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 a viable long-form internet video delivery platform - 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 Digital Home Group, active in both processor design and standards development, is particularly close to my heart, as it’s made up of both anthropologists 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, expect Yahoo to bet the farm on this one.

Granted, we’re not big Yahoo fans here at digitalmissive - at least not of Yahoo! Mail: recently, several years’ worth of email was lost from Andreas’ personal account, and since early 2007, the search function on mine started returning messages only from the last month or so.   Yahoo’s response to both issues was of the “Known-Issue,-Our-Engineers-Are-Aware-Of-It” variety, but both issues have remained unresolved over the past few months.

Concurrently (as you might have heard), things have gotten a bit bumpy around here economically lately - but for Yahoo the news has been even worse: in October, the company announced the intended layoff of 10% of their workforce by year’s end,  and after turning down a buyout offer from Microsoft earlier this year at $31 per share, today the company’s stock dipped below $10.

Perhaps to entice Microsoft to make another offer (and perhaps to avoid submitting himself to what would’ve been a memorably contentious 2009 shareholder’s meeting), in November CEO Jerry Yang agreed to step down once a replacement can be found.   But despite the imminent departure of the initial $31 offer’s main opponent, and despite Yahoo’s obvious (if somewhat humiliating) interest in winning back the software giant’s affections, Microsoft has not been enticed to return to the table with a reduced offer.

Most recently, Yahoo Senior VP Toby Coppel (head of operations in Europe and Canada) has announced his departure from the company as well (although Yahoo insists Coppel’s decision is unrelated to Yang’s departure and Microsoft’s lack of renewed interest).  While I was admittedly frustrated with Yahoo Mail, it is with no schadenfreude that I witness the company’s troubles - especially not for the 1000+ Yahoo employees to be let go by 2009.  But it is interesting to note that how well a company executes on the small stuff (such as the mail accounts of two guys from New York) often has a way of being predictive of its longer-term prospects.

It’s not clear whether Microsoft’s apparent disinterest in Yahoo is genuine or whether it’s a tactical stance given Yahoo’s continually weakening negotiating position – but either way, as unhappy as Yahoo shareholders must be these days, Microsoft owners should be showing Steve Ballmer the love for walking away at $31…

One of the most daunting technological challenges we face is scaling up this old internet of ours to meet the bourgeoning consumer demand for bandwidth-intensive applications such as streaming media, telecommuting, and cloud computing - and as internet video demand moves from short-form/long-tail/low quality content to long-form/short-tail/high quality content (i.e. from YouTube to Hulu to movies), internet video only becomes a larger and larger part of this equation.

Just a heads up: as of now, the public internet will cease to be able to meet bandwidth demand by 2012, according to an excellent study by research firm Nemertes (if you read just one of the external sources linked to from this blog, make it this one).  Citing independent research from the University of Calgary, the study finds that the three largest US content providers (Microsoft, Google and Yahoo) have already “built out dedicated infrastructures” in advance of just such as scenario - in Google’s case, as evidenced by their recent pursuit of ‘dark’ (unused) transcontinental fiber.

In short, a trend towards content providers “investing in technologies to accelerate traffic to their sites ahead of that on the regular Internet” over higher-performing paid or private “overlay” networks.  Put another way, the egalitarian net-neutral internet we of today will become just the lowest rung of a multi-tiered system composed of competing proprietary networks – nothing less than the commercialization albeit by technical necessity) of the internet.  “The oligarchy, in other words, is devolving into individual city-states” is how the Nemertes study puts it.

So that’s what’s up on the content provider side – what about the service provider?

It turns out ISP industry recognizes the trend as well, and moves are well underway.  Because they lack the resources of a Google or Microsoft to implement their own parallel physical internet backbone data links, proprietary  CDNs (content delivery networks) are the direction they’re going in instead.  What’s a CDN? Through both network optimization/caching software and the brute-force deployment of multiple content-caching servers placed at strategically positioned and geographically diverse locations along the edge of the internet, CDNs are networks designed to circumvent the increasingly messy core of the publicly routed internet to provide the higher bandwidth, lower latency and increased scalability required to meet the challenges of the future.  The third-party wholesale CDN market is relatively mature (industry leader Akamai now maintains over 34,000 servers located in 70 countries), but several large ISPs have recently opted to ‘roll their own’: in June 2008, AT&T announced it was building out a CDN of its own using  software licensed by several smaller firms (ExtendMedia, Qumu and Stratacache), and just last week at a conference, I was handed a press release from Verizon announcing a CDN partnership with UK CDN firm Velocix.

Why have two of the largest US carriers now decided to buck the outsourcing trend and create their own CDNs, especially during such challenging economic times?  There are several reasons:

• While most residential ISP customers are on (ostensibly) all-you-can-eat plans, CDN usage is metered – so while the ISP’s per-user revenue has remained largely static, their costs from the 3rd party CDNs they’re currently contracting with have been steadily going up.  This makes the prospect of cutting out the middleman increasingly attractive.
• On a technical level, the synergy of an integrated CDN/last mile solution offers potential performance advantages an external wholesaled CDN would have difficulty matching – and as the last mile becomes faster due to increased presence of fiber (i.e. FIOS) and/or Docsis3.0, the integration of the CDN with the last mile makes even more sense.
• To the extent an ISP is able to build a demonstrably better mousetrap on their own, the quality of that company’s proprietary CDN could well become a primary competitive differentiator driving subscription growth – especially if, as expected, long-form internet video usage continues to grow.
• Unlike AT&T, Verizon is planning to leverage the price/performance advantages of their new proprietary CDN on the content owner side as well, and has already contracted directly with Starz Entertainment to offer Starz content to Verizon customers (in this way, the in-house CDN could very well resuscitate the largely failed ‘walled-garden’ model).

