To me, the most interesting technologies were 3D and a massage chair that took me under for 20 min. The biggest news story, however, was USB 3.0, a sad state of affairs if 2010 is marked by a tiny, soon to be in every computer, plug (no matter how fast that damn thing is).

Ignoring the massage chair, which I can’t recommend enough, 3D was the hot topic, inspired by, of course, Avatar. Everybody, from Nokia to Nvidia, appeared to have something related to 3D. They mostly had excuses for it—Nokia was pimping its high bandwidth infrastructure for 3D content aimed at TV & telephone providers; Nvida was pimping its 3D shutter technology for consumer PCs; Frauenhofer Institut was pimping its glasses-less 3D technology; and more and more and more—but my end-conclusion, also after trying to explore the potential for a revolution that was Avatar, was that 3D is an excellent gimmick that will draw a crowd to your stand or cinema, but will leave you disappointed 2/3 times.

Ironically, Nokia had the most impressive display of 3D, showing it off on a 15,000 euro JVC flatscreen. When asked for details, however, all they could tell me was the price of the TV and that their bandwidth technology was not for sale to the “likes of me.” Very arrogant, those Nokia folk and it wasn’t just the 3D guy either… Nvidia’s shutter glasses also worked well and I see a real potential for 3D gaming. Frauenhofer’s glasses-less 3D-TV… pah! The problem with 3D is that it’s so easy to do it badly and 3D without glasses is far from ready. 3D with glasses is far from ready!

I don’t get the obsession with not wearing glasses either. First of all, they’re roomy, which means that you can wear them over existing glasses, they won’t make the claustrophobic more claustrophobic, and they’re disposable. Putting on glasses in the living room is kind of like turning off the light when watching TV.

Last, but not least, I liked lcReflex, which developed an interesting, if not very portable contraption, that makes applications on a computer screen three-dimensional. It involves something they call a Stereomonitor, two screens joined together at a 90 degree angle (one front-facing, one on top facing down) and a semi-transparent mirror in the middle. Put on glasses and you can manipulate an image of brain in 3 dimensions, which should be very interesting for, eh, brain-scientists and playing 3D Tetris.

What’s fairly clear is that we are very close to having 3D in our living rooms, whether it’s for playing games or for watching (selected) TV-shows and movies. But 3D has the same problem that HD-DVDs and -TVs have, which is that it’s insanely niche. You can’t play everything on it and you need some pretty expensive equipment to play it. That combination doesn’t justify much of an investment in it.

The best chances for success belong to companies like Nvidia, which produce consumer-priced solutions for consuming content. Add to this that it is (relatively speaking) fairly easy to convert digital content from 2D to 3D. I very much see the next stage of gaming to becoming 3D.

I’m much more bearish on video-media. Great that cinemas have found a new revenue stream to subsidise their troubled existence. Great that 7 out of 10 filmmakers are considering to make their next film in 3D. I don’t think cinemas have to worry about living rooms competing with them on that level anytime soon. While the need for a big screen to enjoy 3D is a myth well-worth breaking (and it soon will be in gaming), it is still a powerful way to experience a movie and something you can sell at €/$ 15 a pop. Home-entertainment still has the expensive technology problem and the fact that BluRay DVDs simply aren’t selling to anyone except Playstation 3 owners.

As mentioned, 3D’s gimmick power is strong, but that will wear off after having 3D technology in your living room and hardly any media to consume on it. It’s much better off in cinemas where the growing few pay a few bucks more to see space debris floating above their heads, or on consoles where the price of a 3D add-on is hardly more than buying a Guitar Hero guitar.

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Internet IS disintermediation. It removes boundaries between services/product producers and consumers.

Which means that if your business model consists in standing between them, as a gatekeeper, then you have a positioning problem. Record companies have been learning this the hard way during the last decade.

We all know about Myspace and how musicians made their work popular before signing a contract with a record company (think Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys).

It looks like even this time is over : the music industry business model is now getting a step further towards disintermediation with the smart, cheap and beautiful Pomplamoose.

Video Songs from Standford.edu

Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte met in Standford University. They both come from a family where music is all around the house and both started playing instrument and singing very young.

The video song concept is inspired by the mid 90s Danish Dogma 95 avant garde film making movement. The idea is a) do it yourself approach b) shoot the musicians while recording and c) edit the music and video so that e) all the sources of sound are displayed on a split screen during the clip.

Pop covers

They’ve been doing both covers (Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Earth Wind & Fire -see below- etc …) and own material (Pas Encore the video above).

There are many musical influences, though all pop and elaborate, their choices say it all. Nataly voices sometimes reminds Stina Nordesntam for the background vocals arrangements, but the main influence is Feist (whose The Reminder album is a masterpiece of quiet and intimate pop songs). Their cover of Gatekeeper from the latter is quite evocative of the voice similarity.

With their video songs (editing, images), one can see the influence of Lasse Gjersten, another Youtube star and symbol of the internet culture.

Dongle and crowdsourcing

This fresh, arty and DIY approach made them superstars on Youtube (hundred of thousands views) and they decided to sell their stuff on iTunes and on home made Pomplamoose dongles.

For their music artwork, they decided to crowdsource it. And as usual with any band event, they announced the result on another youtube video.

Who needs a record company ?

So far they’ve sold about 20,000 songs on iTunes and according to the Wall Street Journal blog they declined Major Labels (Warner, Sony, Universal) proposal and remain free of any record company contracts. Instead they decided to carry on and only use Youtube (their pomplamoose channel) as a mean to communicate and exchange with their fans.

Derek Sivers has seen it coming and made a handy lifehacking book on the topic : How to call attention to your music.

It used to be that, as a musician, only 10% of your career was up to you. “Getting discovered” was about all you could do. A few gatekeepers controlled ALL outlets. You had to impress one of these magic few people to be allowed to present your music to the world. (Even then, they assigned you a manager, stylist, producer, band, etc.) As of the last few years, now 90% of your career is up to you. You have all the tools to make it happen.

