Reisman on User-Centered Media

A nice piece by Jim Rapoza of eWeek shows how technologies often go from bubble to bust ...and on to rebirth.

Rapoza's use of "push" technology for his example came particularly close to home for me, since I lived through all six phases of that cycle with my original Teleshuttle "push" technology. My personal experience shows how the long cycles of the patent business can serve as a counterbalance to the fast cycles of technology.

1. "Useful Invention:" I developed some ideas relating to what came to be known as "push" distribution and filed for a patent and started Teleshuttle in 1994 (well before PointCast launched in 1996).


2. "Growth and Competition:" Teleshuttle gained lots of interest from '94-96, and got its software distributed on several million computers -- but PointCast, Marimba, and BackWeb made a much bigger splash.


3. "Hype:" For a few years, "push" was very hot, and even though the Teleshuttle product failed to build a profitable market, I was able to leverage that hype to partner with a company called BTG to work on commercializing my patent.


4. "Bust:" PointCast went under, and the other guys retrenched. Teleshuttle and BTG tended to the development of a portfolio of patents, and did other things (I was CTO for a dot-com).


5. "Death:" By the early 2000's push was written off as a classic failure, but we still saw value there -- one minor example being Windows Update (and its Apple counterpart).


6. "Rebirth:" Push returned in a big way as RSS feeds. We persevered in commercializing my patent portfolio and sold it in 2006 for $35MM.

So it was a very long and often discouraging ride, but all's well that ends well.

Some might say this is exploitation by a "patent troll." But that misses the whole point of the patent system. It is reasonable to recognize a patent as the innovator's well-deserved incentive. Some people excell as entrepreneurs, others excell as innovators -- even if their business does not succeed. The Constitution provided for patents as a way to encourage the innovating part, not the succeeding in business part. The Framers understood that succeeding in business generates ample reward of its own -- it is innovation that needs the added incentive of a patent. Viewing the patent as Plan B provided the hedge that made it easier to justify the risks inherent in developing my ideas and starting the Teleshuttle business. In my case that hedge paid off -- after 12 years!

Tags: Media New Media Web/Tech Internet Technology Media Technology Patents Patent Trolls Flop Hype Innovation Invention RRR

Location-Based Services, Geotagging, and Map Mashups

I will be moderating an exciting panel, with prominent speakers from IAC (Ask.com, Match.com, etc.), Smarter Agent, MeetMoi, and uLocate on June 18 in NYC.

Location-based services are not just for driving directions anymore. The Web is now richly linked to locations in the real world and visualized on maps. This creates whole new dimensions to navigating the Web and a new class of Web-based services. Links from Web pages appear on maps which show proximity to other pages that can be clicked on. Other Web 2.0 aspects such as social networks can also be viewed through the lens of location.

Think of it as Steinberg's classic "New Yorker's Map of the World" but dynamic -- as your location changes, your location-based view of the world changes. But here it is your view of the virtual world, your view of the Web.

This fits in to the broad trend I wrote of some time back, The Future of the Web -- in Many Dimensions -- one of which is the dimension of the physical world.

Location-based services are at an inflection point:

• Global Positioning Systems are proliferating and gaining new exciting features
• Flickr users are geotagging their pictures
• Nikon, Sony, and Nokia are building geotagging into cameras
• Google Map mashups (and the like) are creating a plethora of new services

New businesses are forming to take advantage of this dynamic Web of Location. Established businesses must understand the potential of this growth sector. Financial players, such as venture capitalists and investment bankers, need to know the very latest on this growth sector to stay ahead of the game.

We expect an interesting session!

Tags: Media New Media Technology Media Technology Location Location based Services LBS Geotagging GPS Mobile Web/Tech RRR

There is recent buzz about Google getting into ITV (Interactive TV). In addition to some recruiting (with a senior hire of Vincent Dureau from Open TV), Google researchers recently attracted some attention from a report on an experimental TV+PC service.

That service was said to supplement the mass-media experience of television with a personalized Web-based experience: "Our goal is to combine the best of both worlds: integrating the relaxing and effortless experience of mass-media content with the interactive and personalized potential of the Web, providing mass personalization." The paper won "best paper" award at the Euro Interactive Television Conference. A note from the authors and link to the paper is on the Google Research blog.

How and when Google will go there seems unclear. When I asked Chris Sacca of Google about it at a recent conference, he suggested it was research at this stage, and not in any current product plan. Interestingly, one of the references cited in that paper was paper from 2003 which happened to have as a coauthor some guy named "Brin, S." So it is reasonable to think Google has some real interest there. Obviously, the ability to link Web ads to TV programs and ads would be a killer.

Especially interesting to me is the fact that what these papers describe is essentially an applicaton of CoTV, coactive TV, which I have been working on and promoting for some time.