Are 3rd party CDN wholesalers Akamai and Limelight losing sleep?  Probably not – deploying an effective CDN is an incredibly huge undertaking, and as such will be a realistic option only for the AT&Ts, and Verizons of the world.  But for the combined residential CDN/ISP, does being in both businesses concurrently present some interesting antitrust/conflict of interest issues?

Regardless of how it plays out between content providers’ pivate backbones and service providers’ private CDNs, what is clear is that the landscape will likely look profoundly different in five years – the internet as we know it could well become the equivalent of the public post office - while the equivalent of a parrallel  higher-performing ‘Fedex’ internet emerges, for the sole purpose of getting you that HD internet video stream or workplace desktop session you require.

On a purely technical level, it remains an exciting future – but will the incorporation of the internet (and the de facto end of net neutrality) happen at the expense of innovation?

That’s it. Just like that. One morning you wake up to find most of your emails emptied, gone, vanished - never to be retrieved again.

Well, that just happened to me. But what happened really?

A happy Yahoo! Mail Plus customer since February 2003 - a full five years of my personal emails dissolved into thin air this past week.

A moment of panic ensued. Then I started thinking.

The good news: I discovered that Yahoo! has a toll-free number to call (still relatively untypical for a .com), their customer service rep was exceedingly helpful and to-the-point, without schmoozie upselling attempts and just a minimum number of subservient “we-love-you-Mr.-Customer”.

And yes, I did get my follow-up call the same evening, just as promised.

The bad news: In a heartbeat Yahoo! (accidentally?) removed a full five years of my personal email communications with friends, family and many other folks I care about - only to confirm Yahoo! had forever deleted thousands of my digital messages off their server farms.

To me, that real question behind this unexpected personal data kill: In our hyper-social, interconnected world, what role does our email communication really represent within our personal sphere?

Certainly not as direct and personable as a one-on-one phone call, email is faster to-and-fro sender and recipient than, let’s say, a letter or a fax.

Conversely, email lags the speed of instant messaging and typically is slower than a briefly “spit-out” Twitter-style micro-blog post.

Of course email is searchable. In fact, Yahoo!’s recent free browser update improved my ability to turn scant bits of memory (… didn’t what’s-her-name’s email mention “engagement ads”?) into a series of (mostly relevant) hits.

Try that with past voice mails , letters or faxes received. It will not work.

But did I hold on to years of emails because I really needed to, or simply because I could? 

And what meaning do personal emails occupy in my daily life in terms of actual productivity gains?

Pushed by Google’s competitive Gmail launch, in May of last year, Yahoo! responded by offering “unlimited email storage” capabilities.

At one fell swoop, I was confronted with the pleasures of an all-you-can-eat email depository.

But just because competition got tough on Yahoo!, and storage cost had fallen dramatically, doesn’t really mean myself (or most anyone) actually needed the extra space and ensuing clutter.

Leaves my postmortem analysis with the legal aspect of my involuntary email vanishing act.

In short, a look inside Yahoo!’s service agreement failed to provide detail into the liability aspect of emails lost. (Do I actually have recourse here?).

But then again, it’s too late anyway.

What’s gone is gone, forever in the heavens of the Internet ether.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who keep their ice cube trays filled and those who don’t. (Remember when there were ice cube trays in most freezers?)

So maybe I should update that: are two kinds of people in the world: those who keep their email inbox empty and those who don’t – and I have to admit I’m in the latter demographic.

There, I said it. While my desktops (both physical and digital) are pretty clean (and I like to think that I’m right up there as far as productivity goes), my Yahoo account goes back well into the last century, and my mostly unkempt inbox now has over 9000 emails in it. I know, not exactly best practices – but Yahoo’s recently moved to no limitations on email data storage size, and I’m taking Mr. Yang at his word (and I’ve had clients – Exchange Breakers, I used to call them – with several times that amount of messages in their inboxes).

What made such bad behavior possible was my profound dependence on email search. Since I’m not populating subfolders, I *need* my search functionality – and for several months now, (along with a fair number of other Yahoo users) my email search is broken, only returning matches from the last three weeks or so.

I’ve Googled it - it turns out there are a lot of us out there but not enough to be news-worthy. I’ve sent forms and chats to Yahoo support – I’ve only gotten the generic “this is a known issue, we’ve escalated it” response. If I were paranoid blogger (and I hear that can be a problem out there on these here internets), I could almost convince myself Yahoo is attempting to ‘encourage’ users like me to keep less of our data laying around cluttering up their data centers – but no, I think it’s just another example of the potential downside of having one’s data up the cloud: outages. While what’s happening to me isn’t as scary (or evidently news-worthy) as what happened recently to some Apple MobileMe early adopters (in which the emails were actually lost ).

Cloud computing: collaboration, portability, workstation platform flexibility, lower server and backup costs – a free lunch. That is, until there are host-side issues up there in that cloud. Then the feeling of comfort from having someone in cloud responsible for your data can turn intoa pretty uncomfortable feeling of helplessness, especially when (unlike the Google Apps and Apple MobileMe situations) the issue is not widespread enough to garner media attention and goes unresolved for months.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten pretty acquainted with that <next> button, having hit it hundreds of times now to page through 9 years’ worth of emails.

Yahoo, thou art bumming me out. Waaah.