software becomes. That means more people jailbreaking their iPhones, altering their netbooks to run OS X, or installing copies of Apple software on homemade hackintoshes. We know we've reached a critical point when a major corporation--Palm--is doing this very kind of hacking with the Pre, so that it can sync with iTunes.
All these non-standard installations creation major engineering headaches for Apple. It may not have to support all these weird Mac incarnations, but it has to close loopholes to prevent them from working. In the last few months, Apple has reportedly been trying to block out netbook hacks, Palm support, and shut down clone-maker Psystar. But it's impossible to stay ahead of the rabble, and Apple will have to deal with a burgeoning population of users who hack around with their stuff.
The end result is that the Apple ecosystem will have to become increasingly "closed" for the company to maintain the quality and the consistency of their user experience. And being "closed" is just what the company's detractors have latched onto as a fatal flaw. As TUAW notes, Apple has more to gain from staying the underdog.
Babbel and The Wall Street Journal both turned away from the Freemium model this week. The outcome will be drastically different for each.
Babbel, a language-learning site, came out of beta today with a surprise: It will be charge between $6.65 and $11.95 per month for access, according to TechCrunch. "Freemium doesn't work for us," the startup's director told TC.
It's not for want of funding, either. Babbel held two successful rounds of funding in Europe, winning at least $1 million euros in total. But the subscription model allowed the company to do away with unsightly advertisements on its site, and to license higher-quality content from language publishers. The site's principals are also hoping that a locked-in subscription account will keep the average language-learner active on the site, and prevent users from defecting to a free competitor.
The second site to close down freemium access may be The Wall Street Journal online. In an interview with Sky News this week, News Corp Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said he was preparing to order News Corp's online properties to include no-index code in their source, preventing Google from crawling their content and delivering it to searchers. Murdoch says he's happy to have fewer visitors to the site as long as they're paying.
As plenty of outlets like PaidContent have noted, that move will be tantamount to a self-inflicted gunshot to the foot for a variety of reasons--TechCrunch estimates that 25% of WSJ online traffic is funneled through Google News, and that the number is increasing. Right now, the Journal, which requires a paid subscription to read articles in full, allows a special loophole for complete access when readers arrive from Google. That loophole will be closed. (The Murdoch interview, below.)
So what's the difference between Babbel's approach and Murdoch's? Visits to Babbel are purpose-driven, while visits to the WSJ are topically driven. All things equal--i.e., assuming a user pays money for a subscription to the Journal and to Babbel--his motivations for visiting each are different. He probably has a routine for learning a language on Babbel; every so often, he checks back to do a lesson at his leisure. Visits to the Journal's site are different; he only goes to read their take on a specific issue. But that'll be hard for him to do when he doesn't know the issue exists. Short of visiting the WSJ every few hours, the user is reliant on aggregators and portals like Google News or Yahoo to let him know that news is breaking. If the option to click through to the Journal's take isn't there, he may not get around to checking it until he's read coverage at more accessible outlets--if he gets around to checking it at all. If he stops visiting, he'll stop paying.
Freemium is a profitable model: several studies have indicated that many Web users are willing to pay for the stuff they use, and the ones that aren't can be monetized by other means. News Corp ignores the popular consensus at its risk.
Blockbuster is piloting a new movie-rental program that allows customers to load movies onto SD cards and play them back on mobile phones and TVs equipped with SD readers. The rentals cost $1.99.
Perhaps conceived as a one-up response to the unexpectedly popular RedBox movie kiosks, the SD-card rental stations are meant to address some of the age-old problems with DVD rentals--namely that they're easily damaged, and must be returned. With an SD rental, the user keeps the SD card, though the content contains DRM which sets a date of expiration. (Above, the taxonomy of SD cards; below, a Blockbuster SD kiosk.)
The SD rentals are also meant to target online streaming, which is growing in popularity thanks largely to Netflix's Watch Instantly feature. Blockbuster is hoping that the better quality video contained on their SD cards will win streaming video customers back, but of course, you still have the inconvenience of traveling to a Blockbuster SD kiosk. Blockbuster also offers "on demand" viewing via its Web site, letting you download DRM'd movie rentals as opposed to streaming them. Still, renting even the crappiest of movies will cost you nearly the same as a whole month of movies on Netflix; this downloadable copy of Cranked High Voltage is $4.
