Media Technology

When I was a young MIT grad student back in 1994, I attended a big Media Lab symposium on the new Digital Information Superhighway. Mosaic had been out a little over a year, Netscape had been founded six months ago, and I was listening to Mickey Schulhof, President & CEO of Sony America, give us his vision of the future. The world he described was the standard pre-Web story: every home in America would have a set-top box (made by Sony) that decoded content for all us consumers. At the other end of the wire was a Sony office that handled billing and content delivery. The content was, of course, also produced by Sony, though they’d happily broker for non-Sony customers as well. He also made a strong point that they had no interest in managing the wires themselves, kindly ceding this part of the vision to competition.

Being a young grad student and having religiously read Wired Magazine for over a year, when it came time for Q&A I asked the obvious question: “In this world you describe, how will people get access to non-professionally produced content that can’t afford the pricing structure Sony will require?” His answer: “I don’t think people care about non-professional content.”

As we all know, he was soon proven horribly wrong, but every time there’s a new seismic shift in technology all the current monopolies scurry to try to put the Djini back in the bottle. The latest shifts for content is with portable and home-entertainment boxes, and it’s in this context that I read the announcement that Disney has finally agreed to license Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management software to “bring about a vibrant market for legitimate, high-quality entertainment delivered to new categories of end-user devices, such as personal media players and home media center PCs.” In other words, the game is shifting again, and this time the Content Cartel isn’t going to be caught with their pants down.

Now things get bloody, as if they weren’t before. I suspect the only thing that frightens Disney more than P2P-traded Mickey Mouse fan-art is the idea of Microsoft stepping into the Sony role of Mickey Schulhof’s vision. Microsoft, along with Apple and RealNetworks, have to walk the fine line between appeasing the Content Cartel and offering consumers enough control that they don’t blow off DRM and proprietary standards entirely for systems with simple embedded Linux & MPEG. (See Jeffrey O’Brien’s recent Wired article for a nice discussion.) I’m not sure who’s gonna win this one, but as one of those people producing non-professional content, I sure hope Schulhof vision wasn’t just late in coming.

References

• Microsoft and Disney Announce Multiyear Agreement to Cooperate On Digital Media Initiatives and for Disney to License Windows Media Digital Rights Management Software (PRNewswire, 9 February 2004)
• Disney and Microsoft strike Internet deal (Mark Tran, The Guardian, 9 February 2004)
• Microsoft, Disney In Digital Pact; Wake-up Call To Apple? (Brad Gibson, The Mac Observer, 9 February 2004)

The past few days I’ve been downloading streaming audio of lectures and talks given by interesting and intelligent people™, converting them to MP3 format and putting them on my iPod. The process is still a little slow — usually I stream the audio using RealPlayer and use Applescript and Wiretap to automatically capture to disk, then trim using Quicktime Pro and convert to MP3 using iTunes. However, I’m pleased with the end result.

I’m still looking for good sources of audio talks, and welcome suggestions & links. Here are the three I’ve most enjoyed so far:

• WGBH Forum Network: A large archive of free public lectures (some audio only, some audio + video), hosted by Boston’s public TV/Radio network. I’m especially enjoying the MIT series of talks by Nobel Prize winners.
• World Affairs Council of Northern California: Interesting talks on a wide variety of global topics. I often listen to this on my local public radio (KQED).
• National Press Club: The NPC holds luncheon talks by people ranging from Donald Rumsfeld to Wynton Marsalis. Archives hosted by National Public Radio.

FusedSpace is hosting a design contest for “innovative ideas that, by means of existing technology, can change or improve our current relationship with physical public space or that can otherwise bring about innovations in the public domain.” (Where by public domain they mean in the sense of common space, not in the intellectual property sense.) Props to Corante and Eric Nehrlich for the link.

Years ago, Steve Mann made Cool Site of the Day with his Wearable Wireless Webcam. Now, almost a decade later, you can order the DejaView CamWear Model 100 hat or glasses-mounted camera, which continually records a 30-second buffer of video so you can push a button and start recording from before you even know you wanted to. Price will be $399, available “in January” (so they’d better hurry!)