Disintermediation has lovely green eyes, a heartbreaking voice, mischievious musical arrangements, and engage in casual conversations that are fun to watch on youtube.

Pomplamoose September

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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So, my review today will be short, so short that I won’t talk about more than one feature. And that feature may disappoint you, I know it. But, in the greater picture of things, I think it’s pretty cool.

Stepping over from Windows half a decade ago, I had to adopt a new behaviour. I was forced to use iTunes, which meant that I had to import my whole library into it to make full use of this software and it’s ability to organise music. The iPod also affected this, which, prior to the iPhone/Touch, delegated its entire user-interface to iTunes also, allowing people to create intricate smart- and playlists, download podcasts, etc. in the software, whilst letting the hardware be controlled by one button only.

My musical behaviour on the computer had become somewhat bloated, less spontaneous than before. Leopard (10.5) innovated on this a little, by introducing Quicklook, which, through the space bar, allows for the quick previewing of most files, which is especially nice for movies and occasionally nice with music as well. The problem with the latter is that when you shift the focus to another app, as ADD-affected/music-listening people tend to do frequently, the music stops… quite literally. So it wasn’t a perfect solution.

Snow Leopard (10.6) introduced an improvement to that feature, one that is already affecting the way I listen to music on my Mac. Quicklook still works the way it always did, but what’s new is that you can quick look within an icon. By hovering over a music file on your desktop and changing the display in the finder to large enough icons (they need to be made a certain size (64×64 on my Macbook) for this to work), you will see a play button on the icon, which, when clicking, plays the track or video. And you can keep playing it while you do your other stuff, such as me typing this blog post.

Pretty awesome, if you ask me. No need to fire up iTunes just for that one file and my need to ADD has been satisfied.

/End Review.

Vincent

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Just like you guys couldn’t offer me much of a suggestion regarding how to arrange this distributed video system, people were fairly unresponsive to my request to send me greetings by video or audio. Even pictures from the good old days were apparently too much to ask for–us “oldsters” used analogue cameras back in the day and no Flickr in sight.

This all changed however just last week when we decided to focus on what I call the lowest common denominator in organised activities like this reunion and also business. Focussing on the simplest possible solution to solve a collaborative problem.

We asked everyone that couldn’t make it to send a short text to say hi, etc. And the responses came rolling in. Within 2 days, we already had 30 and they keep coming.

It just shows you 2 things: 1. really K.I.S.S. (keep it simple & stupid) is the best way to deal with most problems. And 2. we are really not ready for a video-based messaging system. Sure, there’s Youtube and more, but you also need to record, you need to look good on the recording, you need to convert it to flash, you need to upload it, the receiver needs to convert it back, edit it (a super-big hassle!), and then present it in a usable way. Far from K.I.S.S.!

Vincent

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it has good momentum to spread virally (one of the most watched in bing and this is how i found out ) and i am checking if and how often i will stumble over it

basically I blog …water, being in hiatus mode  as well

enjoy

Georgia

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So, I have come to the personal conclusion that online video is something that people simply don’t care about (very much). Here are a few reasons why:

1. No success-story on the web: Youtube was acquired by Google, which does not prove its business-model; Loic LeMeur (yes, that LeWeb ’08 guy) abandoned his video-idea, pretty much; The promising Stage6 by the DivX people was abandoned due to, I believe, excessive illegal content being posted on it, etc. etc. OK, the French Dailymotion is no. 1 on Techcrunch’s new Ranking of European hot startups, but even that service isn’t what I would call the perfect implementation of a video service. As a matter of fact, the only thing that seems to work out is television, Hulu (basically television and US only), and Piracy.
2. Bandwidth: even though bandwidth is clearly increasing, it is still, for any business that wants to set up its own video service, a dramatic weight to carry, at least compared to other content on the web. And what if you want to upload your own video? Prepare to have to wait for a while.
3. Does not speak our language: as I mentioned in my previous “hate-post”, the web is largely text-based and the often non-indexability of video means that it does not interoperate with the most-used web-application: Search.
4. Unforgivingly immersive: I listen to audio-podcasts and music all the time, because it’s compatible with the rest of my lifestyle, e.g. travelling/communiting or doing exercise. You have to give all your attention to video, which I consider a barrier to entry for our A.D.D.-infested society.
5. Expensive to produce video (?): a question-mark there because obviously hardware-costs are falling. But still expensive, as it’s complicated and requires both expensive (in terms of time and money) training, patience (a time-cost) while editing, and the ability to work with specialised (and often expensive) video-editing software.
6. Unforgivingly intrusive: It took me a long time to adopt a webcam, until it was basically built into my laptop. I still don’t like to have to dress (up) and make up my hair just to have a conversation, and all that, even though now I will rarely Skype without it. But I am a, tongue in cheek, modern man, which I can’t say for many of my peers.

These and more reasons is why I suspect that Online Video is not a hot topic and might perhaps never be. If you’re in the midst of an online video startup, I don’t know what to tell you, except I hope it radically improves on what has come before.

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of The Guardian)

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For a reunion event of people all over the world that I am co-organising, of which a certain part cannot show up, I am planning to give the latter a chance to send their greetings recorded across the internet and shown in either video or audio-format (with picture) at the event.

However, I am a need of the appropriate service that can facilitate this process. Essentially, I am looking for:

1. Something that is web-based and does not require a user to install software on their computer
2. Something that will take video and/or (preferably both, but not necessary) audio
3. Preferably at an adequate resolution / audio quality to be played on a large screen in front of a large room of people
4. Something that I can export into an application like iMovie for Mac or Windows Movie Maker
5. As this would likely be a compilation of 50 or so people, something that requires minimal effort on my part, except for setting up the service, doing the downloading, and post-editing.

I realise that this is likely unknown territory for many of you, as it is for me, but I think would actually generally be pretty cool and hope to brainstorm about your ideas and/or the possibilities/limitations with you.

Any ideas?

