For many years it was enough for cable companies to redistribute the same content as the national TV networks and the same movies. That was until a company called HBO provided something different: original programs. By doing so they created series like Tales From The Crypt, Oz, The Sopranos, Sex and The City, Rome, Entourage or Boardwalk Empire and inspired a whole industry to follow their model. Even cable networks that were specialized in movies like TNT(now producers of Dallas) or AMC(Mad Men) joined the trend.
The Internet more or less seems to follow the same trend. Of course for big retailers like Amazon producing their own content is not a necessity, but for smaller brands every bit of original content posted on the Internet can mean new fans.
Let’s examine a little bit what are the options in the space of original video content for the Internet:
Webcasts – online transmissions of actual live events.
Webisodes – short episodes (usually few minutes) connected to TV series like Stargate, Lost, etc.
Short video clips – you all know what YouTube offers you. Also any respected singer, band, brand offers you a collection of its best videos. It is even recommended to put full HD tunes online.
Videoblogs -The video alternative to blogging.
Series – These are not yet on par with the TV ones, but they are definitely growing.
Animation – Here there is a lot of space for growth. Especially since short clips are always redistributed and almost always viral.
We already have more content online than we have on traditional TV. The beauty of it comes from the fact that it’s available to watch at any time (except for the webcasts, of course). Since we are witnessing a shift in advertising funds towards the Internet, we should be prepared for even more original content. In the next weeks we will present you several companies that are focused around building great Original Video Content for the Internet.
OK folks! That’s the last one about Jobs. We had enough in the last months and weeks. We respect him, but it’s time to move on. He would have wanted this. Otherwise he wouldn’t have given us his famous Stanford speech.
The reason we wrote this is to announce you that today is the official launch of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. Isaacson wrote several successful biographies like those of Einstein and Franklin when he was approached by Jobs in 2004. The difference this time was that he was able to meet his subject and talk to him for many years and at least 40 times.
A.I. has been through different waves during the last decades, from the huge interest in games to expert systems and then to semantic web, but except for games where it is obvious how A.I. technologies are used, people do not really know what is it exactly that researchers in this field do. Are they creating Terminators or are they creating something really useful like a teaching assistant?
Last days have been full of news about A.I.: from Siri to Knewton, A.I. was everywhere in the news (at least the news about Occupy Wall Street are not about A.I.). Most of the articles were about Siri, of course, and not without merits. It is probably the closest that we have come to realize the vision of personal digital assistants, a key part of the semantic web. It is debatable if Siri is an intelligent agent, but it is clear that it represents a new wave of digital assistant. By saying this we acknowledge that what Apple gave us is far superior to the Microsoft’s ’90s shy attempt at the idea. The Internet is full of clips with Siri and also one of the major news was that it was already ported to the older iPhones like iPhone4. Steve Wozniack, the Apple co-founder, also suggested that there is more to Siri and some features he tested are not yet in the final product. That only means we’ll see them in the future, maybe in the next iPhone. Woz also suggested that this is the future: answer engines, not search engines. It’s not a new ideea since Wolfram Alpha and Quora are working on it for years. It’s just that it’s the first time when an implementation almost gets it right. Kudos to Apple. Quora is not dead. Au contraire. If Apple buys them it might be the next big thing. The Wolfram Alpha as we all know was a fiasco, so it still premature to say if this is really the new trend. People want both: the short (answer engines) and the long answers (search engines), so probably these two are not different markets, but rather facets of the same market.
Of course search engines are not dead. We hear that DuckDuckGo finally took off. They got funding and started hiring. We hope they don’t take the Cuil route to disaster and that in some day we might be able to really see their dream come true.
And as if all these news were not enough, we also noticed that Knewton, a start-up focused on education is really attracting a lot of press and money. Their adaptive algorithms are old ideas, but the execution and reviews are stellar. We hope they will change something.
So as we see everything is focused around A.I. these days. As long as researchers and founders are not building Terminators we are really excited.
The founders have died when their creations were rising… It’s not the first or the last phrase of a famous novel, even tough it could be because this is precisely what happened during the last days. So the founders of some companies died right when their creations were everywhere. Which founders? What battle?
Let’s stop for a moment and analyze what happened during the last days. Please bear with me even tough it will be hard to recite the names and remember what they have done.
Of course we have to start with Steve (died on the 5th of October). He was instrumental in bringing the digital electronics era to the post-PC age into the land of the greatest consumer electronics ever created. He was so good at what he did that a one year old now thinks that a magazine is just a broken iPad (if you don’t believe this please write magazine is broken iPad). Everybody heard about him and we don’t have to wonder why he was so important. He did not eradicated some maladies like his old frenemy Gates, but he created a world in which technology can be used by everbody. He also helped creating the digital music market which he controlled for the past years.
