Sony Unveils PS3 Digital TV Tuner/PVR; Works With PSP Handheld

From paidcontent- Sony Unveils PS3 Digital TV Tuner/PVR; Works With PSP Handheld. Anyone else remember the NEC handheld/console symbiosis with the Turbografx 16?  That might make this pretty cool.  Seems like this would be cool in the US version with CableCard support so it could replace a set-top box and a TiVo- would that make it worth the money?  Maybe it would.

TV is fake?

Digital TV guru Shelly Palmer has an interesting post about "fake" reality TV, which has some great analysis of our perceptions of TV.

He takes some (well-deserved) shots at "Man vs. Wild" which irked me as being a sham when my roommate started TiVo-ing this show like crazy about a week ago.  The "alone in the wilderness with just his wits" idea is an interesting premise to be sure.  The show lost me when he floated through rapids on a homemade raft, with one camera pointed at him on the raft for his big close ups, and shot from above with another- yet the raft camera clearly was not on the raft (and I don't even have HD).  If they will stop his jurney to put a camera on the raft or take it off, how real could the show be.

From what I can tell, Survivorman is much more "real," with host Les Stroud filming his own exploits with camera gear he takes with him.  He's probably not completely alone, but he's more alone than Bear.  Or perhaps Survivorman is just less fake?

Verizon v. Google in 700Mhz

I checked out the Silicon Alley Insider, a local NYC Tech scene blog, and saw their post about the fight between Google and Verizon Wireless over the terms of the 700Mhz spectrum auction. 

I think the Open access idea is is great.  The idea that licensing for spectrum should not specify a particular device has been around for some time- Google is likely preparing for a situation in which they want to be able to wholesale to retail wireless providers. 

It's not possib le because of the way spectrum licenses work now, though the idea has beeen around for a few years in the spectrum scarcity and property rights literature (see for example Gerry Faulhaber and Dave Farber's work or the TPRC paper archive).  Cellular telephones, for example, use particular bands for which service providers must purchase a license.  This license specifies the services to be provided.  So if by some chance you purchased one of Verizon's licenses for, say, a CDMA frequency in Montana, you still would only be able to offer CDMA based cell service.  No other uses  are legal.

Go get em, Google!

Another reason to skip the iPhone: WLAN pwnage!

According to Network World, Duke University is experiencing iPhones suddenly crying out in terror, and taking down WLAN access points with "18,000 requests per second from iPhones knocking out dozens of access points."  Hardware aside, the big deal to me is this:

So far, the communication with Apple has been “one-way,” Miller says, with the Duke team filing the problem ticket. He says Apple has told him the problem is being “escalated” but as of midafternoon Monday, nothing substantive had been heard from Apple.

I hope Apple understands that their response to this will be measured in Internet Time now. 

Why would we not do that? Maybe becuase you never have been good at it!

Today's NYT has the two CEOs of ATT and Apple justifying their decision to cripple the beautiful and fun iPhone device with a  network David Pogue called  “slow, and horrible."

The two executives said they were comfortable with the unexplored implications of the business relationship they have forged. In a break with the tradition of the cellphone industry, Apple is taking responsibility for the activation of the iPhone as well as account maintenance through its iTunes software on a customer’s Mac or PC. Account control has been jealously guarded by the cellphone carriers.

Mr. Stephenson remarked: “That’s what the customers want, and you can give them a good experience. Why would we not do that? I like this model a lot.”

Might I be permitted to answer that SBC/AT&T has never exactly had a wonderful record of 1. vision or 2. customer experience excellence?  AT&T wireless had excellent customer service, but that ended with its acquisition by Cingular.  Maybe this is the new AT&T...but history is not in their favor?

Oakland, this is no way to treat your starters

Seeing Oakland lose at Shea last Saturday was tough- a 1-0 loss in the bottom of the 9th.  With the A's losing 3 games to the Mets and two to the Tribe, it was looking like another wasted June.  We picked up a win against Cleveland on Wednesday, and then blow a 3-1 lead to lose again Thursday night.  This is a good precis of how we keep losing ballgames.


