I Am Trying To Believe (that Rock Stars aren't Dead)

Last Friday night I attended a Nine Inch Nails concert in Philadelphia with Chris Cera of Vuzit (thanks Chris for your help with this post). At 43, Trent Reznor can certainly still grab an audience by the throat and shake it. It was a fantastic show; the kind of show that has you checking to see if there are other tour dates within driving distance.

During a short break in the sonic and visual mayhem, Reznor spoke for a moment and told us emphatically to steal his music. Later, on my way to the car after the show, a member of the band Cube Head was handing out sharpie-labled home-burned demo CD's in the parking lot complete with a hand drawn "copywrong" marking. It was an interesting contrast between established artist and emerging talent and how they are both figuring out how to make their way in the post-vinyl post-jewel-case economy.

I'll come back to that theme in a second, but first a brief aside. Chris (who has some background in real time video processing) and I were blown away by the amazing stage show; it was geek manifest and a video processing tour de force. During about 1/3 of the show the band played sandwiched between at least two giant video monitors, the one in the foreground transparent when its pixels were dormant and opaque when lit up.

The source video for the display was sometimes heavily processed local camera inputs, sometimes it was prerecorded, and sometimes it was electronically generated. Whatever the source, it was frequently and heavily modified by the audio inputs or by the movements of the artists on the stage. With a sweep of his hand Trent would wave away the static hiding him from the audience and then moments later it would fill back in. It's hard to explain but the effect was very cool. Cool enough that trying to figure it out started to distract both of us from the music. There are some videos out there of it in action but none that I found really capture the full effect. Let me know in the comments if you find one.

The next day, still curious about how the stage show was done, and with Reznor's call to "steal my music" still in my head, I poked around on the web looking for more info. One of the most interesting things I found was this story about Nine Inch Nail's Year Zero Alternate Reality Game. The way Reznor used this new gaming medium as an extension of his canvas rather than as a promotional stunt (and the nascent geekness it suggests) makes me think he has a much better than average chance to figure out the post RIAA world. Or, it may just be that with the state of distribution being what it is, he realized that while promotion might move more units, it would do it in a way so loosely coupled to monetization as to be pointless.

His comments in the story's sidebar make me think it is probably the latter. In particular: "So a couple years ago I realized that music essentially is free now. I'd prefer, it wasn't, but it is. And hey, I've had a pretty good run. I can still make a living touring." .... "I feel that the right model hasn't revealed itself yet."

Here's the thing, I'm not convinced it's going to reveal itself. Or, more likely, it has revealed itself and he already knows what it is: "I can still make a living touring."

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Watch GeoEye-1 Launch Tomorrow; Thoughts on the Imagery War

GeoEye, an imagery provider, is launching their latest satellite, GeoEye-1, tomorrow. This satellite will offer half-meter resolution imagery to commercial companies and even greater resolution to government agencies (as high .41 meters). As was widely reported last week, the new imagery has been licensed exclusively to Google for online purposes (CNET has more on the deal's terms).

The satellite will launch tomorrow (September 6th) "Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket. The planned launch time is 11:50:57 a.m. PDT." You can watch the take-off live on Boeing's site.

If you're uncertain what this means take a look at the two images below. The one on the left is "1-meter simulated resolution from aerial imagery of Colorado Capitol and Downtown Denver” the on the right is .5-meter simulated resolution. It's an amazing increase. I hope that GeoEye-1 is used to catalog the world in this detail. You can see more comparison images on the GeoEye site.

This is the latest foray in what has become a battle for the best imagery with the between Google and Microsoft (where best means highest-resolution of the most places).

Long after the release of the late Jim Gray's TerraServer, Google started it with the release of satellite imagery in Google Earth and Google Maps in 2005. Microsoft released 3D-enabled Virtual Earth in the browser later that year along with Birds Eye imagery. Google returned the volley in 2007 with Streetside view. Just last month Photosynth launched and was moved to the Virtual Earth team.

Of late both companies have been adding imagery of the sky and far away planets. Both companies have also released 3D modeling tools to allow users to supplement their virtual worlds. Google also recently released MapMaker to allow users to supplement Google's mapping data.

I've only listed the major product features each company has created; each month there is a release of imagery for a new country or city by each. In July Virtual Earth released imagery for cities in Finland, Belgium, and Japan. All total it was 14. TB; this is nothing compared to the 69TB that May's release included. Google's latest updates brought Streetview to Japan (the first international site), mapping data of Georgia, and fresh satellite imagery for the Olympics.

I expect this battle to continue and for we as consumers to benefit. I really love and appreciate the products these two companies make and subsidize. I am not sure when the one-upmanship will end, but personally I am not looking forward to it.

