Author: Mathew Ingram

So the Wall Street Journal says that the long-awaited, much-ballyhooed Google Phone is coming soon, and TechRadar says that Google execs demonstrated a working prototype at a developer event recently in London. Meanwhile, some of the bloom has come off the iPhone rose in the past little while (for some people at least), with much discussion of how Apple maintains an iron fist when it comes to which apps are allowed on the device. So if given the choice between the two — which I admit is pretty hypothetical at the moment — which one should I buy?

The iPhone is tres cool, no question about that. It looks great, it feels great, and (for the most part) it works great. The size of the screen and the auto-rotation feature, not to mention the multi-touch interface, makes Web browsing and photo viewing almost as appealing as on a desktop, and puts it miles ahead of any other mobile device so far. Apps like Shazam — which identifies the music you’re listening to on the radio or your stereo, or pretty much anywhere in the immediate vicinity of your phone — make the phone a pleasure to use. Unfortunately, Apple won’t let iPhone users install certain apps, even when they sound really useful.

Continue reading “Should I get an iPhone or an Android?”

Congrats to my pal Mark McKay, video-blogger extraordinaire, for being one of the three videos selected in Michael Geist’s recent contest to explain the dangers of the Conservative government’s proposed copyright legislation, Bill C-61, in 61 seconds (although it died when the Harper government called an election, depending on the outcome of that election the law could be revived). Mark — who bears a startling resemblance to Rick Moranis’s character from the movie Ghostbusters — has put together an introduction to the law with his usual skill, a talent he also employed for us at mesh 2008 in May, where he both shot and edited a lot of the video along with my friend Greg Philpott and his team at mDialog.com. The C-61 contest was judged by (among others) Stephen Page of the Barenaked Ladies.

watch the video…

Almost a decade after Amazon bought the darn thing, the Internet Movie Database or IMDB is finally getting the ability to stream movie trailers, TV shows and other content, so that when you go and check the site for reviews of a film or goofs (my favourite feature) or a plot synopsis, you can watch some of it right in the page. As Rafat Ali notes at PaidContent, this is so obvious an offering that it kind of makes you shake your head that it has taken so long — but that’s the movie industry for you. Apparently Amazon has signed deals with CBS and News Corp. (for content from Hulu) as well as Sony, and is hoping to get more. I wish them luck.

IMDB was probably one of the first websites I became addicted to — I loved going there before I picked a movie to watch to read reviews, and I loved going there after to read the goofs and other trivia — and it’s also one of the first that I can remember showing other people to try and get them to understand the power of the Web. Unfortunately for me, and anyone else who lives outside of the United States, most of the content that will be available through this new offering is restricted to U.S. residents, and so without some kind of anonymous proxy tool, you will get the dreaded “this video is not available in your country” warning.

I can’t remember if I’ve written about this before, since it’s not exactly new — I think it’s up to episode 58 or so now — but one of my favourite Web-based music experiences has to be the Black Cab Sessions. The format is dead simple: get a musician into the back seat of an old black British taxi-cab and have them play a song as the cab drives around London, while someone films it with a handheld video camera (must get kind of cramped). I’ve embedded a sample of the cab sessions: Badly Drawn Boy otherwise known as Damon Gough, playing Born in the UK.

watch the video…

So Best Buy is acquiring Napster, the struggling music subscription service, for $121-million. That’s a nice premium for Napster’s shareholders — about 85 per cent over what the shares were trading for before the offer — but they are likely to be the only ones celebrating this deal, I predict (and even so, the stock has tumbled by more than 60 per cent in the past year). The acquisition is obviously an attempt by Best Buy to branch out from the slow-growth electronics business, and there’s nothing wrong with that impulse. But buying Napster is a dumb way to go about it, in my view.

No doubt Best Buy believes that it can somehow magically fix what is wrong with Napster, by combining the service with its deep pockets and existing technology retail business. Adam Ostrow at Mashable says he sees the deal as making sense, and I would argue that he is right — to a point. Best Buy clearly sees Napster as a relatively cheap add-on, considering the company’s stock was barely trading on par with the amount of cash it had on hand ($67-million). But unless Best Buy has supernatural abilities (and the company’s track record in music doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence on that front), I think this combination is doomed.

Why? Because Napster’s problem isn’t a lack of money, it’s a lack of a successful business model. Despite the protestations of those who enjoy streaming music services, including Union Square Ventures partner and noted music fan Fred Wilson, the fact remains that most people don’t want streaming or “subscription” music — that is, music they can’t keep forever. If they did, then Yahoo Music wouldn’t have been such a dismal failure, Virgin Music wouldn’t have shut down, AOL Music wouldn’t have had to be acquired (by who? Oh yes — Napster) and satellite radio companies Sirius and XM likely wouldn’t have had to merge. For whatever reason, people like to own music.