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of Kimpton Middle School)

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In the Netherlands, when I grew up, we had a TV-station, called The Box (later bought up by MTV, which now has a Music-TV-monopoly in the Netherlands), which allowed people to sms in and request songs. That later evolved to a system, that still exists, I think, of sending messages via sms to the channel, which would play while a song was playing. If I say “Dutch boy or girl, I LOVE you,” I think you get the general idea of how that went.

I can see the attraction. It must be incredibly addictive to try and get your message on the air, to get your 140 characters of fame. And it felt exactly the same with the Facebook+CNN thing, where it seemed more like Facebookers were competing for air-time with themselves and with the unforgiving flow of the live-video station.

As a TV-sceptic—I’ve stopped owning a TV as an adult, and switched to the more geeky (I know…) XBMCs and the internet—I would be more than happy to see this medium go, but I also understand that this 79 year old tradition of sitting absolutely still with a TV-dinner will not go without a fight. The Micheal Jackson + TMZ scoop aside, Big Media still has a higher budget to be quicker and (maybe!) more relevant than small & new Media alternatives are.

Is the Internet the direction to take, however? I think I just made a case that the, still addictive quality of a few seconds of fame (Twitter is the perfect example that we haven’t evolved passed that yet), makes for a somewhat effective marketing strategy for Big Media.

I think that TV is also relentless and monotonous. It does not allow you to switch contexts, it’s a non-stop flow of information, and it doesn’t care about making you waste 15 min. of each hour with senseless advertising. In that sense, it is the complete anti-thesis of the Internet, which has already delivered on the promise of complete user-control (compared to the Old status quo, at least). TV doesn’t care about you, except for your continued presence in front of the tube, and while Internet companies really want the same, we at least have found ways to get around that.

In that sense, I think that anyone with some sense of wanting to keep control over their own life, will continue to turn away from TV. I like watching it, don’t get me wrong, but on my own time and without commercials. The future of Television will either to stay unchanged, reserved for the traditional folk too tired to want to think / interact, or it will be a mash-up of video (e.g. I have 3 min. to waste, I want Stevie Wonder only, without the MJ burial thanks, and on my watch television.)

End musing.
Vincent (can’t stop signing my name, sorry, (my) blogging feels more like writing a letter than anything else.)

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It’s the story of Carlos Amorales, a Mexican visual artist, who does some pretty interesting things, including: graphic design, installations, performance art, and co-founding a record-label. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing (it’s only 14 min.!), worth checking out is:

• 01:15, when he shows how me makes his illustrations by keeping a digital database of images in different shapes. All in black, though he occasionally uses red. If you think these simplistic, then look at some of his installations (next point), and you see that these are just the beginning, really.
• 04:40, when he shows some of his installations and talks about how they give the audience the ability to enter the work. It made me think about how creative developers/artist can use the new technology of “augmented reality” to create layers above art-installations that take you more into the experience. Any museum I go to these days, I always get the audio-tour as  it adds to my understanding of what I’m seeing. The same could apply to pointing your mobile camera at it and seeing a visual augmentation. Of course, this is where those infernal copyright laws come in; I think this is something that should be done first with certain avant garde / independent artist, to show-case the potential…
• 09:20, when he talks about his record label, Nuevos Ricos (turn down your speakers before clicking this link), for which they created a manifesto, which included giving all the music away for free. Instead the focus was on performance, on entertainment. I mean, well it’s completely ridiculous and you can see that it’s more of an experiment to understand youth culture. At the same time, it is something that many anti-copyright people (including me) have argued for, that music should be about the performance, not about making money from a shiny disc / digital file. But in the end, maybe music/art should be about self-expression and we all express ourselves in different ways. Some, like the clowns in the video, who have very little musical talent, will prefer showcasing themselves. Others will prefer to just make music and make a living from that. We live in a very nuanced world, after all…

End thoughts, hope to be back this Monday.

Vincent

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In Alan Moore’s & Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Warhol’s existence is not painted in a very colourful light (pun intended). He has been resurrected as a machine into a society where money no longer plays a role and is very depressed. So his ability to record everything is really not very meaningful to him. Having only read this part of the comic last night, already my sentiments about Always-On are changing towards… and what would it accomplish?

I recently visited an Art Exhibition of independent artists in Maastricht and tested out a little what an Always-On Device would look like to me. I used my camera, a Canon 870 IS, as a recording device, which I held in front of me while walking through the crowd.

I managed to capture the people experiencing an exhibition, a piano player who was adding atmosphere to a room full of art, just hypnotically playing a few notes over and over. What actually intrigued me the most, I captured maybe two dozen miniature sets for the Maastricht Opera house. It was very surreal, the sets which were made out of cardboard and wood mostly, were 3-dimensional, and I was floating with my camera device around it and through it even, capturing it all at angles never deemed possible to me before. As if I was my own film-director.

Of course, apart from the disappointing battery-life on my camera, clearly not designed for video-recording, and the occasionally funny looks that I got, the real challenge is to make that data actionable—a big priority in everything I do. It is a matter of transforming the raw footage into a tight package that can be consumed by others, and the question is really, should this be the responsibility of the creator or of the consumer…?

With us having reached and surpassed the age of the mashup, it makes less and less sense to continue to try and re-invent the wheel, rather delegating that task across far more… interested people (in the area of video-editing at least), of which there is no shortage, as long as the tools and the specific community exists. Clearly, that kind of methodology requires a lax attitude about copyright.

To recap, so that it doesn’t seem like I’m entirely floating in thoughts, an Always-On Device would need:

1. A willing human recorder
2. A recording device designed for capturing experiences
3. A way to process that information into “usable bits”
4. A favourable legal environment
5. And a willing consumer

I’ll leave the question of “do we even want it?” for smarter people than me to decide. In the mean time, I will continue my search for point 2 and 3 on that list (more on this blog, if successful).

Until after Paris,
Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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My conclusion: the iPhone (or respectively iPod Touch) are interesting insofar as interfaces are concerned that either require mouse-like interaction or that require no interaction whatsoever, e.g. listening to music. And it’s pretty consistent with my first post about the iTunes app store, where I wrote that developers should focus on developing games and other visual applications, rather than on typing-intensive apps.

