Subscribe to RSS Subscribe to Comments

damien stolarz blog

speech recognition in the car - Microsoft, Tellme

Microsoft’s Tellme Purchase Will Have Immediate Impact on its Car Plans | Digital Media Wire:

useful article. Here’s a quote:

“Remember that little piece of crap called a Zune everyone’s been so quick to bash, and that idiotic digital store that goes with it, the Zune Marketplace? Well they won’t seem like such terrible ideas once you’re using Sync’s technology in your car and finding the whole system goes much better with a Zune than an iPod. You’ll download or stream music, movies, and games while sitting in traffic, all without your eyes leaving the road or your hands leaving the wheel. If you’re not doing it, your friend will. When you try it, you’ll want one too. Microsoft will do it better than competitors that enter the space because of the lead time tweaking it. Does this all sound familiar? ”

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

The $7 TV Network (link from PBS)

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . The $7 TV Network | PBS:

The $7 TV Network: Neokast brings multicasting to the masses.

Basically it’s a P2P live streaming solution; unlike bitttorrent, which is actually very easy to pull off, this is a live stream. My company, Blue Falcon Networks, perfected (and I’m not exaggerating) a technology like this way back in 2002… but then switched business models (they are now akimbo). Then I heard of another P2P company doing it a few years later.

One challenge is that, while everyone has 3-15 minutes of user generated content to put up on YouTube, it’s actually quite hard to store and create a compelling library of content to run 24/7.

The other real challenge, sadly, is not solving the technical problems, it’s getting that subtle balance of tech solution, network function, player adoption, and critical mass of users to make a Bitttorrent-for-TV into a defacto standard.

Having put about 5 years into solving this problem technically, and having indeed solved it, it’s interesting to note how important the user adoption dynamics make technologies like this hard to deploy broadly.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,