(Thanks to @boblozano for the GeoEye-1 back story and links)

Microsoft Missing the Boat on Mobile?

Yesterday's Microsoft Watch had an incisive article about Microsoft's failure to compete in the mobile phone marketplace. Echoing my own assertions that Microsoft's obsessive focus on competition with Google in search is a massive distraction, while open mobile is Google's most strategic initiative, Joe Wilcox notes:

Microsoft must change its priorities. The company has wasted too much time chasing Google in search. The search wars are over, and Google won. Microsoft must accept this. Where Microsoft should have been pushing hard is the device category where search will be the killer application: the cell phone.

Instead, Windows Mobile has fallen way behind competing products. Windows Mobile is a mess. The user interface is too complicated, and there are few—I say no—capabilities that distinguish it from other mobile operating systems....

It's time for Microsoft to launch a mobile Manhattan Project, something on the scale of Internet Explorer in 1996. If Microsoft cedes the mobile market to Apple and Google, the PC will be the software giant's final—and declining—legacy...

The mobile market has dramatically changed over the last 12-15 months. But Windows Mobile hasn't moved with it. Apple's iPhone is exciting and has raised end user expectations about mobile user interfaces. Apple's iPhone platform has huge potential to woo developers, too, mainly because of the App store.

Now along comes Google, carrying two nuclear missiles: Android and Chrome. Both are immediate problems for Microsoft. Let me be absolutely clear: Chrome is not a Web browser, it's an application runtime. Chrome is really Google Gears with a browser facade. Sure, Chrome is based on Webkit and has browser legacy, but the product's core capabilities—and Google's objectives for them—is running Web applications. Chrome is a development platform, but in the cloud instead of on the PC.

Implicit in the argument is that while both Google and Microsoft are subsidizing their mobile initiatives with cash from their core businesses, in Google's case, succeeding on mobile is aligned with and strengthens their core revenue stream in search, while in Microsoft's, it competes and undercuts their core revenue in operating systems. This becomes clear when Joe turns his mind to lightweight laptops:

Microsoft's problem isn't just mobile phones. The next-generation PCs aren't big, they're small. Yesterday I was looking at the pink MSI Wind Netbook and thought it would be a perfect Web application computer. "Net" is in the name for a reason.

Microsoft's Windows Vista is a fiasco that just keeps on giving trouble. I'm not one of the Vista haters, but that doesn't mean I don't recognize its foibles. The biggest: Vista demands too much hardware at a time when the market has shifted to lower-powered notebooks and now netbooks and ultra-low-cost PCs. The latter two really can't run Windows Vista, which is why Microsoft has licensed Windows XP Home for them.

Microsoft had to do something. The company couldn't abandon the emerging netbook and ultra-low-cost PC markets to Linux, so it licensed Windows XP Home for these devices. Now Google comes along with Chrome, which is more application runtime than Web browser. Chrome should run just fine on netbooks running XP Home, even with the resources consumed by each tab operating as a single process.

What do you bet that Microsoft comes up with a new "improved" release of XP Home that has features deliberately designed to block Chrome? This is, after all, what they did against Netscape in 1996, with Windows NT Workstation allowing no more than 10 TCP/IP connections so that it couldn't be used with Netscape web servers.

But this kind of backward-looking, defensive competition doesn't do more than buy you time. Yes, Microsoft killed Netscape, but they missed the deeper, stronger competition that would come from true web applications like Google. The future is not like the past, and any strategy that is designed to protect the past will eventually fail.

What's so ironic is that if Microsoft started thinking about the user again, instead of thinking about protecting their business, they could do great things. There are many problems yet to be solved in online software, but they won't be solved without bold leaps into the future.

New iPhoneLive Conference in November

Please welcome Raven Zachary, an iPhone maven and the chair for our new conference. He will be blogging on Radar about iPhone and mobile issues. -- Brady

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new O'Reilly Media conference focused on the emerging iPhone ecosystem - iPhoneLive. Apple's iPhone is having a profound impact on the mobile telephony and computing industries, reshaping how we think about mobility and defining an entirely new class of devices. Whether you're already building apps for the iPhone or are a developer who wants to make a move to the iPhone platform; if you're an entrepreneur or simply an enthusiast of the iPhone, this is the event for you. I am the conference co-chair, along with Bill Dudney, an iPhone developer and author.