Now I may be perfectly wrong about this and if you’re a long-time iPhone / iPod Touch user and are able to type long messages without a problem, please drop a comment.

There’s no denying that the Apple gadget (whichever version) is h.o.t. But I think it’s a matter of the software-features being over-hyped and people forgetting that the hardware isn’t mature yet.

• First of all: touch-keyboards, really? It just doesn’t seem precise enough for accurate typing.
• Second: 400 dollars/euros for 32GB of space seems way over-priced, more so because it’s also a video-device and increased video-quality also comes with (much) increased file-sizes. Add to this that streaming video from your Mac doesn’t seem possible, unless you employ one hack or the other.
• Thirdly, I think that the web2.0 hype of developing application after application after application has strongly spilled over to the iTunes appstore, which is one of the few digital venues to have some kind of business model, but it totally overshadows any hardware deficiencies the iPod and iPhone may have (and I mean that only in terms of typing and storage, as I think apps for gaming and other entertainment work perfectly fine).

My gut tells me that iPods are mainly for entertainment and not productivity and even so that there’s a better deal to be had waiting for at least another generation beyond this.

Once again, I’m very open to you (trying to) convincing me that I’m am completely and utterly wrong.

Vincent

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Phase 1, five years from now: Real-time

Imagine Google talk’s new innovation, video chat through the webplayer. Also imagine perhaps the most annoying internet-phenomenon of all: “voyeur TV,” made most famous (to geeks) by the likes of Justin TV and other Lifecasters, not to mention Survivor and Big Brother.

Where I see Facebook going in just a few years, is that you tune into a profile and if your friend allows it, you see a live feed instead of a static picture. Already, when I met old friends in Maastricht a few weeks ago, I thought how cool it would be to track a person’s physicial changes real-time on Facebook, instead of seeing what they *want me to see*.

The flaw: most people aren’t that comfortable showing unfiltered feeds. The opportunity: everyday, we’re becoming more accepting of the lack of privacy that the internet provides. The reality: probably a mix of both, where users give consent and only operate the camera when they feel like it.

Phase 2, ten years from now: in your living room

Picture the two innovations that Apple has essentially made mainstream. One, a camera in every electronic device. Two, training users to abandon the keyboard, through the iPhone and now multi-touch gestures. Repeating something I wrote before: this video-review, where a journalist compares typing on the EEE PC vs. the iPhone, at insane speeds in an all-terain vehicle, was really eye-opening how well that “virtual” keyboard works on the iPhone. So much for my first post on the iPhone app-store, that “the iPhone is just for games“…

My vision of a connected society in 10+ years is not that we all become experts at typing. The PC has always been designed by and for geeky engineers and we’ve had to put up with it because there was simply no other choice. Instead, I see every TV, every device perhaps, internet-enabled, in which we manipulate by simple gestures, a shake perhaps, the push of a single button…

In the future, I see people turning on their TV and tuning into Facebook and chatting with their friends as if they came for afternoon tea.

Phase 3, twenty years later: holofriends

In “Avatar,” the new movie by James Cameron, 13 years in the waiting, the story is that people use avatars to explore strange new worlds. In the real world, James Cameron is developing technologies that can capture actors’ facial expressions to the nth degree, and offer a real time preview into how that would look like post-production. Take that together with ca. 2000 cinema screens in the US that have been converted to 3D and perhaps you see where my thinking is going. In a few decades, both the motion-capture technology and the 3D one will become affordable, already 3D filming is a matter of tying two HD-cameras together, and eventually 3D screens will come to our living rooms,… perhaps enabling us to see and interact with hologram friends from Facebook?

Imagine, jogging with a Facebook friend, having your mom “virtual hug” you after you were dumped, having virtual se… ok, now I’m going to far!

Phase 4, fifty years into the future: I’m alive, I’m alive!!!

In the future we will be able to speak to dead friends and family members. Morbid? Perhaps it’s better expressed as, in the future we will live forever, at least digital versions of us.

But perhaps the 300 MB sized data encompassing our brain, as envisioned in the Battlestar Galactica sequel, Caprica, isn’t quite so realistic. Instead, a $100 million Paul Allen foundation, called the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is using digital technology to slice, dice, and capture what our brains are made of. It’s quite sad, because so far they are finding that the data is so excessive and so “personal” (every brain is different!!!), that they don’t yet know when, if ever, they will have finished capturing the brain.

But what is certain is that, eventually, we will develop an understanding of what makes us tick, and perhaps, perhaps, develop technology to transfer our memories to a machine. And when that happens, what’s to stop people from signing up to live forever? And imagine the pressure then coming from friends and family members to experience those memories one last time, and again, and again. It would be the rebirth of a more morbid social network, finally.

Final thoughts

None of this has to be Facebook-powered of course. But there’s no denying that wherever the internet is going, it will be built on more interactions between people, between real people, not these quasi-friendships strangers make on Twitter, mostly for selling and customer support purposes. And right now, as far as those *real* relationships are concerned, Facebook is king.

The end… or the beginning?

Vincent

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At the same time, do the math! To get the 16GB version, I have to shell over €99 + €50 per month for the next two years. That’s €1300 as a base price for the iPhone, not including the cost of getting hooked to paying such prices in the future.

Some other factors to consider:

• There’s is city-wide, free WiFi in Luxembourg (at least one good thing about this small city, apart from me being there )
• Skype was just released in the app-store, making calling on the iPod Touch + Wifi a viable option.
• Signing a 2 year contract seems like a big deal, considering I just started the job and still need to be able to keep it.
• The country of Luxembourg is so small, that I ‘ll be in international roaming mode before I know it (Mobile in Europe sucks, did you know that?)
• Taking a 32GB iPod Touch + a internet-less phone, would be ca. €400 + €30 per month = ok, €1120 for 2 years (bearing in mind that I usually NEVER take 2 year contracts on anything!)
• I already have an excellent portable camera, the IXUS 870 IS
• I also expect an upgraded iPhone to come around, hopefully within the next 6 months, but too long for me to wait.

