Author: Lynne

Streaming Video is Hot – Why is it so “Clunky”?

Cory Treffiletti (Carat Interactive) wrote in Online Spin today “Streaming video is hot right now, and it’s only getting hotter as broadband becomes more pervasive… The way video is currently viewed online still seems somewhat clunky. It feels as though we’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. If you see the current executions, we’re placing video into existing ad spaces. We’re pushing video into banners and buttons rather than coming up with new presentation architecture. We need to re-evaluate how we see the Web and how we place video inside of it.

At last – a realization that there is an “architecture”! My take on this tech:
“Exactly! I was in a meeting with a major publisher a few months back and all he thought he could do was an ad. Why? Because it was too expensive to create and produce new content dynamically in the short time frame he required, even though they have the writers and editors already. When they tried in-house video shoots and hired a video guy to handle production, it took weeks to months to see the rushes! They get out news daily, and it took weeks for the guy to tinker something lousy together. He hated that video guy, because he needed to create new content now and knew that the traditional video production way was a dead-end for his deadlines.

All he wanted was a writer chatting up the latest gadget in a minute, with a 5 sec promo, and maybe clips of conferences and stuff. Oh, and he wanted it to be top-quality, sound great, have his company branding look pro, and be available immediately so he could see how it was received with instant email reports (so he could show his sponsors). And it had to be economic, because he wanted to do it ALL THE TIME, not once a quarter.

He didn’t want software tools mucking things up. He didn’t want to wait weeks to see the results because he had to get out the review ASAP! He didn’t want to book time and spend $$$ for a pro film crew for a 2 minute discussion of the Apple IPod when he’s already got a cool digital camera and knows how to use it and knows what he wants to hear. He wanted it on the web on his site instantly, and he wanted the results (metrics) in his email as soon as something happened.

ExecProducer said “sure, we already do all this”, and he got it. He shoots his review, emails the clips off to a special email address, and instantly a produced movie to his specifications with titling, music, technical correction (audio/video), desired formats for anything ranging from a video cellphone to a DVD, and reports – kind of like a video ATM. From the time he hits “send” to the first “view” on the web is about 2 minutes. His hair is growing back.

And with a few minutes effort he’s done for the week. Actually, since it was so easy, he’s talking a daily newscast. More content means more sponsors and ad messages. And they watch it, because they trust their favorite journalists to tell them what they want to know. And so it goes.

It just took a bit of ingenuity. But that’s what Silicon Valley is famous for, isn’t it?”

Cory went on to say “What about a site that is purely a video interface? What about typing in a URL and coming to a TV station? Does the future hold the possibility of a pure video interface with flash layered on top? Companies like Maven and Desksite offer experiences that are similar to this but are housed on your desktop rather than online. Why can’t we foresee this experience online as well?”

My take on this tech:
“What about a site that is purely a video interface?” ExecProducer has been doing that for years with privately generated and produced content. Our partners include business consulting firms like Valux with their MinutePitch offering (see Rob Enderle’s mention in his article “The Death and Rebirth of the Movie Industry” and the CoolClip Network, among others. MinutePitch, for example, provides private channels used by sales to communicate with key customers, entrepreneurs doing custom pitches for investors and partners, and execs and managers reporting to corporate, but Hollywood style with music, titling, and all the bells and whistles that we always get from TV but don’t get from boring raw clips.

There’s a lot happening right now with innovation in video media production, deployment, and analysis. You’ve just gotta look.

Hotels, VC’s and Vanity Video

As I was watching a venture capitalist earlier this week push a MinutePitch (by Valux) of a security startup (he said “Very cool video”), I was thinking how nice it would be if someone would use my video production engine ExecProducer for family stuff. After all, we started on this route because it was just absolutely horrible pulling together our family videos of Hawaii using conventional video edit software (unfamiliar features, inconsistent/nonexistent format selection, synch and other technical errors creeping in, tool malfunctions – you name it).

Even though we offloaded the digital cameras every night, we had to wait until we got home for resources to complete the movie, and by then it was very arduous. This was one of the spurs to create automated production mechanisms, and then the paper and Berkeley trials and company and, well, you know how it is…. But we’ve been doing business video – not personal video – because that’s what the investors like.

