This one’s a somewhat lighter post, mainly a few observations about how, of all things, New York City weather, social networking and mobile technology all seem to gel quite effectively these days.

Last week, just back from the ITP Spring Show at Manhattan’s Tisch School of The Arts, I took a quick break strolling across Union Square, on my way to Yaron Samid’s latest NY Video 2.0 meetup event.
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Have you recently taken the New York subway, let’s say, to 23rd, 66th, 86th, or 103rd street?

If you exit at any of these stops you’ll notice some of your favorite entertainment stores vanished. Shut down. Closed for good.

At 23rd and 6th Avenue Barnes&Noble, gone! At Lincoln Center Tower Records‘ flagship store, gone! Over at 86th and 2nd Avenue Circuit City, vanished. And at 102rd and Broadway Blockbuster Video closed its doors, too.

Be it for books, music, movies, or consumer electronics (for anyone 30 years or older), those were among the brands you would likely turn to first – to discover, buy and play your entertainment retail. 

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One of the most daunting technological challenges we face today is scaling up this old internet of ours to meet the burgeoning consumer demand for bandwidth-intensive real-time applications such as telecommuting, cloud computing, and streaming media.

And as internet video continues to trend from short-form/long-tail/low quality content towards long-form/short-tail/high quality (premium) content (i.e. from YouTube to hulu to TV/films on embedded hardware), exploding consumer demand could bring things to a head even more quickly than currently anticipated.
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The cell phone has been fodder for art projects for a little while now. Here are a few pieces I’ve come across recently – a few personal favorites…

This is an installation by a Boston artist by the name of Rob Petit. At the very least, you’ve got to give him credit for meticulousness – and the sheer number of discarded phones he uses in some of these pieces says a little something about how ubiquitous, disposable (and environmentally unfriendly) the devices have become. For more images of his images, go here. – this is clearly a guy who thinks a lot about cell phones.

    
Here we have an installation from the European art/technology collective informationlab.  “Cell Phone Disco” is basically a grid of sensors and LED that allows users to draw shapes with their with their active cellphones.  OK, maybe the concept strikes me as a bit shallow (an impression reinforced by the unfortunate title), but I think approaching technology with a certain amount of playfulness is almost always A Good Thing – and indeed the installation has proven very popular, showing across Europe and in several American cities as well.

   
I like cars. Like most car fetishists, there are a few websites I enjoy wasting a little time with from every so often, and one of my favorite bookmarks is rinspeed, a Swedish auto design firm with a soft spot for vintage Porsches.  At this year’s Geneva Auto Show, Rinspeed is showing the electric concept car the “ichange.”  What’s cool about the ichange is that most functionality (iginition, lights, ventilation, etc.) is controlled by an iphone app.  Not only is leveraging the power of a smartphone the driver already owns rather than building out a full traditional dashboard is an interesting take on green design – it also insures you won’t be able to make calls while you drive!

Back from CES - the annual Consumer Electronics love fest in Las Vegas,  (OK, I am a bit late posting this) – I am actually pretty psyched about what’s coming down the consumer electronics pike this year.

As CE devices get faster, smarter, and increasingly untethered, the “on-your-terms” digital lifestyle proposition pitched to us for all these years seems a considerable step closer to its “anywhere, anytime” goal.

Yet, despite years of impressive CES innovation hoopla, I continue grappling with a personal observation I lovingly coined the “Star Trek bottleneck”:

CE designers’ propensity for innovation seems directly proportional to their lifetime exposure to, yup, you guessed it – the popular Starship Enterprise television series.

OK, I am kidding. But as with any good joke, there’s some truth to it.

To stick with the Star Trek analogy – short of time travel and “beam me up Scotty” – is there anything in CE land that Captain Kirk and his crew didn’t have that’s not readily available to us in stores today?

There’s the wireless video monitor and the wrist-band smart phone, plus the super-smart refrigerator, remote home security, and a growing number of cute gadgets.