So, it’s a tough decision for a cheapskate like me.

It’s taken me a long time to get to the point of wanting to use a touch-screen, which I considered an inferior typing solution, until… I watched this video. It’s amazing that this guy, sitting in a moving vehicle shaking like a bull on steroids, can type intelligible words on his iPhone, and nothing at all on a regular button-based keyboard.

Take that together with the iPhone OS 3, due to come out within the next 1-3 months, and it sounds like an interesting option. But €1300 for a phone? Man!

What do you say, cheapskates, buy or don’t buy?

Vincent

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Here goes:

Alfred Hitchcock: The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in. In other words, since all that was missing was the simple natural sound, there was no need to go to the other extreme and completely abandon the technique of the pure motion picture, the way they did when sound came in.

François Truffaut: I agree. In the final era of silent movies, the great film-makers—in fact, almost the whole production—had reached something near perfection. The introduction of sound, in a way, jeopardized that perfection. I mean that this was precisely the time when the high screen standards of so many brilliant directors showed up the woeful inadequacy of the others, and the lesser talents were gradually being eliminated from the field. In this sense one might say that mediocrity came back into its own with the advent of sound.

Alfred Hitchcock: I agree absolutely. In my opinion, that’s true even today. In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call “photographs of people talking.” When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try to first to tell a story in the cinematic way, though a succession of shots and bits of film in between.
……
In writing a screenplay, it is essential to separate clearly the dialogue from the visual elements and whenever possible, to rely more on the visual than on the dialogue. Whichever way you may choose to stage the action, you main concern is to hold the audience’s fullest attention.
Summing it up, one might say that the screen rectangle must be charged with emotion.

While I’m on this wavelength, this piece also reminds me of another essay, I read recently, this time on making solid investment decisions. The piece, by Andy Kessler, was on the concept of elasticity, which is not only used in evaluating customer decision making under different conditions, but is also relevant when shifts in technology occur, allowing for drastic development on that new platform. From semiconductors, to phones-that-are-computers, each allowed for explosive innovation to happen, displacing the masters of the previous era. But there is still a place for masterdom, I feel, as the example of Hitchcock, a director that will likely never be forgotten, clearly illustrates.

Taking opportunity of opening markets makes a lot of sense; becoming the master of your medium, gives meaning to what you do.
Vincent

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• The shift from TV to web (Youtube, Hulu, iTunes Video, etc.)
• The shift towards gaming, aka interactive video
• The shift towards 3D cinema
• The unabated reign of piracy, which means that content-producers have to look beyond traditional media.
• The relative affordability of the home cinema.
• The rise of televised serials on par with movies in terms of budgets, screenplay, acting, and other qualities
• Something else? Please let me know in the comments!

It kind of makes you wonder whether cinema as we’ve known it is ending. Is cinema, in its constant drive to innovate, losing those things that made it great in the past? It took me something like reading “Hitchcock / Truffaut” to come to the conclusion that that is not the case. As the web2.0 boys like to write, “Shift happens!”

Case in point: when Hitchcock started making movies in the 1930s, they were silent. To give the effect of the sound of a man walking back and forth in the room upstairs in “The Lodger,” he used a glass ceiling. That’s right, you could actually look through the ceiling and see the feet of the man. Today, even a decade or two later, that effect would’ve been completely unnecessary.

Same as today camera rigs are becoming affordable to you and me, changes in technology can and will affect how we give visual meaning to a story. Because that’s what it’s all about, story telling, and the medium is simply the one that is the most effective for that.

There is perhaps a risk of focussing on form over substance. Many have predicted that in order for the status of proprietary cinema to be safeguarded, there would need to be a 3rd and maybe even a 4th dimension. My last IMAX-experience having been the two year old “Superman Returns” movie, I’m no expert, but I found it entirely unconvincing. 2009 is the year of 3D cinema, so I’ll leave it up to the more recent IMAX-visitors to decide whether 3D is as yet ready to replace 2D. I’ve heard critics say that “the screen just points at you,” which I don’t find particularly encouraging. At the same time, as equipment becomes cheaper and people experiment more, I’m sure a way to settle into the new medium will be found.

4D, which is the time-dimension, and in which you can find interactive media like games, and media spread across a longer period of time, such as TV-series, also holds much promise, perhaps more so than 3D. As a story-teller, imagine the potential of having the viewer co-create the story, or of having 50 hours of film to tell a story in. Amazing!

“Hitchcock / Truffaut” is a fascinating study of Hitchcock films, in the form of one long interview between Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut, and I encourage anyone interested in classic cinema to give it a read. It’s also about finding visual elements to tell a story and gives an insight into how cinema has evolved over the years. 4 Thumbs up!

Vincent

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsBfj6khrG4&hl=en&fs=1]

Vincent

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5. Can you believe this???

News… what has that looked like over the years? We had print, which lead to books and perhaps pamphlets. Let’s just jump to the 20th century. We’ve had the onslaught of the marketing age, which also made newspapers big. People have never paid for news really, they pay a minimal fee for the price of the paper, the rest of which is covered by advertisers. Then came the internet and it all went down the toilet. You, me, everyone imagined they could be a journalist, even if it meant just copying the text word-by-word of what someone else had written.

Compare that with music. It started with the production of sound, live performances, then the reproduction of sound across various media. The business-model was 90% of the time a straight sale. Music speaks to our brain, differently from the way news does (it’s all drama anyway, right?), and we are hooked on it, like a drug. So we pay and we pay and we pay. Then comes the internet and the magic of painless reproduction and distribution. The power-houses that are media-companies were slow to catch on and it’s pirate-city all round. CD sales go down! In comes smart Apple with their silly little white box with one button and saves the whole damn industry! We think, oh my god, Apple saved retail! What Apple in fact did was close the loop again. Instead of artist -> CD -> shop -> CD -> consumer, we now have artist -> mp3/4/5 -> iTunes -> iPod -> consumer. Everyone wins, though most of all, Apple.