Other obstacles remain. Many phones use micro or mini SD cardslots, and don't take full-sized SD cards. Many TVs still aren't built to play video of SD media, and most laptops don't have them either, meaning that watching an SD video on the road means taking a long a USB card reader. Another problem: not everyone will enjoy the irony of driving somewhere to pick up a data-card the size of a postage stamp. Still, SD cards do represent a marked improvement over DVDs in durability and re-usability, so if they caught on it'd hardly be a step backwards for movie buffs.
The SD kiosks themselves will be built and operated by NCR corporation, in partnership with MOD Systems. Blockbuster already employs a network of NCR-build kiosks for autonomous DVD rental.
Palm desperately needs better apps. And it's hoping its new Web-based development environment will lure more creative code monkeys, according to PCWorld. But is the environment really the problem? Or is Palm offering too little too late?
Dubbed "Ares," the new site packs features such as a drag-and-drop interface (like Apple's IDE), created to make designing and testing Javascript apps easier. It's aimed at pro coders, though, and Web developers who want to transition to coding for Palm devices.
After a developer is done testing and prototyping using Ares, they'll be able to package the app and download it to a phone for testing, or submit it for entry into Palm's app store.
Both Palm and Google Android rely on Javascript for their applications--Javascript is one of the most commonly-known programming languages. But while the Android Market boasts over 12,000 apps to date, Palm's app catalog hovers around only a few hundred programs, many of them incredibly lame.
Some app developers have been frustrated by Palm's disorganized app approval process and have defected to off-brand Palm app stores like PreCentral that allow users to download "homebrew" apps. Others, such as open source guru Jamie Zawinkski have unceremonious dumped their Palms.
The problem Palm isn't the IDE. It's the bigger Palm environment. And Apple's easy-to-use tools and developer language, Objective-C, and it's lock lock onapp store profit isn't helping, either.
Google's philanthropic Flu Trends site has been able to track swine flu about as well as health care surveillance, according to Bloomberg. What else can trending searches tell us about the state of health in the United States?
(Above, Google Flu Trends shows incidence of swine flu in the U.S.; darker areas correlate with more flu-related searches.)
To answer that question, I got a little help from the Google team in New York. The data they showed me aren't so comforting: Judging by searches for unemployment, medicare, and Cobra insurance, Americans seem much more concerned about losing their health care benefits than in previous years--especially in a handful of hard-hit regions.
Using Google Insights for Search, a mashup engine that the incidence of search topics, we learn that searches for health insurance plans have been trending upward since 2005 and rose about 15% year-over-year in 2009, as shown in the graph below. Searchers in Florida, Oregon and Colorado have been submitting the most queries.
Searches about health care also spiked during last year's election season and have since become most prevalent in the District of Columbia, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Indiana. More people are also looking to extend their coverage for family members, according to Google's data; searches for "cobra insurance" reached "breakout" status among Google's rising search terms, and cobra-related searches in 2009 have increased considerably. (Below, cobra insurance queries over time.)
With Obama planning to curtail Medicare and Medicaid budgets, interest in Medicare has also been rising according to Google's data. Predictably, the most Medicare queries have come out of Florida, but D.C., Kentucky, and Tennessee are also concerned. Rising search terms about Medicare include "aarp medicare complete" and "medicaid eligibility." (Below, medicare queries over time.)
Unemployment insurance is also a major concern, especially in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Google has registered over twice as many searches for "unemployment health insurance" nationwide in 2009 as in 2008. (Below, the endemic incidence of searches for "unemployment health insurance.")
One bright spot: incidence of flu may have already peaked at the beginning of October, according to Google's data, so if you've escaped H1N1 thus far, you might survive the winter without it.
Search engines would be more efficient if they were decentralized, reports MIT's Technology Review. In other words, they'd be faster if they were run like bot-nets.
Bot-nets are networks of zombie computers whose processing resources have been possessed by viruses, ready to be exploited by whoever spread the virus. Just two years ago, it was thought that the most powerful supercomputer on earth was actually a bot-net created by the Storm worm. (Below, a modern data center.)
Search engines like Google and Yahoo, by comparison, usually centralize their processing in enormous data centers. Researchers at Yahoo have begun to re-think the approach, according to MIT, and theorize that it might be better to spread the engine's index around a smattering of smaller data centers. According to MIT: "With this approach, smaller data centers would contain locally relevant information and a small proportion of globally replicated data. Many search queries common to a particular area could be answered using the content stored in a local data center, while other queries would be passed on to different data centers."
To make the distributed model work, Yahoo researchers have designed a scenario in which statistical information about page rankings could be shared between data centers. Each small data center would run a query concurrently, and the ones with the statistically better results would respond to the user.