All set in slick form factor, of course, all with build-in intelligence processing more information ever faster. Good ol’ Gene would have been proud.

In other words, it’s as if this past-century icon of sci-fi television continues to haunt our 21st century CE designers to this day.

Of course, I have no empirical data, no scientific studies. Just a pretty good hunch, mixed in with a healthy dose of cynicism, about why today’s CE industry seems unable to think more innovatively about, well about innovation itself.

Maybe it needs a new and decidedly young(er) generation of CE designers to get us beyond my “Star Trek bottleneck” dilemma? One void of stylized sci-fi TV exposure and implicit 60ies and 70ies ideas of what innovation should be.

But than again, no matter what any new group of CE designer may come up with, it still needs to stay sufficiently functional and attractive to consumers, right, or it simply won’t sell?

So, maybe it’s not just about passing the CE design torch on to the next generation, but also about our own limitation as consumers to desire (and then use) something entirely different from what we collectively perceive as “innovative” today? 

So where might we be heading next?

My guess on this, next-gen CE devices will focus on software rather than hardware, and regard bolstering quality-of-life as a key goal.

That next evolutionary step in consumer electronics might then have less to do with form factor (that’s largely covered ;-), and much more with adding previously unavailable intelligence inside and outside existing hardware concepts.

The key driver – and blocker at the same time? Our collective ability to imagine beyond the obvious.

Any of this probably not for CES 2010. But hey, let’s see what CES 2020 will bring.

If there’s one widely agreed upon fact of life in the still nascent long-form (short-tail) internet video space, it’s that consumers will not tolerate anything close to the advertising density they will for traditional broadcast television:

• A current NBC show on hulu carries roughly ¼ of the advertising that same show broadcast on a terrestrial NBC affiliate carries.

At the same time, online CPM rates are substantially higher than traditional broadcast rates, based on the internet-given ability to target online ads to individual users:

• NBC and hulu can charge over twice the CPM that NBC can charge for broadcast television.

It’s often taken for granted that these two characteristics are both inherent to internet video and even somehow compensatory – yet imagine if we could challenge the first assumption (the relative intolerance for online advertising ): in other words, imagine online video advertising density more in line with that of broadcast video, yet maintaining the higher CPM rates charged for target online advertising…

Now there’s a business model.

How to get internet video consumers to tolerate the amount of advertising tolerated on television, though? To me, the (somewhat obvious) answer is to solve the problem of making the internet video experience itself more comparable to the television experience.

In other words,

I would submit that there’s a direct correlation between the amount of advertising online premium video consumers will tolerate and the fact that (until now) they happen to have been sitting alone in front of a computer at the time– in other words, increase the comfort, ease, and sociability of the experience, and (for better or worse) you can increase the advertising.

Now that’s finally happening, as CE companies start rolling out TV hardware with embedded network interfaces this week in Las Vegas.

Today I read with interest a Will Richmond VideoNuze article questioning whether the current online advertising model will support this new generation of internet-enabled television hardware, and how it might have to change.  What I feel Will misses, though, is that as a result of all this new couch-centric hardware changes the fundamental viewing experience, there will be a commensurate increase in tolerance for advertising on the part of the average internet video viewer.

So as the density of long-form premium internet video advertising approaches that of traditional television yet the online CPM rates remain higher than the effective traditional broadcast rates (because of the internet-only value-add of ad targeting), I feel that the advertising-supported long form short-tail internet video sector has a bright future indeed.

Oops, I stand corrected. My mid-December post about US presidential interests in post-campaign viral marketing wondered whether European heads of state would follow Mr. Obama’s lead.

Little did I know (I should have checked), Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel has been podcasting weekly since mid 2006. 

Kudos to her (rather early) interest in this still relatively new digital medium. But this made we wonder, whether I had missed others among Europe’s leading politicians. 

As to France, I was unable to find anything on President Nicolas Sarkozy. Maybe this is because he is still relatively new in office and hasn’t quite gotten around.