So now I read that “Several hotels are offering guests the opportunity to capture their vacations on camera” by either renting cameras and printers or even creating a movie experience: “Guests who sign up for the Tribeca Grand Hotel’s “Director’s Cut” package can borrow a video camera and make their own movie about Manhattan. Computers at the hotel allow you to add special effects, cut unwanted scenes and lay a soundtrack. The package starts at $369″.

The only problem is it is really a bear to do all the movie editing and production. So wouldn’t you like to just shoot your movie, email your clips, and get back a produced and finished and polished video with titling and music and the beautiful intro scenes of the hotel and sights and end credits with the information about the hotel and when you did it? Wouldn’t that be just grand?

Of course, you can always go custom: “Visitors to King Pacific Lodge in northern British Columbia, Canada, can sign up for the ‘Last Action Hero’ package and have their adventures documented by a personal cameraman. Guests will receive a video to prove to the folks at home that they really did catch that big salmon or take a helicopter to a remote spot. Starring in your own movie isn’t cheap, however; the price is $5,150 a person”. Ouch!

I like my idea better – don’t you? 🙂

Programming Jobs Lose Luster – Live Free or Die

The NYTimes today discusses why bright engineering students are leaving the major to move to business even if they love science. It’s the jobs, stupid (to paraphrase James Carville). “U.S. graduates probably shouldn’t think of computer programming or chemical engineering as long-term careers” since “The erosion of ”deep code” and other technology jobs in the next decade is creating a high-stakes game of musical chairs for geeks, Silicon Valley recruiters say”. Sounds pretty gloomy.

Where do we go from here? If you are totally committed to a technology career (because you’ve already got your degree or career in it, or you have it as a calling), you’ve got to think smarter. As William Jolitz said last week in his article Misplaced Software Priorities in Cnet:
” We are in danger of losing out in the best and most interesting part of the software market. I’m referring to the development of high-level components such as user interfaces. These deserve our attention because they increase the value of what we can do with technology. Instead, we’re continually re-creating the same low-level infrastructure.”

The big win here would be to kick software innovation into high gear by clearing the decks to focus the innovation segment on the “race to the top” (as Thomas Friedman of The New York Times has put it). People with big dollars then can take big risks for big opportunities.”

So as the motto goes, “Live free or die”.

Fun Friday: Jezebel is Gone, Bugs are Edible, and Disposable Camcorders

Well, Jezebel is gone. Jezebel, for those who don’t know, was the jaguar at Happy Hollow in San Jose. All my kids loved to visit her when they were little (the oldest is now 20). I always thought she was smiling. We will really miss her.

For all those programmers out there – if you are really sick of those tedious debug cycles, there is hope. You can actually eat those bugs – in Mexico. “It’s just like eating a regular hot dog, but with five or six times the nutritional value.” (Juan Garcia Oviedo, Biologist).

Lastly, you know something is on the edge of complete obsolescence when it’s still expensive to make but they have to sell it as a “disposable”. That what Benny Evangelista tried in his review of the Pure Digital Technologies disposable (kind of) camcorder. The reason they say you want one – it does 640×480 30fps, and you can trade video files. Funny thing is, I can do that with a digital camera. And I own it. And it’s small. And I can use the latest memory cards. Oh, and did I mention I own it.

For example, the Canon SD200 is a 640×480 30fps camera. Costs about $200. Uses standard SD cards you can buy anywhere. Plenty of room for switching cards or using a gig card. Has a very good editing feature for clips. You’re not limited to most recent clip or anything like that. Also has great image capability. My son Ben Jolitz used this camera for a short comedy feature film festival entry (high school level) this year called “Bots” (see “Fun Friday: How Many Robots Can You Name?”). It’s very very small and light – fits in a pocket. And he did a pro level production with it.

It has optical zoom, unlike the camcorder. If you want to spend more money, plenty of cameras have auto-stabilization (look at some of those Sonys, will ya, and they’re 60fps!!!). You’re not limited to 20 minutes – just switch memory cards, and they’re getting bigger for cheaper all the time.

I suppose if you want a DVD fast, this might work. But there are so many DVD burners on the market. While I always love labor saving processes, I just can’t endorse this one. Now, maybe if they decided to offer digital cameras instead…

Misplaced Software Priorities

For a perspective from William Jolitz, co-developer of 386BSD, on the need to separate “innovation” from “renovation” in design, read Misplaced Software Priorities today. While it may gore a few oxen – especially those who work in the architectural flatland of low-level software – given the rapid outsourcing of this very same area to low-cost programmers in India and China, it might be time to listen to an alternative view from a long-time Silicon Valley developer and entrepreneur who’s done more for the acceptance of open source than all the pundits put together.

