Code Creating Culture
Just a heads up:
If things seems a little slow around here its because I’m spending the week at CFUnited. After that I’m spending the fourth of July holiday in DC with ethie and his family.
Theres a ton of great news happening right now but I have about enough time to glance at it and then file it away. Hopefully, when I get back I’ll be able to post. 
This is a wonderful little hack to put some use back into that old Atari (or recent ripoff) joysticks to use. The key is to just get the thing and mount new hardware inside of it!
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Are cell phone cameras broken? John Poisson thinks so and he’s creating a whole new set of tools to enable ‘the next generation of photography’. (Note: MMS is the technology that allows pictures to be sent from phone to phone.)
MMS has several problems. Cameraphones are kind of like home exercise equipment: the ad make it look like a cameraphone will be fun, easy to use, improve your life and make you smile more. But when you get home and try it, you realize it’s a pain in the ass. So you don’t really use it. We think it’s the software. The MMS interface on most phones is user-hostile. It can take 40 clicks to do what you want to do. There isn’t really that ability to take a picture and share it with someone intuitively like you can when sending a text message. And the ability to add music or a little icon to a picture is not aligned with people’s simple desire. There’s also very little feedback that what you sent was received. It’s simply a send mechanism and not a communication mechanism. That ignores the very nature of what this mobile device is.
TheFeature: Short messaging services (SMS) don’t really provide confirmation of receipt either.
Poisson: I think that’s a liability, but SMS caught on despite that. When I send someone a text message, they’re mostly likely going to reply, even if only briefly to confirm they’ve received my message. If I send you a picture though, are you going to send another picture back to me?
TheFeature: Do you also see problems with the provider’s business model for MMS?
Poisson: The pay-per-use model, even for SMS, is a bit of a liability. The way carriers are charging for MMS is fundamentally broken. I may incur a cost when I send you a picture. I may also incur a cost for you though. It’s like sending someone a letter and they have to pay the postage as well. Now carriers are trying to support unlimited picture messaging within their network. You can see they’re trying to capitalize on their investment in MMS infrastructure, but they’re using that technology as a way to lock people into their network. But people want to communicate with each other regardless of their carrier. I understand the carriers’ point of view, but they’re continuing to not provide a use for that cameraphone that’s relevant to people.
Having just got a shiny new cameraphone I can really identify with this. I can snap all the pictures I want but I’m stuck to only sending them to other Verizon people. If I want to MoBlog I’m going to have a big bill. 
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Odeo is an exciting new startup that promises to make podcasting profitable. They’ve now entered their beta stage. Screen shots posted at the above link.
I’m amazed by the speed at which these guys have put this together. I’m impressed by the choice of pink as the main color (after all, pink is the new orange, which was the new black). But I’m really impressed by the savvy the guys running this have shown:
“I’ve been thinking for awhile that the future of podcasting is not on the ‘Pod but on the phone,” says Evan Williams of Odeo, a podcasting startup in San Francisco. “Audio is by nature a mobile thing–you can take it wherever you want.”
Currently you have to have a computer around to listen to podcasts – or at least one to transfer it to a more mobile form. Being able to listen to podcasts from a mobile phone is genius!
Pick a cabbie. Cabbie drives people. If people stop at your property you win!
Monopoly, only stretched thin and applied to the real world (London, that is). Another game for those lunch time breaks. It’s perfect for setting it and forgetting it.
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MTV, or Muddeled Televised Vision, has bought the popular child online game, NeoPets. MTV is excited about turning the little Pokemon like game into a gateway drug for its soft-core spring break specials and occasional video.
MTV, which also owns runs Nickelodeon and Nick.com, said the addition of NeoPets.com to its portfolio will boost its presence in the online entertainment segment for children and young adults.