But so is Prime Minister Gordon Brown over in the UK. But at least he does have his own website.

Although so far void of regular podcasts to the nation (and anyone else, for that matter), his site at least provides YouTube links to various ad-hoc press conference. A start.

Meanwhile, over in The Netherlands, Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkende has not yet taken to video podcasting either, it seems. I am somewhat surprised.

Turns out, neither does the country’s monarch seem interested in this sort of “modern” communication.

What makes me wonder is whether heads-of-state podcasts (or the lack of the same) are an indication for any government’s true commitment to bringing its country into the digital age. 

Like a CEO running a company, if you don’t try your own products, how would you know they work?

Any thoughts on this?

Be encouraged to chime in.

On the eve of the 2009 CES show, perhaps it’s time for a few more thoughts on what should prove to be The Big Story at this year’s show: televisions and set-top boxes with internet access baked in, for direct internet video access.

For the last few years, numerous companies in the ‘computer’ business (on either the hardware or software side) have made repeated attempts to market solutions involving the PC as viable long-form internet video delivery platforms – with little to no success. Lately, though, perhaps enough anthropologists and/or behavioral scientists have been hired to finally convince at least a few of these companies that despite all the bells and whistles, a computer might never be a television after all (as they say in the south, “you can put a brick in the oven, but that don’t make it a biscuit”).

So while certain companies might have enjoyed a substantial technological head start in internet video, through a stubborn insistence on leveraging the home computer, the opportunity was missed. But no matter: here comes the CE industry – as of Thursday in Las Vegas, it’s their market now.

Apple undertook a conscious expansion into the CE industry several years ago with the iPod (in fact, dropping ‘Computer’ from their corporate name) – is it too late for other computer-centric companies to make a similar move? 

The recent Intel/Yahoo initiative is a particularly interesting case in point.  Both companies, as Yahoo Connected TV vice president Patrick Barry poetically puts it, “emerged from the ocean of the PC”.

Intel Intel has been especially forward-thinking regarding the convergence of the home computing and consumer electronics industries for some time now, having launched the Intel Digital Home Group several years ago.  The interdisciplinary Digital Home Group, active in both processor design and standards development, is particularly close to my heart, as it’s made up of social scientists as well as computer scientists.

Yahoo We’ve been pretty hard on Yahoo lately, but they do have some heavy OEM hitters lined up to implement their embedded internet TV ‘widgets’ system: Sony, TiVo, and Samsung. Also worth noting, the Connected TV initiative intends to follow a purely advertising-supported model, and studies routinely show consumers prefer advertising to subscription fees.  Lastly, yet another issue (and one that holds true for all internet video contenders) is the remote: as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently noted, a Nintendo Wii-like pointing remote will likely be required as internet-enabled television hardware matures.

At any rate, given their recent setbacks, this could be Yahoo’s last best shot at redemption – so look for them to bet the farm (or “throw the long ball”, for you American football fans) on this one.

Net Neutrality.  Up to now, the conventional definition of the concept has been that internet service providers shall be prohibited from “blocking or slowing content from some applications or companies” (as quoted from a recent NetworkWorld article).  Arguably, the definitive infraction against this particular notion of Net Neutrality was Comcast’s recent ‘managing’ of Bit Torrent traffic via the insertion of spurious connection reset packets.

However, the whole issue the issue of Net Neutrality (at the last mile between the ISP and the consumer, at least) is rapidly becoming a moot point: in preparation for the expected explosion of demand for longer-form video over IP, most major carriers are now scrambling to assemble and/or acquire proprietary content delivery networks (CDN)s to avoid the ever more congested and unpredictable system of routers out there in the public cloud (a recent post about just what Google, Microsoft, and Verizon are up to can be found here).

So while your neighborhood ISP might maintain a commitment to Net Neutrality itself, the real action is well upstream, as major corporations join already established CDN players such as Akamai, Edge Networks, and Yahoo’s Cloudfront to distribute and/or cache digital media content out along the edge of the cloud, in effect forming competing private mini-clouds to minimize the role of the public internet itself.