What is the key here?

• For one, music isn’t news. As I pointed out, music is a drug, while news is a duty. Music is fun, while news is … interesting? We can live without the news, believe me, we can’t live without music.
• Two, news was never a powerful business model to begin with. Since the days of Soap-operas, all media has been owned by advertisers, who somehow have made this industry survive, even though no one was really willing to pay for it. Yes, we can also live without television, but we can’t live without music.
• Music is also a tightly controlled product, it’s expensive to make music and to get it into your ears. News, on the other hand, the media has long learned how easy it is to copy-paste.

The internet has shaken both industries and much more so news. Because its sugar-daddies, the advertisers, suddenly realised that they could get away with no longer paying for the expensive process of print and distribution, as well as having many more options to advertise online. The power-position, which was already unbalanced in the first place, has shifted even more in the direction of the advertisers.

For music, the power of supply continued to be in the hands of the media-companies. In case you haven’t noticed, those are some powerful companies and the world of music and other entertainment media is locked down with some big nails—Pandora, Hulu, Joost, iTunes, take your pick, chances are that most of these are not in your country. The internet has had an effect, to be sure, but they control the supply and they have lot’s of money to change things. They finally got iTunes to succumb as well, with their now variable pricing.

There is no analogy here and no matter the superficial similarities and the coming of the “iReader,” there never will be. News will never be something that we want to pay for. Who wants to pay to hear that Hurricane XX has killed millions, or Region YY is filled with starving children, or that Region ZZ has weapons of mass destruction? Because, that, unlike the stories we may read on the internet, is what news really is: making us aware that our planet isn’t all that. Give me a good song any day over having to hear that!

Just briefly, the iPhone store translated to Macs. Why it’s different: it’s i…Phone, the most locked-down technology on this planet. Vs. the PC, which is the most unlocked technology on the planet. Need I spell it out?

The greater point I’m making is that frequently “visionaries” and “entrepreneurs” write their business plan or manifesto stating that because X is so, my business will work that way too. Analogies, taken too loosely, will kill your business and rather than taking the words of visionaries at their face value, we should work it out: Was X like that really, and is your business like that really too? Chances are… it’s not.

Vincent

(man, I love it when I can pump out all this text in 15 min. or less)

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I was wondering what made a university give its, let’s call them “words” away for a free, until I realised that the one thing that a university probably has in abundance is words. The same applies to print media, with an excess of its type of media, or radio stations, with an excess of music… etc., etc.

My theory of “freeness” is thus that you should release those things for free that you have in abundance. I’m sure there is a more formal economic theory about it, and I think it comes down to the idea of marginal value and that those things that have less marginal value can be released for free or cheap, while those with a higher marginal value should not be (please correct my interpretation in the comments, if I’m wrong).

The reason we are (or I am) so confused about this subject, is because things cost money. It costs money to produce a newspaper, which is why we are forced to look at adverts on every second page and pay a cover charge as well. So, it’s no wonder that we expect that by releasing stuff for free that they must be losing money!

I’m not a good economist, so I can’t throw a complicated formula at you, just that I think that you have to focus on other values, next to the commodity-cost of words / text / music, when selling a service. For universities, it’s the facilities and access to very smart people; for print newspapers, it’s the convenience of the paper at a fair price; for radio-stations, it’s the freshness of supply and witty comments. As long as you can differentiate yourself in areas like these, other things can essentially be given away for free.

As mentioned, I’m sure a theory exists about this, but I thought it would be a nice thought for today’s post.

A quiz to finish. What parts of following businesses could probably be released for free?

• A strategic consultancy
• A mail delivery company
• A gas station
• A word-processing software business
• A social network business
• An author of books

With at least one of these, I think it’s ok to say nothing at all. And I think that for none of them, it’s ok to say that everything should be free.

Vincent

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zy_5Tv3d3A&hl=en&fs=1]

I love the way the video ends:

“Thank you for that Jeff. It remains to be seen if the wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers for actual work and not just dicking around.”

Vincent

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The list:

• Twitter is still hard to define for other people that ask me about it. I don’t use it as a chat-client much, rather I use it as a push-mechanism, that aggregates all links from my blogs and bookmarks, as well as some micro-thoughts.
• FriendFeed is more of a chat-client for me, I like the centralised comment interface, love the rooms, and also use it to feed all content to it. It’s also a big source of news for me, while I read Twitter less and less (except for those people I pulled into FriendFeed, of course).
• Delicious is mainly for bookmarks that I can use through the great Firefox extension, but I also feed the ‘techiteasy’ tag to the @techiteasy channel on twitter for instance. A secondary bookmarking system is Netvibes and FriendFeed likes.
• Netvibes is my rss-reader of choice, because it isn’t linear like Google reader and allows me to get a quick overview of what’s playing in the world. I also use it to read my mails and have twitter, friendfeed, facebook, etc. clients embedded in widgets.
• Facebook is my address book for friends, a tool I use to arrange meetings, and to check what’s going on in the lives of people that are close to me. I rarely use apps on it, except for a birthday calendar one.
• Gmail is a reliable mail-client, period, and one I use as a backbone for even my own domain-mail.
• WordPress is Tech IT Easy. I personally never use its dashboard, preferring to compose posts in Marsedit for the Mac.
• Blogger is all of my other blogs (at the moment 2, previously around 4) and a very reliable service that doesn’t annoy me with script-blocking or similar. Some would call it blogging for kids, of course, but I don’t mind. I see it more as the gmail-version of blogs.
• Picasa is the backbone for publishing pictures on blogger, I don’t really do web-based picture collections anymore, except through Facebook.
• Google.com, I nearly forgot. It is, next to netvibes, the most visited website for me and essentially what connects me to every website out there.
• I’d like to list a list of news sites, unfortunately I feel that rss and Twitter/Friendfeed have commoditised the idea of news sites and severely restricted my loyalty to only a few aggregators and sites, including BBC news, Techmeme (less and less), and Hacker News (more and more).

