Change of Address

Sorry to keep saying this but the blog has moved over to a dedicated website at www.mediangler.com. Could you bookmark that and go there?

IPTV Growth Guess Clueless

This strikes me as an underestimate giving scant recognition to the fact that IPTV will offer a range of buddy like services that powered myspace to 30 billion hits a month recently.It comes from a Diffusion Group report.

IPTV deployments in several key European countries are on schedule, with new launches expected in smaller Eastern European and Nordic countries. For these reasons, the EMEA region is expected to top 14 million IPTV households by 2010 with France, the UK, Italy, Spain, and German accounting for 87% of the total.The number of North American IPTV households is also expected to near 14 million by 2010, with the US accounting for 80% of these subscriptions. While the majority of 2005 and 2006 IPTV deployments have been executed by small rural operators, TDG expects the new deployments by Verizon and AT to greatly increase subscribers starting in 2007.

ATV’s News Archive July 10th – July 14th

Vista

I was at a Microsoft presentation day, Tuesday, all gearing up for the November launch of the new operating system VISTA, Office 2007 and Microsoft’s collaboration tools and as I’m a user of IE7 Beta, we can throw that in for good measure.

Sure the headlines are going to say it’s a make or break for Microsoft but I don’t buy that one at all. These products are Microsoft’s mature market and there is no make or break. Only on Internet Explorer do I sense Microsoft is vulnerable but IE is hardly a cash cow.

First though VISTA. I’ve already written about Vista in the Irish Times. The aero-glass look and feel is a feature I enjoy. Semi-transparent views mean you can half see a lot of what lies behind any particular screen you might be looking at on the desktop.

Other admirable features are the sidebar where you can keep live applications or desktop gadgets like a weather forecast, and the bottom of screen menu which with a mouse-over gives you a view of all or any live window.

Your activities, then, are accessible in a number of ways.

Aesthetics are going to be increasingly important in screen communications and Vista is a step forward. It’s a comfortable environment for people like me who rely on intuition.

Still, I felt MSFT could be doing more. People want to enjoy their time at a computer and the PC’s functions are migrating to the TV where aesthetic appeal is far more important, so a few jolly features like being able to do something with a buddy on another PC across a broadband network could have been built in at the operating level, particularly by a company that owns Groove. But so far so good.

Microsoft’s information retrieval philosophy in Vista is a step to applaud. I’ve been keeping an eye on Fast company, originator of web search engine Alltheweb but now a highly focused enterprise search company. Fast’s philosophy is simple. Forget people organising data. Index and search it and then present it in ways that make intuitive sense.

Microsoft is trying to do that with its stacks. You can still be an old fashioned heirarchal person and use tree-structure folders to organise your data in Vista, but you can also leave the organising to the search engine.

It will return documents of all kinds in a variety of stacks. Stacks are reminiscent of Mac’s early hyperstack tools. The search engine will organise information for you by, for example author, document type, subject, date. You name it. They all constitute what is in effect a different stack.

The benefit of a stack is it gives you a way to change your relationship with data. Having searched for a document (or rather, having organised your documents) by author, you can create a different stack (date) and drill down to find the document you are looking for, at the same time creating a different context (timeliness, for example).

Great. And it looks good. But here’s the rub. Microsoft doesn’t have an aesthetic philosophy. They talk about listening to customers and rightly believe that to be progress. It means they build features cutomers have asked for. But the consumer world is after more that. Stacks could have been dressed up in a number of different and appealing visualisations. Stacks could give a multitude of visual clues to users. To devise and develop those visual clues you need to be thinking aesthetically and you need to understand the relationship between images, understanding, and pleasure.

This is where MSFT falls down and where Vista is in need of attention from artists and designers from other fields. Perhaps I am quirky in insisting that an operating system needs to be more beautiful. Vista is progress and I think it will move Microsoft forward. Where Microsoft is though is a hard place. Stuck between old engineering disciplines and the new aesthetic world it is slowly entering (IPTV, X-Box, Media Centre). You cannot easily port engineering values to those walks of life where people’s first priority is to groove… did I say Groove? Maybe Ray Ozzie is the artist to Bill Gates code-geek.

Tomorrow’s Post

Won't be much of it – I'm in a briefing from Microsoft on Vista and the Office launch. But will get back to you with news on Wednesday.

But hey, in the meantime take a look around, click the tag cloud or browse the categories. The site's starting to take shape.

New Advertising Models

San Francisco based GoodStorm will soon launch a new program called MeCommerce that will allow bloggers to insert product listings in a javascript and iframe box on their sites and keep 50% of the retail mark-up for themselves.

TechCrunch » Blog Archive » GoodStorm to offer e-commerce widget with 50% revenue split for bloggers

Just shows that nobody and no model is invulnerable. Good Storm is surely a threat to Amazon which gives paltry affiliate fees, and to the affiliate model which Amazon spawned. Companies that use affiliate programmes and performance-based advertising (the current buzz) will have to rethink their margins.

technorati tags:advertising

New Blog Site Update

I'm having problems with column alignment on the new blog site, so please do not go there yet. Hoping it will be remedied by tomorrow.

New Media Business

Below is the weirdest form of business. It can hardly be true. Set up a few domains on the web (say 200,000) of them, attach a weather forecast and enable Google's Ad sense…. a $120 million business!

"Demand Media is building the next-generation of web media companies. Today, our collection of websites and domain names receive more than 25 million unique visitors per month"

Demand Media | Home

See the Red Herring article here and get your thesaurus out.

Newspapers

News that Robert DeNiro is thinking of buying the New York Observer is a high profile example but some commentators are saying newspapers' response to the internet will be: go back into private hands.

"Between analysts delivering ominous forecasts about the future of print media and the chaos of messy media group breakups, the American newspaper industry is going through turbulent times. From this uncertainty, a pattern is slowly emerging: the delisting of newspapers."

Privately owned: A way out for US newspapers? – Editors Weblog- Analysis

But could it be back to the days when the likes of the Astors owned the Times and Observer in London and Newsweek in the USA?

Nobody seems too worried right now as newspapers are looking around for solutions and in some cases paying silly amounts of money for online properties.

technorati tags:newspapers, online, content

More on Gates

The weekend papers were busy trying out new ideas. Like – does Bill Gates' departure mean crisis, the final unravelling, or hmmmm, let's think.

Flock Again

I'm in my second day as a flock user and I'm getting closer to saying it's a steal, the first quantum step improvement in browserland in a decade.

technorati tags:flock, browser

Search This

Late last year I served as rapporteur at an EU workshop where Europe's top search experts were looking ahead to the future audio-visual search engine.

Of course Fast company were there and they made the telling point

Flocking

This is a test of the flock blogging facility. Well a bit more than a test. I haven't been able in wordpress to use tags so far. Flock has a straightforward way of doing it.

technorati tags:browser, flock

Wiki’s Progress

Economists now use the Big Mac as a guide to inflation and the cost of living across the world, assuming that the price of the Big Mac will always tend towards equilibrium. In the IT business Microsoft might equally be used as a point of comparison for the popularity of community tools. If Microsoft start using Wikis then their time has arrived, no?

GBuy

Google is likely to launch soon a raft of services that link search returns directly to purchasing opportunities online, possibly providing some online stores with “trusted” status from Google, a way of improving click through for companies playing straight with online buyers. It’s one more incremental step to making the web a better place to find and buy than any traditional advertising medium.

Net Neutrality

Updates on the net neutrality story (that’s the danger of telcos using our desire to access certain services frequently, e.g. Yahoo, as an excuse to charge) can be found here and here.