This one-day event scheduled for November 18, 2008, in San Jose, California, will explore the business and development issues surrounding the iPhone platform. There are two main iPhone themes at this year's event - Build (core iPhone development) and Launch (launch readiness and business issues).

iPhoneLive will also feature Launch Pad, a showcase for the coolest, not-yet-public apps and startups. The iPhoneLive Launch Pad presents an opportunity for iPhone developers and entrepreneurs to unveil new applications and startups at a major event. There are a limited number of slots available for iPhoneLive Launch Pad, and there is no cost to participate. The deadline for submitting a proposal to participate is September 30th.

With only eleven weeks remaining before the event, we won't be doing a call for papers this year, but there is still time for community input into the conference program. We're finalizing our speakers and panelists now. We'd love to hear from you. Do you have any recommendations for speakers and panelists? What would make this conference a must-attend event for you? Please send an email to iphone-idea@oreilly.com with your ideas for iPhoneLive.

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OFF=ON Trend and Ubiquitous Computing

The good folks at trendwatching.com have a new trend report up, called OFF=ON. In their words:

More and more, the offline world (a.k.a. the real world, meatspace or atom-arena) is adjusting to and mirroring the increasingly dominant online world, from tone of voice to product development to business processes to customer relationships.

They're absolutely right, the signs are right there for all to see. They have been for a while--Matt Webb has been one of the few voices banging this drum (read Matt's take on OFF=ON here). The best articulation of it, though, has to go to William Gibson in a Rolling Stone interview:

One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi.

It's worth repeating that great line: "One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real". It's been an organizing principle for how I view the world in the last year.
For example, when I read "Beyond the Flickering Screen: Resituating eBooks" by Sherman Young, see Gibson reflected in Young's statement "Instead of seeking to make an e-book culture a replacement for print culture, effectively placing the reading of books in a silo separated from other day-to-day activities, it might be better to situate e-books within a mobility culture, as part of the burgeoning range of social activities revolving around a connected, convergent mobile device."

When I read about smart home monitoring letting us detect when our elderly relatives are hurt, I bask in Gibsonian glee. Granny's got an IP address and we can ping her!

When I see that all the Android Developer Contest winners used GPS, I see Gibson's face beaming back from me. That's why Google drive the streets, why Nokia's buying Navteq. The revolution won't be televised, but it will be geotagged.

Technorati Tags: google, geo, ubicomp, williamgibson

Web 2.0 Expo & Web2Open in NYC

The first Web 2.0 Expo NYC is going to start in just two weeks. Just like in SF we have sessions for developers, designers, media & marketers, web ops, and executives. The Development sessions that I am looking forward to the most include John Resig talking about Visual Programming in JS, Cal Henderson talking about scaling video, Toby Segaran hacking the open web's data and the Ajaxian's (Ben and Dion) talk with Brendan Eich and Chris Wilson on the Future of Browsers (we're working on getting someone from Chrome). On the Keynote stage I am really looking forward to Fred Wilson's talk about NYC's Web Industry and ending the week with Dan Lyons.

In addition to the main conference content we also support a free unconference where the content is selected by the participants happens on-site. Organizer Nate Westheimer just posted some information about it.

Web2Open is the free un-conference side of the Web 2.0 Expo and takes place on September 17th and 18th, during the Expo. Inspired by the BarCamp movement, Web2Open is where the attendees lead create the conference content. It's volunteer organized, and offers a fresh, community-oriented take on tech conferences.

One of the best parts of the Web2Open is that it’s free! To register, sign up for Expo pass using the code webny08opn (attendees with conference pass may also participate).

Wondering how you can get involved?

The most important thing you can do is show up, participate in attendee-led sessions, and even propose a session yourself (most sessions are pitched and decided on on-site!).

Also, as you're gearing up to come to the Open, sign up for the Web 2.0 Expo CrowdVine community and interact with other attendees. There, people are already pitching Web2Open session ideas, and some will be selected as pre-programming in the weeks that follow.

Lastly, we still could use some volunteers! Volunteers will help staff the Web2Open welcome desk, introducing folks to the Open format, helping folks understsand how they can get involved.

There are a lot of empty spaces on the Web2Open's schedule. Check the wiki if you want to get an early spot.

Technorati Tags: web2open, puppy, unconference, web2expo

First Burning Man Imagery Appears

The geo hackers were out at Burning Man in full force this year. Above is a screen capture from a GigaPan taken by Rich Gibson. The view I've chosen is centered on the Man's heart, but he captured the entire structure from a crane and you can zoom in much further than I've shown here (launch the full-screen viewer). Rich took 45 Gigapans while he was on the playa.

In case you are not familiar with them, GigaPan is a project sponsored by NASA/Ames, Google and Carnegie Mellon. It provides the ability for thousands of photos to be stitched together to provide an immersive view of an area. The project consists of a robotic camera mount, a photo uploader and a photo stitcher. The site has a lot of amazing imagery including Boston's Charles River and SF's Twin Peaks. If this is interesting to you they've opened the Beta.