This is not so far from another search engine's taxonomy. ChaCha uses a similarly distributed approach to answer user queries, but instead of data centers it uses a humans.
Of course, Yahoo's research may all come to naught; its search engine is about to be replaced by Bing here in the U.S., and possibly for all Yahoo sites the world over.
Apple may be building a miniature iPhone, with a waterproof, ultra-durable capacitive touchscreen, iLounge is reporting. Or is it a giant iPod Nano?
The new device, a leaked image of which appears above courtesy of iLounge, would boast a 2.8-inch screen; the current iPhone has a 3.5-inch screen. ILounge says the touchscreen pictured would be more rugged than the one featured on the current iPhone/iPod touch: less sensitive to high temperatures, water, humidity, and aging. The developer of the displays, Host Optical, is the source of the leaked images, and is claiming to be an Apple supplier. Host's images also show another iPhone screen size--3.2 inches diagonal--suggesting Apple might be shrinking the size of one of its current devices, as well as adding the diminutive 2.8-inch version (shown below).
ILounge approaches the leaked images with appropriate skepticism, theorizing that one or both of the screens might be intended for a future iPod versions (touch-screen iPod Nanos, for example) and not necessarily iPhone revisions. Shrinking the iPhone's screen size would seem an unlikely and boneheaded move for Apple; as people become more reliant on their iPhones, they'll need as much keyboard space as possible.
But if they're real, the new, smaller touch devices may be designed to fill in the lower end of a product line graced by a tablet device at the high end. Apple may be envisioning that current iPhone users will upgrade to a tablet for their heavy mobile use, and want to simultaneously pare down their handset to something more compact. AT&T may even offer bundled deals for a tablet + iPhone/iPod plan that features a shared voice and data pool.
AppleInsider thinks differently. According to their sources, the new iPhones will also be "world-phones" compatible with either UTMS or CDMA networks, and will be build specifically for Verizon. The new, smaller device may be a way for Apple to two-time on its exclusive iPhone contract with AT&T, or it may indicate that the exclusivity is about to end. Whatever the case, the increased incidence of iPhone-related rumors suggests an announcement is nigh.
We already know Netflix users are begging for easier ways to get streaming video to their TVs--Xbox, PS3, Roku, and Blu-ray players apparently aren't simple enough solutions. Instead, more and more
people watch TV and film on their computers while fuming because they can't
easily get all that content--Hulu, Netflix, Amazon--in one place.
The Myka ION aims to bridge that gap as the first gizmo to stream both Hulu and Boxee to big screens (in addition to running full-fledged PC apps, which let you add other streaming services). But it's not cheap. At $379 (more if you add on a wireless card and a Blu-Ray drive), it's ultimately expandable but inching toward PC pricing. And that got us wondering whether we've been thinking all wrong about the way we stream video.
Here's where the demand for streaming video has thus far pushed people:
Toward traditional home theater gear (TVs, DVD players, video game consoles) that stream video right out-of-the-box. This is great at first. But these devices aren't made to upgrade. And at $5,000 for an HDTV or $400 for a game console, you don't expect to have to scrap it when new services, compression technologies and software render it obsolete. OEMs can build their TVs and game consoles to be upgraded, but they end up adding the cost of a Myka to the retail price.
Toward the iTunes store. Add up the costs of movies and shows, and you're eventually talking about a financial black hole. Plus you still have splurge for an Apple TV, and fire up your computer to queue up shows or buy movies.
The solution is, of all things, Windows 7. It packs what's arguably Microsoft's best innovation of the decade: Windows Media Center, which has gained the ability to stream video and music wirelessly from your home PC to TVs all over your house using little "extender" boxes that are sold separately (the Xbox can also serve as an extender.) Unlike other options--set-top boxes and fancy Blu-ray players--it uses your home computer as the video streaming device, meaning you can add services, browse robustly and even record video like a DVR by patching your cable or satellite TV through your PC. And again, it's all wireless.
Because the extra hardware you need (i.e., the "extender") is just a wireless dummy, you're not sinking money into some soon-to-be-obsolete gizmo, and you're not limiting yourself to just one service (Hulu and Netflix almost never appear side-by-side on streaming devices.) Your Netflix, your Hulu, your TiVo, even your channel guide gets better when it's all replaced by a Windows 7 PC.
Many of us might be reluctant to sink money into Windows 7 hardware, especially thanks to bad Vista experiences or the allure of the Mac. But a Windows 7 notebook, used right there on the couch like a giant remote control, might just be the answer to your streaming video woes.
