Technology & Ideas that Change our World
Apple tablet has been much anticipated and rumored, but Mike Arrington and TechCrunch are creating something quite cool! Read more.
An these kind of new devices will have some impact in the way web apps are developed, with emphasis in multitouch features.
As the graph via TechCrunch perfectly illustrates, WolframAlpha has not revolutionized Search… at all. It is a very nice concept, but far from delivering any real everyday value other than being somewhat useful to find numeric facts.
By comparison Bing has resulted in a good surprise to put pressure on Google monopoly in Search. No Search Revolution, but at least some good competition. That is excellent news for all of us.
An today’s news of Bing Travel launch look very promising.
NYT, GigaOm, and others attribute to the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen the fact that Twitter, Blogsplot, YouTube and many other sites are not accessible from China these days.
Even the brand new Microsoft search engine Bing is now blocked!!
I wonder if the cause of Bing blockage will not have anything to do with the fancy feature of Bing playing video thumbnails as you move the cursor over them. Taking into account that porn is censored in China and that YouTube videos were perfectly watched from Bing (and YouTube is blocked in China since March), there might be an additional reason for Microsoft’s search engine black-out. See the picture above via TechCrunch and put yourself in the shoes of a chinese censor. Wouldn’t you block it too?
China is a country where the collective good is well above individual rights. Chinese perfectly accept to have only one child by law. And Chinese do not mind censorship as long as the system allows the economy and standards of living to keep growing as they have during the past years.
Any Chinese who is really interested in bypassing censorship can easily do it with plenty of VPN services available in Internet, like FreeGate. In reality, very few of them care.
I am sure you have already heard about Wolfram Alpha, the new search engine that will shake the thrones of Google and Wikipedia as kings of Internet knowledge.
Soon to be launched, Wolfram Alpha defines itselft as a Computational Knowledge Engine, aiming at providing factual answers, more than a set of links to search results. See it in action in the clip above.
The man behind is Stephen Wolfram, a Brittish professor who, in the early 90s, created Mathematica, a software tool for maths computation well known among engineering and science college students.
The Silicon Alley Insider Chart of the Day (above) shows the great curve of DVR (Digital Video Recorders) adoption in US, where almost one in three households already have one. This poses a threat to the advertising model of broadcast TVs, as DVRs are commonly used to fast-forward ads.
DVRs are clearly growing, but for how long? Take the analogy of answering machines. In the 80s and 90s, everyone had an answering machine at home. Then Voicemail Service arrived, managed by the telco, and now answering machines are not sold anymore.
Similarly network PVRs, or even further, Catch-Up TV, make the DVR at home irrelevant. Why program the DVR to record a show, when you can have it from the Catch-up catalog when you want and where you want, accessible from a laptop or a mobile handset?
And the good news for telcos and content owners: with a Catch-up TV service, you take back the control of ads.
It is the Hulu model taken to the three screens (TV, PC and mobile). If you have Hulu, why would you want to record a show in your DVR? why would you want a DVR at all if the content is always there available?
I guess that by now, all music labels have already realized that music downloads and subscriptions are the only way forward to distribute music. CDs are dead, and rightly so.
Maybe because we just finished unpacking the shipment from KL in our new home in Shanghai, I just happen to realize how I hate CDs. I have hundreds of CDs purchased before the MP3 era, and while unpacking them, I could only feel how useless was the task of putting them on the shelves in my study room.
For my next move I only hope I will have already got rid of all the CDs after ripping them all to my music library, (or alternatively legally download private copies of them with Bittorrent).
I do not think I will ever buy a Music CD again. The last music CD I bought was played only once while ripped to my library.
R.I.P. Music CDs.
After a few weeks in Shanghai, I am finally settling and getting used to China, and how crazy they drive in Shanghai.
I have a decent 2Mbps ADSL line at home that works much better than the broadband I was getting from Telekom Malaysia in KL. P2P traffic is not throttled aparently, unlike in Telekom Malaysia, but since 24 March YouTube is blocked in China. Nobody knows officially why, but I am missing the highlights from the Spanish Liga in YouTube, which by the way were harder and harder to find before they were (instantly) removed due to copyright issues.
On the mobile side, almost everybody uses China Mobile in Shanghai. iPhones although not officially launched can be easily acquired in stores (imported from US, Hong-Kong or Singapore) . The iPhone 3G is quite popular and you can see a lot of them in Shanghai, despite 3G in China is not yet available. It will be launched very soon, on 17 May, the International Day of Telecommunications. I was also about to buy a G1, “imported” from T-Mobile, but somehow the Google account was impossible to activate, probably because the hack was blocked.
When the 3G licenses were awarded, the market in China was reorganized around three operators :
China Unicom will launch the iPhone 3G, and I would not be surprised if in one year, the number of iPhones in China would surpass those in USA.
On the TV side, Cable TV is very popular, given that it costs 13 RMB per month, or less than 1.5 Euro! for about 50 channels, all Chinese. International content is officially not available, but specially many foreigners “subscribe” to Dream, a Satellite Digital TV provider from Philippines that does include in their packages CNN, BBC, ESPN, HBO, TCM and others.