Continue reading “Best Buy and Napster: Dumb 2.0”

Maybe it’s the reverse of spring cleaning, but I’ve been feeling a yen for a new blog theme, and I finally took the plunge. I looked around at a bunch of different WordPress designs, and saw many that I liked, but in the end I went with the excellent Thesis theme from Chris Pearson. I was a big fan of his Cutline theme, and used that for some time before moving to my most recent theme — The Morning After. I tinkered with it and customized it quite a bit, and learned a lot about CSS along the way, but in the end I wasn’t really happy with it, and Thesis fit my needs perfectly. Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments, and if you’re reading this through your RSS reader then, well… never mind 🙂

This doesn’t really have much to do with the Web or new media or anything like that, but I feel compelled to take some notice of the fact that David Foster Wallace is dead. His wife apparently came home Friday night to find that the author had hung himself in their home in Claremont, California. He was 46. It’s not clear whether Wallace was depressed or dealing with any other issues before his death, but suicide and various forms of mental illness, including depression, were a recurring theme throughout much of his work (after his first novel got critical acclaim in the late 1980s, he checked into a hospital and asked to be put on suicide watch, and suicide also appears in a commencement speech that he gave at Kenyon University in 2005).

In one short story he wrote, called Good Old Neon, the narrator — a well-liked, high-school sports star turned advertising executive — recalls feeling like a fraud all of his life and eventually kills himself (you can read some of it through Google Books). Wallace described the story as his attempt to understand a high-school classmate of his, a well-liked sports hero who later committed suicide. Wallace himself was a sports star of sorts in high school, a competitive junior tennis player. Tennis forms one of the backdrops for Infinite Jest, probably his best-known work, a sprawling 1,000-page novel about (among many other things) the life of a young man living at an exclusive tennis training academy.

Continue reading “David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008”

If you are the kind of data geek who loves to just accumulate numbers about things and then slice and dice them to see what appears, then Andy “Waxy” Baio is your kind of guy. An independent journalist and programmer whose blog at Waxy.org is a treasure trove of such things, Andy spent some time recently and analyzed the recent album from DJ mashup artist Girl Talk (which I wrote about here). Using data from Wikipedia — as well as some he got by using Amazon’s “crowd-sourcing” engine, Mechanical Turk — he came up with a spreadsheet listing all the samples that Gregg “Girl Talk” Gillis used on the album (264 in all) and how many samples each song contained.

Then he created a visual timeline of where the samples appear in each song, and a bar graph that shows the age of each song used as a sample (median age: 13 years old), as well as the same data laid out in a different way, to show that Gillis uses a lot of recent hits, and also a lot of 80s tunes, but not that many in between. What does any of this mean? Who knows. But it’s a tour de force of data porn. As always, Waxy gives a full breakdown of his methodology, and all the data can be download as a CSV file if you want to run your own analysis.

I have to say I’m a little surprised by all of the hoopla about a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News posting messages to Twitter during the funeral of a young boy. From the sounds of some of the coverage in other newspapers and on various blogs, you would think the guy had shown up with a camera crew and interviewed the grieving family while they were weeping by the graveside, or done a helicopter fly-by. All he did was type on his mobile during the service, as far as I can tell, and what he posted was nothing but the actions of the mourners and the rabbi. There was nothing inappropriate, nor ghoulish, nor anything that could be seen as an invasion of privacy (reporters were invited to attend).

So what’s the big deal? Journalists report on unpleasant events all the time — including car accidents, murder scenes, war and even funerals. I think the journalism professor quoted in one story who compared it to someone doing a TV standup in the middle of the event is overstating things just a tad. Did the Twittering add a huge amount to the telling of the story? Maybe not. Although I think if someone couldn’t be at the funeral and they knew the young boy or the family, perhaps they would have liked to hear about it as it was happening.

Continue reading “Twittering a funeral — why not?”

Anyone who isn’t talking about how dumb Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was in her interview (and that’s a lot of people) seems to be talking about the new Microsoft ad with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, and how they don’t get it. Mike Arrington doesn’t get it, and neither does my friend Mark Evans, to name just two. I think John Furrier comes close to the truth when he says that Mike not getting it is a sign that it’s working, because it’s not aimed at geeks. And part of what makes it hard to get is that it isn’t even about Windows, or Microsoft for that matter. Like Seinfeld, it’s not really about anything.

I made a marketing expert friend of mine mad recently when she said that the marketing professionals she knew didn’t like the original ad — and thought Microsoft was getting taken to the cleaners by its ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky — because it was a dumb idea, or at least not a smart one. I tried to make the point that I don’t think Microsoft cares whether she and her marketing colleagues think the campaign is “smart” or not. They aren’t the target market any more than Mike Arrington is. I think whoever put these together is really just trying to humanize a giant company, and that’s a tough assignment.

Continue reading “Humanize Microsoft? That’s impossible!”