Some of the key points of similarity:

• CoTV addresses two screen PC+TV applications
• It includes a variety of technical methods to link the PC and TV without need for cooperation of the TV programmers or distributors. This includes audio sensising as described by the Google Euro ITV paper, but I think the most appealing solution is just to put a little software in a network connected TV (such as a media center or DVR or advanced TV) that tells the PC/Web service what channel or program is on).
• Among many other applications, it addresses the kind of "Query-Free...Search" described in the 2003 Google paper that basically uses the TV program to drive related searches, thus "automatically selecting web pages that a user might want to see while watching a TV program."

For more on CoTV, check out the Web site.

The two Google papers are:

• Social- and Interactive-Television Applications Based on Real-Time Ambient-Audio Identification, by Fink, Covell and Baluja (2006)
• Query-Free News Search, by Henzinger, Chang, Milch, & Brin (2003).

Tags: Media New Media TV Web/Tech Internet Entertainment Technology Media Technology Coactive TV Coactive Media Google Search ITV Interactive TV Interactive Television Media Multitasking Simultaneous Media Use Concurrent Media Use

The growing opportunity in media multitasking is nicely summarized in the recent N Y Times article, At an Industry Media Lab, Close Views of Multitasking. It reports on the Emerging Media Lab at Interpublic, and notes that "market researchers are still struggling to understand the realities of what has been called "concurrent media usage."

But a point yet to be widely recognized is how support for coactivity is a key to increasing engagement. Researchers now recognize that "engagement" is a critical factor in media and advertising effectiveness. What is still missed is that our media can easily provide built in services to support coactivity -- what I call "coactive media" (notably"coactive TV" or "CoTV") -- that can aid in getting users more engaged.

This missing link makes the concurrent media relate to one another automatically, and thus make for a more engaged experience. This can be done at a platform level (much like a search engine) without adding any new burden to media producers.

Instead of the concurrent media distracting attention from one another, they can increase engagement -- by facilitating the reinforcement of one medium with another.

It is certainly important for researchers to learn how media multitasking occurs organically (as it does now), but it will be far more valuable (to users, producers, and advertisers) to create a platform that facilitates and focuses more purposeful coactivity!

(See the CoTV site for details on how easily this can be done.)

Tags: Media New Media TV Web/Tech Internet Entertainment Technology Media Technology Coactive TV Coactive Media Media Multitasking Simultaneous Media Use Concurrent Media Use

With the release of Yahoo! Go, and the recent purchase of Meedio, Yahoo! is becoming less centered on the PC or any other single device, and more centered on the user, who consumes media on many devices.

A view of the profound importance of this step is in the Diffusion Group analysis, Yahoo Go™ - The World's First Genuine Personal Entertainment Guide? What they call the Personal Entertainment Guide (PEG) is what we and others have called the Media Concierge.

As they observe, Yahoo can become "a new type of system operator - network agnostic virtual operator (NAVO, if you will) ... Yahoo! has taken the next step in challenging the dominance of the traditional MSOs. Brian Roberts and Rupert Murdoch will likely look back in the coming years and ask where all their incremental revenue has gone."

They summarize Semel's January announcement of Go, as stating these objectives:

• To create a seamless experience between devices;
• To utilize the particular device to its best advantage;
• To know better the end-user; and
• To base the entire effort on open standards.

This is another step toward the world of user-centered access to media that CoTV exploits -- a world of any content or service on any device or screen. What CoTV adds is cross-device and multi-device services, as well as new capabilities for "screen-shifting" on the fly. CoTV services exploit the fact that consumers often multi-task, using two or more devices/screens simultaneously.

Tags: Media New Media TV Web/Tech Internet Entertainment Technology Media Technology Coactive TV Coactive Media Yahoo Yahoo Go CES Open TV Open access

This year's CES marks a turning point in the battle for open TV, with two major developments that will mutually reinforce one another.

1. Open Access: One development is the high profile move of prime TV and movie content brands to work with major Internet services, like Google and Yahoo, to bypass the stranglehold of the cable distributors.
2. Open Platforms: The other development is the introduction of the Intel Viiv platform, that promises to change the competitive landscape for the open PC platform as an alternative to proprietary set-top boxes.

The move toward open access has gotten most of the press. (See my posts on TV Meets the Internet as Manifest Destiny -- Soon? and The Distribution War to Come -- A Tale of Two Pipes for some reflections on this.)

Open platforms could be equally catalyzing. Aside from their exclusive access to prime content, the incumbent distributors rely on closed set-top boxes (from Motorola and Cisco/Scientific Atlanta). These boxes are albatrosses:

1. They intentionaly limit what outsiders can do -- by being closed, and
2. They unintentionally limit what the distributors, themselves, can do -- by being closed off from the dynamic ecology of the PC industry.