Of course, if someone wants to stay low-level, they can always learn Mandarin, right?

Tom Foremski Interviews Doug Engelbart

Doug Engelbart is a computer legend, but he is also still very much alive and has plenty to say. Tom Foremski of SiliconValleyWatcher had a poignant chat with him. The upshot – have the last 20 years been a failure?

Some snippets from Tom’s excellent interview:
” ‘How do you deal with society when its paradigm of what is right is so dominant?’ Doug Engelbart, the 1960s computer visionary asked me the other evening. It’s a question he has pondered many times over the past 20 years or so, ever since his research funding was taken away.

Mr Engelbart and his teams of researchers at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) shaped the look and feel of the PC, as John Markoff chronicles in his latest book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.

Mr Markoff’s book raises the profile of Mr Engelbart, well known as the inventor of the computer mouse, and less well known for his seminal work in creating many of the concepts later found in the personal computer. Mr Markoff returns credit to where it is due.

What the book does not chronicle is how the rise of the PC killed funding for Mr Engelbart’s work.

By 1979, he had lost all funding from SRI because of unfavorable peer review.

‘The other research groups said what I was doing could be done better with microcomputers or through machine-based artificial intelligence. That was the dominant culture at the time. What people don’t realise is that there are many different cultures and not one is right.’ Mr Engelbart told SVW.

As a result of his experiences, he questions whether the past 20 or so years of his life have been a failure.

That’s how long Mr Engelbart has been trying to raise funding to continue his research into human machine interfaces and solving large, complex problems using networked software.

But the culture of our time has been unfavorable to his ideas of developing human-centric computer applications using one big powerful computer with many users. The paradigm of the PC revolution is that everyone gets to have a computer, no time-sharing needed.”

Fast Internet Movers and the Long Term

Bill Burnham’s slant on “Deal flow is dead, long live thesis driven investment” makes a number of good points for rethinking investment for Internet companies. Ben Savage of Wasserstein & Co counters “So a firm that pursues thesis driven deals in ‘unpopular’ sectors I think is partially dooming itself to be a firm that hits for average and not for power. Unlike in public markets contrarian investing doesn’t seem to work so well in ventureland.” Perhaps even more to the point, it is a reminder that our industry isn’t “one size fits all”, and the key factors for enterprise versus Internet, for example, demand different evaluatory criteria.

The success of thesis investment depends on the time-to-market of the product vended. Having co-founded startups in bottom of the food chain semiconductors (InterProphet, w/Vint Cerf on the board, doing layer-4 semiconductors for datacenter / interconnects) and top of the food chain Internet services (ExecProducer, realtime video/audio production datacenter hosted services for Internet/DVD/3GPP) I’ve found the demands on IPR and product roadmap are completely different.

InterProphet was granted it’s first patent 3 years after founding and after an intense product development cycle that is still ongoing. ExecProducer in contrast was up and running with partners (we don’t sell direct) and referenceable accounts producing movies for customers instantly (in other words, no manual intervention = no expensive engineering / design staff required) within one year with none of the concerns that a fabless semiconductor networking company faced (equipment, expensive engineering personnel, high legal/patent expenses, due diligence with customers, and so on).

It took several years of time / expense to worry out the patents for a successful ringing strategy for InterProphet, and I’m still working on one of the landmark results papers. It took about a year of part-time work on a fun project with Berkeley to get a successful paper on pioneering massive video production accepted to ACM SIGCHI ACE2004, the conference that Disney and Warner and Pixar shop their papers.

I think Bill’s idea to get ahead of the game by calling up potential investments works well for top of the food chain companies like ExecProducer. However, given the capital and intellectual demands (plus the reputational and technical challenges) of areas such as enterprise software or telcom or networking, and the years of work to establish a presence, Ben’s view is probably quite correct for that space, and unlikely to change in the near future.