A feed reader is a pretty personal thing for a lot of people, including me. It’s one of the main ways that I collect information — along with things like Twitter and FriendFeed and Techmeme and so on — and so I’m pretty particular about what I use, and I’m sure others are too. Some like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon, or they like having feeds in Netvibes.com, or maybe some other homepage portal. I used to be a huge fan of Netvibes, but I don’t use it as my feed reader any more.

Why? I switched to Google Reader about a year and a half ago, and despite some issues with the interface (calling it plain would be a compliment) I got used to it, and came to depend on it — primarily because of the “share” feature, which lets you share items with others and see items that they have shared. It’s like a little mini meme-tracker that makes it easier to find interesting things (my shared items are here).

Continue reading “Tools I use: A close look at Feedly”

Like more than a few people (as far as I can tell by reading through my blog and other feeds) I confess that I was more than a little gobsmacked to find out that Yammer had won the TechCrunch50 prize. It may well have been a tough field for the judges, given the number of lame Web 2.0 offerings I read about among the contestants, but I still find it hard to believe that a service that is ultimately a carbon copy of Twitter won the big prize. Before anyone signs in to the comment section to berate me, I understand that Yammer is for the enterprise, and that it has a kind of “we’re holding your employees hostage” business model, where companies have to pay a fee to “claim” the users that are chatting on Yammer using their corporate email addresses.

That said, all this sounds to me (as more than one person has pointed out) like something Twitter could roll over one morning and implement without even breaking a sweat (now that its server issues seem to be a thing of the past). Is that really a great business? On the one hand, I’m inclined to give David Sacks — the co-founder of genealogy site Geni, where Yammer was apparently created as an internal communications tool — some props for getting an idea and running with it. But it still feels a lot more like a feature that makes more sense as part of Twitter than it does as any kind of standalone business.

Continue reading “Yammer: This thing is a prize winner?”

A U.S. Federal Court has ruled in the case of J.K. Rowling vs. the Harry Potter Lexicon, in which the Potter author sued to prevent a former librarian from publishing a compendium of facts about the novels. The book was based on the Lexicon website, which Steven Vander Ark has run for years — a fan site so comprehensive that Rowling herself has praised it in the past. The court decided on Monday that the Lexicon was not protected by the fair use clause in U.S. copyright law and would therefore be illegal if published. The judge, in my view, was completely wrong, and so was Ms. Rowling for bringing the suit.

I, of course, am not a lawyer. I don’t even play one on television. But I know a little bit about writing, and I know (or think I know) what copyright law was originally intended to do — which is to protect a creator’s rights to their creation, but also to balance those rights with the rights of society to create new works based on that original work. In my view, the judge’s decision gave the first part of that equation a vast amount of weight, while giving the second part virtually no weight at all. If anything, he should have done the exact opposite.

Continue reading “J.K. Rowling: Totally wrong on copyright”

I know I’m not really saying anything new here, but every now and then when I look at Techmeme it fills me with despair. Well, maybe not despair exactly — but a definite sinking feeling. It’s bad enough when Apple news takes over the entire page of Techmeme headlines, but at least that occasionally involves something worth writing about, and some differing opinions. Then you have days like today, with the announcement by Research In Motion of the new BlackBerry Flip, formerly known as the Kickstart (way better name, by the way). Here’s a screenshot:

So what do we have here? A press release by RIM leading off — which I’m totally fine with, by the way — and then almost 20 sub-links from blogs and tech sites. At first I thought the problem was just a lack of smart or snappy headlines, since each one sounds exactly like the next (with a couple of exceptions). But then I went and read every single post and story, and guess what? They are almost exactly the same. Hey, RIM has introduced the Flip! Here are some pics! Here’s the press release! The end. Again, there are a few exceptions — Kevin Restivo tried to insert a bit of analysis, as did Wired and a couple of others. But the rest, nada. What exactly is the purpose of this? To grab as many cheap pageviews as possible? I know some of this stuff has to be done, like sports scores or the weather or whatever, but still. It’s sad.

Among the many announcements at the Apple event earlier today, including new Nanos and headphones and colours and the Genius auto-playlist feature — all of which was obsessively live-blogged and Twittered by legions of bloggers — came the news that NBC shows had returned to the iTunes store, many of them in high-definition. It was almost a year ago now that the network pulled its content out of Apple’s grip, saying the company was too inflexible on price and other things, and started putting it up at Amazon and its own Hulu site, while Apple spread the word that NBC had wanted to boost prices.

So who gave in? From the sounds of it, both sides got their punches in: NBC gets to charge more for HD shows, but will also sell some of its older shows for less than the $1.99 price that Apple applies to virtually everything. As a piece at CNET notes, Apple also gave in to the demands of the movie networks earlier this year, and allowed them to set multiple prices for movie downloads. Will the music labels try to use these signs of weakness to get Steve to bend on album and song pricing?

Continue reading “So did Apple cave, or did NBC bend?”