This year in three overstuffed, stress filled days the Titans of the industry held court on stage in two different cities - Las Vegas and San Francisco. Imagine the dynamics of it all. Members of the media had to decide how to best cover the three who would shape the coming year and possibly the future Gary Shapiro, CEA; Bill Gates, Microsoft; Steve Jobs, Apple.
Andy Marken is president of Marken Communications and has been involved in the marketing of storage technology for more than 15 years. His experience includes work with Panasonic, Verbatim, Matsushita, Plasmon, Nikon, Mitsubishi Chemical and a number of hard drive manufacturers. Andy can be reached at andy@markencom.com.
You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,
"Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet."
Andy reminisces about "the good old days".
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,
"Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet."
Andy reminisces about "the good old days".
Despite the fact that DVD players have finally surpassed VCRs in the U.S., industry players see silver disc sales declining. Why? Well Dr. Waldman, everyone knows! People are suddenly going to change over and join the video on demand (VoD) and pay-for-view society. What is even better for the PC/CE industry is the fact that they will build out their home networks so they can watch their content anywhere in the house.
For thousands of years people looked the other way as folks made copies of other people's work by hand, by printing press, by copier, by disc. Content producers weren't happy but the U.S. Supreme Court determined there was such a thing as fair use making a backup copy of content for yourself. That was loosely interpreted to mean you could make a backup copy of your videotape. You could make a copy of an audio tape to CD so you could play on your personal player, in the car, or...
Sometimes our kids and the community at large make us feel like Tom Hanks in the 2004 The Terminal. We simply go from gate to gate trying to get on the next technology plane to fly to our destination: optimum personal and business productivity. We haven't even installed Vista-- probably wait until quite a few folks fly that plane before we get on board!! We have a new cellphone with a camera as well as network and messaging capabilities. Phone works great. Haven't bothered reading the passenger instructions in the seatback for the rest of the marvelous features. We figure we'll just get airsick...
While videogame boxes have been a yawn for 60+% of the population in the Americas for the past year. For the rest? They are the "A" list of lust. For MS, Sony and Nintendo the Xbox, PS3 and Wii are about percentage points. And bragging rights - serious bragging rights! But Sony drew the line in the sand. They said the console war doesn't start till we say so. Like Nicholas Cage in Gone saying he was going to steal 50 cars in one night. Great chest thumpin, but who cares? ...
The hardware, software, content creators and deliverers could learn a lot by studying The Lord of the Rings trilogy. As Legolas said, "The horses are restless, and the men are quiet." If we stretch the literal portions of the Fellowship of the Ring there are three layers of Earth: Upper, Middle, Lower. The content Earth? - Upper - professional Tellywood, videographers, prosumers - serious dollars - Middle - home/personal family and personal consumer -- memories - Lower - teens/tweens disposable, impulse, casual Yoohh! Shakin !! ...
Feeling a little tired lately? Spending less time watching TV? Wonder how you're going to absorb it all? Well...Yes...Yes...we'll email you on that. If it's any consolation, you're not alone. The beauty of today's content sources is that they are always on, always available, always sending stuff to you. According to a study by Yahoo! that's also the ugly underbelly of today's rapidly changing technology. Their findings, based on responses from people around the globe, are that we are either mastering the demands of multitasking or we have changed the time/space continuum...
In observance of the hard drive's 50th anniversary, we cajoled our kids into visiting the computer museum in San Jose. Seemed like an interesting way to get them to understand the technology that has impregnated their lives. We unplugged our son's MP3 player white earbuds. Made him leave his PSP at home. Turned off our daughter's cellphone...no IMing. Other than the sheer size, they were totally unimpressed with the world's first hard drive -- the IBM RAMAC (Random Access Memory for Accounting and Control) drive...
From its innocent beginning in the early '80s the Internet has grown into an indispensable part of our personal and professional lives. As bandwidth spread around the globe it fostered a new industry, the Web. This gave rise to heroes, billionaires, industry leaders, wholesale disasters. The second generation Web cloud is being seeded by VC and M&A funds as lavishly as before. VCs have war chests stuffed with over $15 billion investing in anything with social media in its name. Media conglomerates are throwing big money at young kids to have a stake in the new media environment...
"A deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something," (Trinity in the 1999 movie The Matrix). The Internet Matrix emerged in the late '80s with three struggling internet service providers (ISPs) serving researchers, educators and a few business people. It enjoyed spectacular growth. Morpheus and Neo sat there just enjoying the success !!! The Internet's Matrix 2 came in the '90s with more excitement, more money than people could imagine. The death of many of the stars was painful.and expensive. With the slow, struggling emergence of IPTV the third remake is here...
Most of today's computers have the power and capacity to support video pro-duction. Digital camcorders are available with FireWire connectivity that simplifies downloading video to personal com-puters. Economical and user-friendly per-sonal video production tools have become widely available. When you record DVD-quality MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video on a CD, it can be played on virtually any DVD-ROM drive or DVD player as well as computer-based CD-ROM drives. Products like NTI's CD & DVD Maker 7 Titanium, InterVideo DVD Copy 5, Ulead MovieMaker 5, Roxio Easy CD as well as a number of the video production tools, make it fast and easy to copy your videos onto CD-R and CD-RW media...
Now that the issues of copyright protection appear to have finally been put to rest, the MP3 world is moving faster than the average music lover can keep up. Whether you're a serious music collector, are looking for a new genre of music to enjoy, or just want to see if you can catch a musician before he or she hits stardom, the Web is the place to visit. Thanks to the technology of audio compression, the global reach of the Internet and the rapid growth of on-line music sites, it's now possible to preview a wide range of music and select the songs you enjoy...
Double Layer DVD recordable discs offer up to four hours of high quality MPEG-2 video, or up to 8.5GB of data on a single sided disc with two individual recordable layers. Double Layer capable recorders will have the ability to record on the new Double Layer DVD recordable discs as well as traditional single layer DVD discs and CDs too. Want more? Because a re-corded Double Layer DVD disc is com-pliant to the DVD9 specification, the discs are compatible with most consumer DVD players and computer DVD-ROM drives already installed in the market....
Although Double Layer 8.5GB DVD-ROM and DVD video discs have been available for some time as part of the DVD read-only standard, it was thought impossible or at least improbable that a similar technology could be developed for personal DVD recording. However, Mitsubishi Kagaku Media (MKM), parent company of Verbatim Corporation, and Philips have recently proven that a Dou-ble Layer DVD recording system is feasible utilizing the DVD+R (write-once) format...