The following list consists of tools that I use online, but much more infrequently.

• Last.fm and favtape.com for music
• Tinyurl for rickrollling people
• Printwhatyoulike.com for ink-efficient printing
• Google docs, mostly for designing surveys, though the paid version of surveymonkey.com is much better
• Youtube and Google Video, for music-videos mostly
• Translate.google.com, a very handy tool to translate websites and the occasional work-doc.
• Twitterkeys for talking like this: The ♨ of success does not always = ✌, ♥, and ☯
• Search.twitter.com, mostly for finding out who said something about @vincentvw.

What are some of your favourite tools for 2009 and why do you use them?

Vincent

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In my dream I was looking for a Christmas gift for my brother, a T-shirt actually. For some reason, I imagined that I entered some sort of electronic boutique to do it, I went to pick a shirt, and went to try it out (my brother and me are pretty much the same size).

So there I was in the changing room when I noticed some sort of display on my shirt. It gave me all kinds of options, many of which I can no longer remember, but basically they were something like:

• “Do you want to see the news when eating breakfast?”
• “Do you want me to operate as a timer when brushing your teeth?”
• “Do you want to see traffic information when driving to work?”

You get the idea.

I then had another dream within my dream, which was about imagining other applications, like:

• You’re listening to the radio and the thing suggests Wikipedia entries related to the topic.
• You’re doing exercise, and it suggests other related ones, with instructions.
• You put it on and it sends out a signal to other clothes that match and they start beeping.

And then I woke up, good morning and happy new year, guys!

Ignoring some inconsistencies, like where the display could be on a short-sleeved T-shirt, whether it’s not a little unnecessary for it to display traffic information or a timer when brushing, if those technologies already exist in cars and electronic brushes, and some others, this is the way I imagine it, let’s call it e-clothing, to work:

• It has a wireless connection, which enables it to talk to other devices (including clothes.)
• It has an accelerometer, which senses things like you brushing or doing exercise.
• It can be programmed, manipulated within or remotely, to become relevant to your context.
• It takes on the colour of your clothing when it’s dormant.
• It also has no problem being folded, etc., so it’s like e-paper or better, like e-cloth.

That’s all for now. I would personally love for electronics to be part of our everyday clothing, it makes a lot of sense when thinking about exercising-contexts, where other devices are cumbersome, and for finding matching clothes (hell for some).

Hope you had a happy new year celebration!

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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In case you didn’t know, most Macs come with cameras built-in, excluding the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, and every Mac before Intel came on board. Last week, I went searching for a camera + microphone, because during my other little adventure of unscrewing and re-screwing my Mac 39 times, I managed to somehow break the inbuilt mic (and there’s no way, I’ll open up my Mac for a mic.!). So, I went searching for a solution that was cable-efficient. Like most Mac-laptops, mine only has two USB-ports and no line-in for a mic., so my choices were:

• getting a USB-mic & a separate USB-webcam (using both USBs)
• getting a USB-webcam with a mic. built in (in theory: 1 slot)
• getting a USB-webcam & a separate Bluetooth-headset (1 slot)

Whatever would happen, I would end up using at least 1 USB-slot, so my decision would be somewhere in-between quality and cost.

The search

Enter a consumer-electronics store (Mediamarkt is no. 1 here in the Netherlands or Germany), and you will likely be confronted with a whole bunch of Logitech, some Microsoft, maybe some Philips, and some other, possibly cheaper or more upscale brands. Of these, none but one (I’ll get to it later) actually mention anything like Mac-support.

Luckily, my Mediamarkt also had an internet-connection (through the Apple-section) for me to check the many confusing brand-designations (I want to shoot whoever thought a combo of letters and numbers was a good way to sell products to consumers!).

Turns out, getting a webcam or a USB-mic that works on a Mac, isn’t a problem. Plug it in and it usually works. The webcam just needs to be UVC—a Universal USB 2.0 Video Class Cam. Getting a webcam & a built-in mic, however, and we enter complex territory. First of all, hardly any sites really discuss the mic factor (you can find Mac-compatible stuff here). I guess, because most laptops have a built-in mic or line-in, hardly anyone considers it. I’ve had a couple of adventures, such as a Microsoft one, where the mic. wasn’t recognised and a for-Macs advertised webcam, which, 1st of all, had horrible video-quality and second, came with a headset that needed a line-in (eh, not really useful for many Macs).

So, one camera in the whole store, offering ca. 30 webcams, is advertised as 100% Mac-compatible: the Logitech Quickcam Vision Pro for Mac. It is the only camera that is 100% designed for Macs. It is also the most expensive in the store, at ca. €100 euros, though offering a 2-megapixel sensor and a fairly good in-built mic. Everything else, in that store at least, doesn’t “officially” work for Macs (you can find a few more on Amazon). Btw. if you do need anything like a driver, check out macam or iUSBcam.

Why Mac audiences are so valuable

So why are Mac-audiences so valuable? Well, you can literarily charge more. Whether it’s a webcam, a usb-mic, software, etc. You can hike up the price by at least 10% and watch the less price-sensitive consumer roll in. You frequently hear the “Windows = bigger market” argument, and I wholeheartedly agree. But my argument that Windows is a big market for commodities rings more true. For every super-upscale model you offer in hardware, there will be dozens of cheaper knock-offs eating up your market. And for every upscale software, you can be sure that a million pirated versions are floating around on the networks.

The closed system, which I am as critical of as the next guy, is what makes Macs attractive for technology-companies, because at whatever small scale you do end up producing, demand will most certainly exceed supply.

And the consumer? Well, he did decide to buy a more expensive machine in the first place, and whatever you can say about Mac-pricing, he will, most of the time, get a better machine and accessories than on the Windows-side of things.

What was my solution?

Being a cheapskate (a previous Windows-user and I’m Dutch), I found a free bluetooth headset lying around, I got with my mobile phone once. Turns out, all of those are compatible with Macs that come with Bluetooth (pretty much all of them). And now, having 2 free USB-slots, I can take my time and pick a UVC-compatible webcam that offers reasonable video-quality for Skype.