Coming off a 1-0 loss in New York last week, Blanton once more left his club in prime winning position.

But with one out, two men on and the A's ahead, 3-1, the bullpen was fatefully summoned. And again, Blanton's outing was wasted when Ron Flores, a newcomer to such pressure situations, promptly left a 2-1 fastball over the plate and allowed a three-run homer to Jason Michaels.

"I feel bad for Joe," Flores said. "I can only imagine how it must feel to have a good outing go down the drain like that."

Summer Media Consumption

I'm really looking forward to the premiere of Burn Notice Thursday night on USA.  The summer is to be free of new episodes of LOST and The Office (which I watch), a million crap shows I don't watch (Idol, Grey's Anatomy, etc) but USA and FX will be working overtime...new season of Eureka, Damages on FX...oooh it's gonna be great.  Not to mention my HBO fix of Entourage, John From Cincinnati- which is looking continue to be a fantastic show, Flight of the Conchords and Big Love.

It's official: No one learned anything from "A Night at the Roxbury"

National Lampoon’s 72 Virgins is a viral video trailer which asks, at the conclusion of its 3 minutes of low-to-moderate hilarity, whether National Lampoon should make the movie.    Have we learned nothing from "A Night at The Roxbury"? 

Those Chris Kattan/Will Ferrel night club sketches were fun recurring humor, but their movie was a piece of garbage (I will admit that I watched it several times) which would have been even worse without great work by Chaz Palminteri, Richard Greco, and Dan Hedaya.

Tipping off Journalists

Today, Salesforce.com and Google announced that, "Salesforce (CRM) will introduce a version of its customer relationship management software that lets small companies buy Google text ads to promote their businesses, then manage leads that result from the campaigns from within Salesforce's product."

Two days ago, Michael Arrington posted at Techcrunch that exactly that was pretty likely to happen. 

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On Google's Dominance- Is Automated Advertising Missing The Point

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Maurice Saatchi writes in the FT that the ROI optimization inherent in buying targeted and automated advertising on platforms such as Google's AdWords misses the larger point about the human role in audience persuasion.

Admittedly, Saatchi and  Saatchi is part of Publicis’s ( nearly $6bn in annual revenue) empire , and their offline media buying and planning business is probably a decent chunk of that.  But near the end, there is this snippet: 

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practised by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere. They are the people that are needed to help advertisers navigate the internet because, as Aristotle knew 2,000 years ago: “Fire burns both here and in Persia. But what is thought just changes before our eyes. The decision rests with perception.”

 
I think this is an interesting question. If search advertising promises to present advertising messages only to those who show intent to purchase a product or service, is the search advertiser avoiding the true persuasive challenge of advertising? 


I'm tempted to think that any large advertiser would be foolish to fully ignore mass media campaigns and market research.  Metrics will have a place in advertising campaigns for the foreseeable future, but if Google's advertising platform gave advertisers the feeling that they left money on the table (in unrealized sales from persuasive campaigns), surely advertisers would start buying different ads?

What will politics become in the Youtube Age

Reading this NY Magazine article on the 2008 presidential race, I was struck by the insightfulness of the two possible reactions to the "YouTube Campaign"
offered by former Howard Dean strategist Zephyr Teachout (in italics)

The first future, the gloomy one, is one in which constant surveillance turns our politicians into plastic people, and turns creative, thoughtful people—people who are willing to think out loud—off from pursuing public office. The second future is the one in which the current plasticness becomes so unsustainable that it goes the other way—we become much more comfortable with awkward phrasing.

 

Unfortunately, she concludes, the gloomy future strikes her as the more likely one. It has something to do with the way the media—writ large, new and old—teaches us all to be strategists, not citizens, and to think poorly of someone as a strategist, not a person, for saying something stupid.

There is plenty to hope for, not least that the  legions of Daily Show viewers who see politics as just one more charade (thanks in no small part of our friends in the Bush administration) can learn to cope with candidates as real people instead of plastic mockeries of humanity.