The image to the right was taken by Mikel Maron (the champion of GeoRSS and a speaker at the Web 2.0 Expo NYC). Using a kite aerial photography kit he got a shot of the man from above.

There will be more imagery coming. There will be aerial imagery from the crew behind Pict'Earth. There will also be immersive Streetside View imagery taken via modified tricycles. In the meantime I suggest that you watch the geotagged photos trickle in on Flickr on their OSM Burning Man Map (Radar post).

Pix From PAX: Gamers Take Over Seattle

I spent much of yesterday wandering around PAX (AKA The Penny Arcade Expo) with tens of thousands of gamers. It was a smorgasbord of video games, tabletop games, gaming gear, and energy drinks. Alongside the gaming companies there were musicians like Jonathan Coulton, MC Frontalot and Beantown favorites Freezepop. The directors of movies like Nerdcore Rising and Reformat the Planet were also in attendance.

PAX is first and foremost a user conference. The booths were aimed squarely at potential gamers - not partners. The hits on the floor were Rockband 2 (fun!), Little Big Planet (beautiful!) and Rayman Raving Rabbits (a Wii game for dancing). The action yesterday was definitely on the Expo floor. I am sure today more people will go to the panels.

In short if you are ever in need of an immersion course in gamer culture attend. I've uploaded more pics to Flickr if you are curious.

Who Put the Google Earth in my Game?

I just saw the trailer for Sony's new game The Last Guy. In it you run around a city trying to lead people to safety with a top down view reminiscent of Google Earth or Yahoo! Maps or Live Maps. People follow you around the city creating an ever longer line, while you try to avoid monsters. As your line gets longer you get more points and can do more things like surround buildings to free all the trapped people.

I was struck by how ingrained in our society this (relatively) new way of looking at our world has become. Google Earth is the most useful virtual world that I interact with on a regular basis and I doubt that I am the only one who feels that way. It is on its way to becoming its own gaming platform (if its doesn't qualify already). Google added a flight simulator mode and GoogleEarthHacks hosts Gemmo, an MMO for the geobrowser. The still-in-Beta Google Earth browser API included a milk truck game at launch (Radar post). WIthin a week of that launch someone had created their own flight simulator for the plugin (as predicted by Google's Ed Parsons).

These are good experiments, but I think that Google Earth's real gaming future will come via a realtime location-tracking game. A game where people will both review their steps and plot their next move in the geobrowser. The geobrowsers are ready for this game, but unfortunately the realtime trackers are lagging. Hopefully our phones, which are the most likely device to keep the cloud updated with our locations, will soon be up for the task (it seems like Nokia will be soon with the LifeviNe app; the iPhone won't be until it adds location-tracking as a background process).

BTW, if you want to get a feel for The Last Guy game play check out their promotional site. It lets you run around any website as though it were the game.

(LifeviNe via PSFK via @sarawinge)
(The Last Guy trailer via @elanlee)

Ignite NYC II - Submit a talk

On the night before the Web 2.0 Expo NY Ignite is coming back to NYC! On September 15th we will have 10 Ignite speakers who each get just five minutes on stage. Bre Pettis, the co-creator of Ignite will be hosting a cupcake decorating contest. Ignite is going to be at New World Stages (340 West 50th Street) where we are a guest of the New York Television Festival. They are providing us a ~400 person theatre and free beer (during the cupcake contest).

We are currently looking for speakers. If you have something geeky to share then submit a talk! Each speaker will get 20 slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds for a total of five-minutes. Put in your talk idea here. We will let people know by September 10th but submit early as selection is rolling.

If you plan on entering the cupcake decorating competition plan on bringing your own decorations. We will have some on-hand but if you are going to be the cupcake decorating champion of NYC then you'll need to bring something unique. You will not be required to use our cupcakes; feel free to bring your own.

Here is a rough schedule for how the night will go.
7:15 Door & Bar opens
7:30 Cupcake Contest Begins
8:15 Cupcakes Contest Ends
8:45 Ignite Talks Begin

9:45 Ignite talks end; upstairs bar opens

RSVP at Upcoming or Facebook to give us an idea of how many people to expect (but you do not have to).

After this Ignite the New York community will be taking on the event (though I will come back next summer to do some). They're already put up a community site; Tikva Morowati is on point if you are interested in being involved.

If you don't live in New York (or Seattle or Portland) or anywhere with an Ignite start your own! I urged people at Gnomedex last week and we will soon have new Ignites in Vancouver, Nashville, Dallas and DC (they'll soon be joining all of those logos to the right). Check out our community site for more information.