PC-based TV has been on the margins for years, but has not been ready for prime time. Media Center PC's (such as those from Microsoft) deliver TV service and TiVo-like DVR capabilities, but have been rightly criticized as big, noisy, and lacking the mass-market simplicity needed for plain old TV. They are the butt of jokes about boot-ups and crashes.

Viiv promises to remove those limitations. This new platform is compact and powerful, with full support for HDTV and surround sound, and with instant-on features. Cable card support will facilitate connections to cable systems. Microsoft Vista will enhance its user interface.

More importantly, this Viiv platform brings the dynamics of the open PC market ecology -- with its huge economies of scale and collaborative product development -- to the world of TV. Motorola, Cisco/SA, and the other specialized set-top box and TV middleware vendors have little hope of keeping pace with Intel on chips, or with its allies, including Microsoft, perhaps Apple, and the myriad innovative players in the PC and Internet hardware/software/service space.

The demo's of Viiv/MediaCenter HDTV user interfaces are already striking. Other software/service providers will layer on their own innovations -- adding an open ecology of rich Internet-based services, as well as rich integration of devices in the networked home. Once that happens, the comparison to cable, satellite, and telco offerings that don't exploit this open platform and ecology will become increasingly unequal. (See NetworkWorld on Debunking the set-top box safety net, and Forbes on Cisco's Misplaced Assumption.)

Smart consumer electronics companies will also join in this ecology (before HP, Dell, Gateway, Apple, and others eat their lunch). The Viiv brand need not dominate the market to the extent Intel may hope -- competing silicon such as AMD's Live can be expected to be significant as well. What matters is that these PC-world products may bring us to a tipping point in the competitive balance for entertainment devices. Some good background is in a recent Forrester report, Intel Viiv Tackles Digital Home Barriers With Silicon.

This kind of dynamic openness has been talked about for a long time, but has remained elusive. But maybe--with these serious steps toward open access and open platforms--"the stars are beginning to align" at last.

Tags: Media New Media TV Web/Tech Internet Entertainment Technology Media Technology Coactive TV Coactive Media Yahoo Google CES Open TV Open access Viiv

The battle between the TV distributors and TV sourcing from the Internet is largely a battle over two pipes. One pipe is the TV distribution pipe controlled by the cable companies (or, similarly, by the Telcos). The distributors act as gatekeepers to prime content from TV program networks -- they limit our choices to the TV program networks they choose to carry and charge us a nice premium to see the content they choose to let us receive.

That is in contrast to the open Internet, which generally allows any consumer to connect to any content source (on whatever terms those two parties agree on). The Telco TV offerings could take the route of the open Internet, but, for now, they prefer the traditional TV model of closed access. These distributors thus have monopoly (or duopoly) control, for which they can charge a premium.

But they carry a second, parallel pipe. Both pipes are just logical or "virtual" pipes that share the same physical pipe of fiber, coax, and/or twisted pairs of wire to your home. One pipe is the TV "private virtual network" pipe. The other pipe is the "DOCSIS" Data Over Cable pipe that carries open Internet traffic to your cable modem (or for Telcos, the DSL pipe).

The war to come is over how these pipes are used-- whether the distributors can throttle the Internet pipe to protect their control of the separate TV pipe. There are technical issues of bandwidth and quality of service, and regulatory issues of common carriage, open access, network neutrality, and pricing. The distributors are old hands at playing discrimanatory and regulatory games to maintain control of "their" networks -- which limit "our" services.

But now the big Internet players are getting serious (see my previous post, TV Meets the Internet as Manifest Destiny -- Soon?), and they are finding the premium content owners eager to experiment with this alternate pipe. It is telling that some network executives have referred to this as "cable bypass." The content providers hate the cable distributors for their monopolistic stranglehold even more than we consumers do. They also learned the lesson of the music industry and are getting serious about learning new ways to survive in this new age.

The real value-add of a mediator between content provider and consumer is not in distribution, but in media concierge services. That is not what the incumbent distributors offer, and because of that, the game is changing. They will still bring us the content on their pipes, but it will increasingly shift to the open pipe, not the closed one. There may be walled gardens in the future, but they will be opt-in (like AOL's Web service), not the only game in your town (like Comcast or Time Warner Cable). We will spend some time in a transitional world of two pipes, as the old school players hold on as long as they can. But over time, the open pipe will dominate, and the owners of the pipes will largely revert to their natural role as common carriers.

The content producers and the consumers have common cause to agree: we don't need your stinking walled gardens. They are an artifact of an age of a limited number of channels and limited connectivity, and that age has passed.

Tags: Media New Media TV Web/Tech Internet Entertainment Technology Media Technology Coactive TV Coactive Media