ACM, Turing and the Internet

Vint Cerf and Bob Khan got a well-deserved dinner and party in San Francisco courtesy of the ACM. A collection of Internet “who’s whos”, lots of wine and speeches, and most importantly, their coveted Turing award. This award was announced several months ago. As Vint noted in an email reply to the Internet Society a month ago (try to take notes during an awards dinner – it can’t be done), “What is most satisfying about the Turing Award is that it is the first time this award has recognized contributions to computer networking. Bob and I hope that this will open the award to recognize many others who have contributed so much to the development and continued evolution and use of the Internet.”

So congratulations to Vint and Bob. I’m sure we are all very pleased that they have been honored with the Turing Award this year. They both deserve it – their work has changed our world!

Fun Friday – Daleks, Jedi, and Vultures, Oh My!

The very latest new and improved whiter than white venture capitalist trend is (drum roll) – “The Consumer Internet”! “Every other venture capitalist one encounters in Silicon Valley now seems eager to reinvent himself as an expert who can spot hot new consumer-driven Internet ventures” writes Gary Rivlin of the New York Times. “The problem is that you’ve got all these software V.C.’s, they don’t know what to do with themselves…They say, ‘These are deals that make people a lot of money, and enterprise software is largely dead.’ So now they’ve decided they’re consumer Internet venture capitalists.” (George Zachary, Partner at Charles River Ventures).

Now, I know that you’re reading this blog while shopping online, running your RSS feeds of the latest stock news, IM’ing to a friend, VOIP’ing on a conference call with a client, and secretly watching a movie you got from a p2p site. But did you know that you are a part of the consumer Internet and that there’s money to be made off of you? Are you surprised yet? Are you holding your wallet tighter?

Daleks are fearsome creatures, indistructable, flustered by stairs, and good dustbins in a pinch. Perhaps that’s why one disappeared from storage recently. “A spokesman said: ‘There may be a black market out there for Daleks – but it’s still a strange thing to steal’.” (BBC News). So if you see something with an odd British accent saying “Exterminate”, cheer up – it may be worth $500 pounds.

Finally, for the last word on the Apple-Intel alliance (a slashdot reader) :
“I felt something, a disturbance in the network, as if a million Mac zealots cried out in horror and were suddenly silenced.”

UCSC Chancellor on Academia, Women, and Technology

Dr. Denice Denton headlined a talk at Google last night on “Leadership and Strategies for Cultural Change in a High Tech Environment”. Ms. Denton, an accomplished engineering professor, was recently appointed Chancellor of UC Santa Cruz. Articulate and involved, she didn’t throw punches on the difficulty of integrating more women and minorities into an institution with very slow processes (tenure) and conservative personal networks in a fast-paced technologic world (see “Advocates Unlock the Clubhouse at Google”).

Given the recent Summers diatribe at Harvard and the propensity of jerks and bullies to get their way (see “Girls and Science – the Hard Costs of Pushback”, Dr. Denton did tackle the “why aren’t there women in the sciences?” question, and she wasn’t afraid to point out that a grave imbalance in gender didn’t imply ipso facto that those few women there would welcome more women, since the risk of becoming “just one of many” could erode the unique position such a woman might have. So while the “only woman” or “only minority” might chair a search committee, for example, with the charter of increasing “diversity”, there isn’t a lot of incentive to the lone representing person to personally risk a loss of position and also possibly antogonize her male colleagues by championing a woman. A man, in contrast, can do this without a loss of status, because he’s arguing against others in his somewhat homogeneous group the same as he might if he were debating fantasy football picks.

Yes, I know this is just common sense. To expect a lone woman to risk her career and position to help a stranger is not reasonable (although some still do). This fear of isolation and ridicule even impacts the mentoring of younger women – I’ve found very few established women willing to speak up for their younger female colleagues. In this case, it helps to be on the business side – see “Girls Can Do Calculus and Physics and Astronomy and Look Nice!”.

Often, to be honest, I find many of these women don’t have children of their own, having sacrificed motherhood for the brotherhood of university success. I do know women in academia who have sons and daughters and are motivated for their children to do the right thing. But then we run into the “can’t get tenure because of the babytrack” complaint (see “Why Women Don’t Like IT?“). Women in business run into this same problem – see “Mompreneurs and Tech”. I wish more women had the courage to do the right thing. But I understand in an area where the Dr. Summers of the world can rant about their peculiarly bigoted beliefs and still get raises, the likelihood of the few women in academia who have survived the gauntlet championing women, tenure notwithstanding, isn’t something I’d bet the farm on.