Regulation for TV and telecommunications is handled by separate bodies, the SARFT for broadcasters and the MII for Telcos. Cable Operators have only recently been allowed to provide broadband services, while Shanghai Telecom launched IPTV for free with some limitations in what TV services they can offer.
SARFT has developed a local standard for Mobile TV called CMMB (China Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting), that after the Beijing Olympics reached more than 1 million users, which is a big success in user adoption, compared to other Mobile TV experiences, specially in Europe and US. The service is Free-To-Air, and car GPS systems and some Portable Media Players incorporate CMMB tuners. Mobile Phones have also been only recently allowed to incorporate a tuner. With the cost of the chip-set going under $5, SARF expects to reach more than 10 million users in 2010.
The Chinese people can not enjoy YouTube, but anyway most of them do not speak English (yet). In return they can watch a lot of CCTV, enve on the mobile!
Via Martin Varsavsky, I find a WSJ article where Steve Forbes gives a provoking view on the roots of the Banking Crisis. Mark-to-market or “fair value” accounting for financial institutions was re-established in 2007 in USA. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) rules that the balance sheet must reflect the “market” value of the financial assets.
With the market value of financial assets falling after the system credibility crisis, banks are dragged close to bankruptcy only due to the need to account for assets at today’s market valuation.
Quoting Mr. Forbes:
Regulatory capital by its definition should take the long view when it comes to valuation; day-to-day fluctuations shouldn’t matter. Assets should be kept on the books at the price they were obtained, as long as the assets haven’t actually been impaired.
Mark-to-market accounting does just the opposite. When times are good, it artificially boosts banks’ capital, thereby encouraging more investing and lending. In a downturn it sets off a devastating deflation.
Mark-to-market accounting is the principle reason why our financial system is in a meltdown. The destructiveness of mark-to-market — which was in force before the Great Depression — is why FDR suspended it in 1938. It was unnecessarily destroying banks.
And a proof point of this thesis can be that while American banks like Citibank are near-bankrupt, other banks in Europe like Santander, less exposed to American accounting rules, seem healthier even though the fundamentals of Spanish economy are much worse than in US.
Markets are so volatile that the idea to use them for accounting is a recipe for system instability.
Take Santander stock price as an example. Why Santander PER is currently 4 (with a 11% yield), when during last 7 years it had always been above 20, with a mere 2% yield? Which valuation is “fair” for accounting? the one of last 7 years? or that of last 7 months? Isn’t the valuation just reflecting how optimists or pessimists are investors? should “optimism” be accounted in the books??
Economics is far from exact science, and it is remarkably incapable of predict, sometimes even explain a posteriori, events such as the current crash. What we know from economists is that people expectations are the most reliable indicator to predict the growth or slow down of economic activity. The credibility of the financial system is now below limits. Fear (panic) to a banking system collapse is reducing consumer spending, companies forecasts are revisited and unemployment surges as companies prepare for the downturn. A vicious circle that the accounting rules strangely help accelerate.
An accounting system based in market valuations, under the current gloom, makes the simple possibility of bankruptcy a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Boxee is getting so successful that many of its users are seriously considering to stop their Pay-TV subscriptions.
Boxee is a cool open source software for Media Centers based on Mac or Ubuntu. This software transforms a Mac Mini, Apple TV or any Linux small-form PC into a social network set-top-box. With a great user interface, Boxee enables you to enjoy on your TV not only your media library but also online video such as YouTube and Hulu, as you interact with your buddies.
Hulu -the joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp- offers a sensational online catalog of TV shows from their parent companies and others, that has made their user growth in 2008 stunning.
Such is the success of the Boxee-Hulu combination that Hulu’s content providers have requested Hulu to be removed from Boxee, in an attempt to stop cannibalizing their traditional revenues from TV ads and Cable networks.
Again the traditional Innovator’s dilemma in front of a disruptive threat. Innovate first and cannibalize yourself? or wait and risk to be eaten by others with less to lose?
NBC and News Corp might worry about Online TV in the short-term, but in the long-run it will ony bring good news:
If Hulu is able to build a stronghold in online TV, they will capture all the benefits of a richer online TV in the long-run.
The ones to worry about Boxee are the Cable and IPTV operators that will need to ad significant value to avoid being by-passed by over-the-top solutions such as Boxee, and dumped by their customers. There is time. Boxee is great, but still for Mac or Linux geeks, a minority.
“The question is not whether Telcos want to be a dumb or a smart pipe. They are already a dumb pipe. The question is do they want to be something else on top?”
Max Foresite – Telecom, Internet & Media Analyst
After a few weeks traveling I am back in KL after the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. I was planning to link any comprehensive report from the blog-sphere with the highlights from last week, but strangely enough I did not find any. So I will summarize my high level impressions from the show:
In general, less visitors than previous editions, more sun, a few Lara Crofts in Hall 8, and occasional pickpockets making it into the headlines.
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