Put another way, in the purest sense of the term, Net Neutrality has already become something of an anachronism – not due to any localized slowing down of unfavored packets at the ISP level, but due to a globalized speeding up of favored packets on CDNs, before they ever reach the ISP.   A recent Wall Street Journal article touches on just this nuanced distinction: according to Google, their recent proprietary internet/CDN initiatives “do not rely on the carrier’s unilateral control over the last-mile connections to consumers, and also do not involve discriminatory intent“ – and even the independent public interest organization Public Knowledge (whose directors include internet academic and Obama advisor Lawrence Lessig) now maintains that “caching in no way is a part of the Net Neutrality issue.”

I’m of the opinion there’s considerably more gray area here.  But no matter – since the public internet will simply not scale to meet the anticipated bandwidth demand once short-tail (mainstream) premium digital media over IP becomes widespread, both carriers and content owners will increasingly invest in proprietary content delivery networks – and as consumers buy into the mass-market internet video offerings made possible by these high-performance CDNs, the very concept of Net Neutrality will seem increasingly quaint – and the “internet” as a whole will come to resemble the American health care system: multi-tiered and largely privatized.

So to the extent long-form video over IP ultimately enjoys widespread mass-market success,  the innocent ideal of a truly egalitarian and fundamentally neutral internet is destined to end, no matter what your local ISP’s policies are.

Don’t shoot the messenger…  

Last week, I quipped about president-elect Barack Obama’s recent commitment to video-taping the weekly Democratic radio address.

The more I think about this though, the new presidential over-the-top social viral video strategy brings up some interesting questions:

For starters, as the new administration is keen to leverage the benefits of ubiquitous online video distribution, what keeps the public from possible Obama video fatigue? 

As of today, we are in week five of the elect-president’s weekly video address and already audiences are dropping off faster than a second rate soap opera could on broadcast TV.

As of writing this post, the new administration’s first video address posted to YouTube on November 15 generated 247,600 average weekly video streams.

However, for Mr. Obama’s more recent weekly messages, viewer attention declined noticeably.

Videos published to YouTube in week three and two generated only 174,805 and 115,106 streams respectively – that’s as much as 46% fewer streams delivered compared to Mr. Obama’s first weekly video address.

But then again, last week’s video addressed the nation’s pressing issue of steadily raising job losses, as a result garnering a record 445,613 streams in only seven days. 

Clearly, subject matter matters as audiences have an acute understanding of what they deem important enough to log on, view, and listen repeatedly. 

The other thought I had, the idea of a regular viral presidential video address will capture eyeballs and minds not just among US audiences, but also around the rest of the connected globe.

By design in and outside of YouTube, Web video by nature is shared freely and abundantly. Mr. Obama’s taped messages make no exception.

Thus, from East to West, North and South, the first of these weekly video messages are likely spreading globally and virally as we speak.

Does that mean Germany’s Chancelor Angela Merkel will soon start her own weekly video campaign?

Are any regular video posts forthcoming from the heads of state in France, the UK, Iran, or Iraq?; prepared to deal with the resulting online feedback of citizens everywhere chiming in?

Interestingly, as little as ten years ago all of this would have been unimaginable.

YouTube and its ample offspring of amateur video snack sites simply didnt exist. Neither did the prerequisite broadband lines, nor PCs with processors fast enough to make Web video fun.

Fast forward, in one swoop the US presidential web video address legitimizes how far we have come in democratizing media in the past years.  

This one’s for the history books.

Rather than trying to avoid (undesireable) discourse and debate, the new White House resident seems to signal honest interest in point-to-point dialogue versus the age-old hub-and-spoke system of commercial journalism. 

The question remains whether the idea of open viral dialog can help jointly create something better down the road. 

Or is the Web’s innate capability of cheap and ubiquitous distribution to and by all merely a zero-sum game?

Well, history books might tell.