Were you ever in a similar situation? Probably not, but if you were, let me know how you solved the problem!

Vincent

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Why I hate video:

1. Media is the most “unflat” industry on this planet: from iTunes Video, to Joost, to Hulu (to Pandora: not video), all of which aren’t properly available in the Netherlands and other European countries.
2. No separate audio-feeds: I don’t know about you, but I like audio-podcasts because I can listen to them and do something else. That doesn’t quite work with video. So I rarely watch them.
3. No transcripts: transcripts are useful, not because I want to read, but because 95% of the internet is text-based, and 100% of aggregation is text-based. If I want to find great tech-content, I check TechMeme. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really link up to interesting video-interviews like Robert Scoble’s (who is, btw, a much better video-producer than he is a blogger), but it links to “just another blogpost”(tm), because that is more easily searchable via Google.
4. Flash: It is the standard for online video, I know, but anytime my browser slows down, you can be sure that Flash is somehow involved. Flash, you suck.

That’s my short list! I’d add no connectivity to TV to it, but I have an old Xbox with media-centre on it, so that problem is solved ( at least for me).

Vincent

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Pros

1) It’s nice, flat (8mm) and light (120g): no bulk here, it’s even more convenient than regular iPods. I haven’t had the chance to test its solidity, but I’m not going to do that voluntarily, even for the sake of scientific progress -sorry.

2) The OS is really intuitive, everything rolls out smoothly and without time-loss. Operating it is nearly a game in itself.

3) The Wi-fi capability is really great, and was one of the main reasons I chose it over a regular iPod. Also, attachments can be opened -which is impossible to do on blackberrys for instance, as far as I know. It is a bit slow, but hey, I didn’t expect anything much faster.

4) Earphones (regular Apple earphones) are pretty comfortable. I often have trouble adjusting to earphones, but not this time, so hurray! However if I wanted to run (which I don’t), I guess I wouldn’t be so happy.

Cons

1) I must say I hate the way it organizes songs with iTunes. I have lots of music with no (or little, or miswritten) ID3 tags, and I litteraly spent a day re-organizing everything, putting right tags and creating lists. Would it have been that hard to be able to keep original folders? (This is a first-approach impression, as I had never installed or extensively used iTunes before. Still, this first impression is a really bad one)

2) The video system is outrageous. It turns out you have to buy an additional software (Quicktime Pro) in order to convert your videos so you can read them on your iPod -and I’m talking legal, .mov movies shot with my point & shoot camera!

3) No plug-ins (flash, shockwave, etc) are accepted while surfing the web -but I imagine it was technically difficult to implement. Still, it is a disappointment.

4) 8 or 16Gb is not a lot. It’s great, but I can’t have ALL my music on it -however I knew that when I bought it, so there.

But nevermind all that, I must say I’m still having lots of fun with my new toy.

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In direct connection with Vince’s article, Mike Linksvayer, VP of Creative Commons defended the idea that there are plenty of ways to make a living while giving one’s art for free. But I had the same issue as Vince’s about the status of the artist in our society: what does this reveal if people are not willing to pay for art anymore? I personally believe that the Internet and the culture of gratuity and open access is an opportunity for unknown artists because giving their art away for free allows them to get some market traction and then, be able to sell some “derivatives” of their art, and make money that they wouldn’t have made without this strategy. So for this specific kind of people, I would say that it shouldn’t be an ethical problem to make money on things that are not the product of their art itself, because the product of their art itself wouldn’t have generated any money otherwise. But of course there is the other portion, which can have an opportunity of making money from its art directly, but which will start feeling a certain pressure to give this art for free. I was kind of shocked during this conference to hear artists in the audience speaking about offering their art on the Internet as a fatality, a trend they were obliged to follow, as if the “Myspace success story” was the only hope left. But as Emily A. Berger mentioned during the conference, referring to Chris Anderson’s article “Free”, you will always have free to compete with you: so either you try to make it better than what is offered for free, or you try to tackle the niche of people having more money than time (the iTunes niche, which, with the right pricing, is actually not a niche anymore), or you make it free and find ways to make money otherwise.  An excellent article from Kevin Kelly called “1000 True Fans” argues that an artist only needs 1000 True Fans to make a decent living, since a True Fan, that you can “recruit” via the free offering, will after that be ready to pay for anything related to you. And he also mentions that the Internet allows you to reach this number more easily than traditional channels and therefore find a middle way between the long tail and the superstar.

But while all this talk is perfectly understandable in the case of the music industry which is a market based on volume, it is a totally different story when it comes to visual arts. Which is why I have trouble understanding a copyright law which seems to tackle all the artists as if they were a unified world facing the same challenges. And this is also why I welcome initiatives like Creative Commons which allows people to give away some of their rights when they feel that the copyright law doesn’t answer their needs and that these new licenses can benefit them, as long as (and this is a major risk) it doesn’t put any pressure on other people in the industry to do the same. But how do you adapt these notions of derivatives in the case of visual arts? It is way harder for a painter to get True Fans, and even if he manages to get some, I am not convinced at all that a person falling in love with the image of a painting will be ready to buy a T-shirt with this same image: it is just not the same feeling. The visual art market has somewhat been already confronted to the same kind of problem outside the Internet, like how to monetize a happening or short-lived works of art. When Christo decided to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, he had to find ways of monetizing a work of art that was offered for free to the inhabitants of these cities, and therefore he sold some pictures of the different stages of the experiment. But, to go back to Vince’s point, this is Christo, and a lot of people are interested in those pictures, whereas an unknown visual artist doesn’t have the traction.

Actually, the major paradox is that only artists who would manage to sell their art directly are able to sell derivatives in a significant amount, whereas the starving artists who would be ready to give their art for free and make a living by selling derivatives don’t have the market traction to generate enough interest around their derivatives, especially in visual arts. And after all, even if Emily A. Gerber said “get your art out there by any means, get market traction and after that you’ll see”, a thousand fans is a pretty large number don’t you think?

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