…Almost 60 percent of the NeoPets audience is over age 13, which fits well with the profile of many MTV brands, MTV said. With 50 original characters, the portal offers business opportunities in feature film animation.“NeoPets users are passionate about the site and its unique offerings, and that is exactly the kind of connection with audiences that MTV Networks cultivates and values,” Judy McGrath, CEO of MTV, said in a statement. “Its acquisition is an important move for us as we aggressively move forward as a multi-platform entertainment company.”
*sigh. McDonalds has a term for this – cradle to grave marketing. The idea is to hook em when they’re young and they’ll be reliable brand devotees for the rest of their life. Ugh. Now you’ll excuse me while I put on a Transformer’s T-Shirt and troll ebay for Atari stuff. 
Derek Sivers is the founder of CDBaby, a neat little ‘mom-n-pop’ type place that allows indies to sell CD’s online. Notable, however, is the recent deal to put all of CDBaby’s music into the iTune’s catalog. There’s an interview with Sivers out now.
Though Apple’s deal says they reserve the right to refuse anything, they generally don’t. A month after they launched iTunes, we got a little invitation thing saying we’d like to talk to you about getting the CD Baby catalog up on the Apple iTunes music store, and I went up to Apple’s office thinking that this was going to be a meeting with, you know, a marketing guy. And then Steve Jobs himself walked out, saying, “It’s really important to us to get every piece of music ever recorded available in the iTunes Music Store.” Since we’re not talking about physical product, there’s no reason not to. There were a few other indie labels there, and he was saying to them, “Even if you have an album that’s out of print, that isn’t even worth you pressing up a thousand copies anymore, let’s just get a digital master of it and make it available to the people that want it.”
So it was really kind of a different mindset for music retail. Not just like, “Hey, we’ve got 100 square feet of floor space, we need hits, baby, hits hits hits!” It was, “Get everything up and selling.” Which is just the most indie-friendly attitude you can have.
And I think it’s really because iTunes did that, that everybody else had to catch up . . . That whole mentality was just kind of tossed out, because you never know what’s going to hit — there might be some obscure band that no one’s heard of today, but tomorrow they’re going to be on a reality show, and 50,000 people are going to want that album that day. So the idea is, let’s get it all up and selling, why not?
Long tail business at its finest.
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Bad Fruit is a plugin for iTunes software that allows you to grab podcasts and put them on your iPod player. By itself, the news is mildly interesting. However, digging deeper, some eyebrow raising happens. Who’s behind Bad Fruit? Why it’s none other than our old friend Michael Robertson. This guy is like the Jack Sparrow of the business world…. ug… what’s that feeling… like… admiration? 
The log file for the software shows several calls to a server at MP3Tunes.com. Some of the software code contains references to MP3Tunes. And if you look at the privacy policies for MP3Tunes.com and BadFruit.com, they’re word-for-word identical in most key respects. Coincidence?
MP3Tunes.com is the new song store operated by MP3.com and Linspire founder Michael Robertson, who has always based his companies in San Diego. No confirmation from his shop yet, however.
Robertson has never been one to shy away from thumbing his nose at the biggest possible competitors. The habit has gotten him sued by the big record labels and Microsoft in the past, but he’s shown little sign of mellowing.
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Looking to dip a toe into the Linux waters? Confused by all the free versions out there? Check out this introduction to the various Linux Distros to get a grasp of what’s out there.
Personally, I would have liked to see a slightly bigger emphasis on the ‘LiveCD’ OS’s because of their convience. Oh well. Now if I could just find a Distro that would work with my Belkin wireless card I would be set.
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USB memory sticks (or keyfobs, or fobs) have become cheap and easy attainable (I saw 128MB sticks for sale at the grocery store the other day). In addition to being a great way to swap files around there are a number of clever and useful things you can do with them. Boot an alternate OS, run a secret cache of your own software anywhere, etc.
I think a future vision of carrying around your personalized environment on a keyfob and plugging into any workstation is much more workable than Sun’s alternative (push everything online and just have dumb terminals connected to the Internet).
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