Robert W. Galvin (died 11.10.2011) was the head of Motorola from 1959 t0 1988 and Chairman for another 2 years. Under his leadership Motorola developed into a global leader in the semiconductor business but also into the company who pioneered the mobile phones. Maybe he was not Jobs, but his influence is still felt around the world. How would you feel today without a mobile phone?
Then there is Dennis Ritchie. R.I.P. Dennis (09.09.1941-12.10.2011). In case you wonder who this guy was it’s enough to pronounce 2 words: C and Unix. The programming language and the operating system. If I will also pronounce Space Travel, you will realise that this guy was also important into bringing games into the digital age. Suffice to say that the PC had not one but 2 killer apps: one was the spreadsheet and the other was the ability to play electronic games and you will clearly see that Ritchie was one of the two guys who hold the keys to the future of the digital age back in the ’70s. The fourth thing I will pronounce when it comes to Ritchie is The C Programming Language. Still the best introduction to programming, still the most imitated. If anything, he and Ken Thompson are responsible for bringing programming and the digital age to the masses. The other 2 important persons that finished this process were of course Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Without them the world would have been uglier. The fact that 2 of them died at a distance of only several days is one of the reason why I wrote this elegy in the first place.
Three founders. Not necessarily of big companies but of a way of life. Three of the founders of our modern digital life. All connected by the passion for technology and death (within several days). And not only their death but also the death of a technology they helped destroyed: film. Yes. Old film camera are now retired. All the remaining producers of film camera (Arri, Panavision, Aaton) announced in the same time that they will let go of their old film camera business. Hollywood is entirely digital anyway. There is no need to go on. Now please go back and read the first phrase. Try to complete it…You will notice it’s very hard to do it for the simple fact there is no greater honor than to die when you have prevailed. So here’s to the crazy ones who believed in a better life: may you all rest in peace. You will be forever missed, even tough we as humans have short memory.
This one of those posts you never want to write. But loss is a part of life. I will keep it short. Steve Jobs has passed away yesterday, the 5th of October (Europe found out only today). If you haven’t seen the Stanford speech please do it. There is not better way to remember him.
What can be said now? His legacy is with us: Apple, Pixar (now incorporated into Disney), amazing products, movies, books, retail stores, and so many other things we can’t even mention. It’s enough to say he was perhaps one of the greatest innovators of our time (if you don’t believe this yet, search his patents online), maybe not because of the sheer numbers, but because of the impact of his innovations.
It’s rare when a company looses her driving force so fast, so I will not say many things about Apple in this post. All I want to add is this: choose now how you want to live your life. There are only several ways to do it and since ancient times some of these have been: dedicate your life to your passions (as Steve did), or just live (as many of us do). Rest in peace Steve Jobs!
While it’s clear that the market didn’t reacted very well to Tim Cook’s first presentation as CEO, the reason for this was not Tim Cook but rather the mysterious disappearance of iPhone 5 from today’s menu. This suggest that Apple’s strategy of controlling even the rumors might be falling apart. It seems that if the rumors are not true you will loose money in today’s market. But then again, sometimes even if the rumors are true you loose money. The 5% plunge that was felt by the Apple shares after the London and San Francisco shows raises the question if we should even listen to the rumors at all. Should we? While it’s true that all crises start with a rumor, today’s presentation didn’t really brought a lot of new things. Except Siri, which we knew it was coming, the rest of the new launches were rather evolutionary than revolutionary. If this will happen in the next launches as well, than Apple will really face a crisis.
Apple Store in NYC
So let’s see what Cook and his team brought to the table. We still got some pretty interesting stuff:
Of course the star was the iPhone 4S. It’s not 5, but it has Siri, a personal digital assistant that starts to look more and more like Star Trek and really does all the cool stuff you want (from finding restaurants to answer to questions about her). It also has a new 8 MP camera designed to fight with the point and shoot cameras and a dual-core A5 CPU, but also dual mode GSM/CDMA radio that will allow it to run on all networks. If that’s not enough, you will definitely like the new software features, like the one that allows you to track your children anywhere (“Find My Friends” – we’re not talking just about Big Brother anymore, but about Big Friend and Big Parent, also).
New IPod Nano. Migh be the last generation, but who cares? They still look gorgeous.
iOS 5 comes with new Touch interface and lots of cool features like deeper integration with all the big software players you like (even tough there is no news about Facebook between those …strange?!?), but also with iCards, Messages and more.
We could go on mentioning the whole list of new features, but it doesn’t make any sense. It’s already clear that all you readers and shareholders care about is the new phone or the new tablet. They should have seen this coming. This time the question is: what will Tim Cook do?
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