Social Networking for Books: One Ring, or Loosely Joined?

I have to confess that one of the social networking tools I find most valuable is Goodreads. (It's a close second to Twitter, and way ahead of Facebook, Friendfeed, or Dopplr.) Unlike twitter, where I follow hundreds of people (possible because of twitter's minimalism) and am followed by thousands, on Goodreads, I follow and am followed by a small circle of friends and people whose taste in books I trust. As someone who loves books, it is the pinnacle of private social networking for me.

So it was with some interest that I read about Amazon's acquisition of Shelfari. Much of the resulting commentary has focused on the problems this poses for LibraryThing, in which Amazon also has an invesment (via their recent purchase of Abebooks.) I'm a bit surprised that the articles have seemingly ignored the fact that Goodreads appears to be the market leader, at least based on data from compete.com:

Of course, that could change quickly if Amazon throws their muscle behind Shelfari and integrates it into their overall service. And there's the rub: we're entering a period of Web 2.0 consolidation. After all, web 2.0 is all about network effects in applications that get better the more people use them. And that means that companies with dominant share tend to get more dominant over time; that dominance need not be organic to start with (though it helps.) Over time, I expect to see companies who've achieved dominant market share in one market segment to use it to dominate a related segment.

But here's the counter: open and interoperable applications, including open social networks. When are companies with "point applications" of social networks going to realize that their best option, in the face of inevitable competition from big companies looking to dominate their market, is to join forces via shared social networks?

Some of my friends prefer LibraryThing. Others may prefer Shelfari. But I only network with those on Goodreads because that's the service I ended up using first. What a shame that I can't see what my friends on LibraryThing and Shelfari might be reading! I'd love to see a firm commitment to cross-application connectivity, with the social network as infrastructure rather than application.

This applies to other specialized social networks as well. Sorry, even though I'm an investor in Tripit, I'm not going to try to rebuild the social network I've already got on dopplr, just because Tripit thinks they'd better add this hot functionality to what was already a unique and interesting product.

I've argued for years that one of the critical architectural decisions we can make about Web 2.0 applications is whether they are built on the "one ring to rule them all" model that we saw with Microsoft Windows and Office, a game where network effects drive a winner-takes-all marketplace, or the Unix/Internet model of "small pieces loosely joined," in which cooperating applications come together to build value greater than any of the pieces do alone.

We're entering the critical phase of that decision. Application developers need to embrace the "small pieces loosely joined" model, or they will be picked off one by one by dominant companies who've already reached scale, and who are practicing the "one ring" model. As Benjamin Franklin said during the American Revolution, "Gentlemen, we must all hang together, or we shall assuredly all hang separately." Now is a good time for LibraryThing and Goodreads to start talking about interoperability.

The Google Alphabet, 2008 edition

Google has added Google Suggest to their homepage. When Google suggest first-launched Buster McLeod (AKA Erik Benson) checked the suggested term for each letter to create the Google Alphabet, 2004 edition. When Google News Suggest launched in 2006 I did the same. Now in honor of Google Suggest graduating from labs here is the annotated Google Alphabet, 2008 edition:

A = amazon
B = bebo
C = craigslist (in 2004 this was cnn)
D = dictionary
E = ebay
F = facebook (in 2004 this was firefox's turf)
G = gmail
H = hotmail
I = ikea
J = john lewis (the first result is for John Lewis, a UK retailer that I had never heard of till now)
K = kelly blue book
L = limewire
M = myspace
N = nbc olympics
O = olympics
P = photobucket (over Paypal and beating out 2004's Paris HIlton)
Q = quotes (the first result is for The Quotations Page; I hadn't realized how popular quotes were)
R = runescape
S = sears (I am impressed that Sears is able to beat second-place Skype; 2004 winner Spybot is gone)
T = target
U = utube (you know your site is popular when a misspelling is a top searched term; Google's spell corrector doesn't even try to stop this misspelling)
V = verizon wireless
W = wikipedia (www.youtube.com was ninth on this list)
X = xbox (the only Microsoft product to make the list this year; hotmail was a part of the alphabet in 2004 and gmail was not oops, hotmail is clearly still on the list)
Y = youtube (not a surprise with all the foreshadowing, but this does mean that Yahoo! is no longer on the list)
Z = zip codes

How does Google's algorithms choose the alphabet, err top term? According to the FAQ it's primarily popularity. There must be some other unnamed factors because some of the Google Trends matchups don't support that.

Here's Yahoo! vs. YouTube. Based on the chart it's not surprising that YouTube has come out on top.

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