I don’t expect this first-generation product to make a big splash, but I do believe in the vision of always-ready wearable cameras and microphones with this sort of record-30-seconds-into-the-past kind of feature. The story is somewhat compelling for consumers (“when your baby makes that great smile, you can capture it and grab the best frame as a picture”) but even more so for industry and inspection, where you’re more concerned with documenting an event than with the artistry of the video.

Rob Galbraith’s Digital Photography Insights has a great article about National Geographic’s first cover story shot entirely in digital. (Props to Haberlach for the link.)

Digital had many of the advantages I’d expect: less equipment to get lost, easy backups, ability to review pictures on-site, and easier remote collaborative editing. The disadvantages were more surprising to me, and included having to deal with brightness differences on different screens, inability to edit on a large horizontal surface like a light-table, and poor contrast compared to slides when showing photos to a large group.

I recently came across two programs for helping transfer large files via instant messenger or email. I see both these systems as gap-bridgers — they bridge between the spontaneity of email/IM and the robust and recipient-controlled download you get with Web browsers. Since the Internet abhors a gap, I’ve no doubt this difference in functionality will go away in the near future, especially as Web-based protocols are further integrated into the OS and file systems.

• DropLoad (http://dropload.com/) is a donation-ware website where you can upload a file (using the web-browser upload) and indicate an email address you want the file “sent” to. That recipient then gets sent a random-hash URL to the uploaded file. Files are deleted after 48 hours or once they are downloaded, whichever comes first.
• HFS (http://www.rejetto.com/hfs/guide/) is a webserver where you can drag & drop files onto the server and get a new URL for the file automatically put in your clipboard. You can also create “virtual folders” that are essentially directories on the webpage. I’ve not tried this one, but it feels like a more lightweight (and potentially temporary) approach to what WebDav or shared file systems do.

I got a new cellphone back on December 5th, swapping out my T-Mobile Sidekick for an AT&T Treo 600 (both good phones, but AT&T has much better coverage in my area). I also signed up to transfer my T-mobile number over to my new phone.

Twenty-six days and about 8 hours on hold with technical support later and I’m still waiting for my number to be transferred. The problem is a classic multi-system gridlock. AT&T sent a request for number transfer to T-mobile through Telcordia, an intermediary that handles number portability communication between the various telcos. They then sent a follow-up with more information, but the follow-up arrived at T-mobile before the main request arrived. This wedged T-mobile’s system and caused both requests to be dropped. Now T-mobile is asking AT&T to cancel and resubmit the request, because they can’t get their side unwedged. Unfortunately, AT&T’s system can’t cancel requests that are awaiting a response. Gridlock.

There’s no one person to blame here. T-mobile’s system clearly shouldn’t have gotten wedged so easily, Telcordia shouldn’t have delivered messages out of order, and AT&T shouldn’t have sat on the request for three weeks when they thought the ball wasn’t in their court. Most importantly, both telcos need more staff to cut through the hour+ hold times.

At long last I’ve gotten the problem escalated at AT&T, thanks to a dedicated number mobility group member named Andrea who was willing to wait through T-mobile’s hold time and patch me into the call. They now say it’ll be another 48-72 hours, which will bring them just under the 30-day return policy on my new phone. Here’s hoping…

Update: And 29 days after purchase, my new phone finally takes calls! (And there was much rejoicing.) FYI, you can cut to the head of AT&T’s customer support queue by dialing 1-888-799-1305 and selecting 3G and English. This is the priority queue used by AT&T stores, though customers can also use it. (Thanks to Nelson and Vyruz Reaper for the number.)

Last night I finally got around to watching Microsoft’s Comdex presentation, specifically the section where Susan Dumais shows off her new search technology “Stuff I’ve Seen.” (Search for “switch gears” at the bottom of the transcript or go to 1:07:50 on the video.)

Most of Stuff I’ve Seen is concentrating on the problem of quickly indexing and searching your entire hard drive, regardless of media format. (I sometimes jokingly refer to projects like this as YAPIM, or Yet Another Project Invoking Memex, my own thesis work fitting that description as well.) However, the part that interests me most is what they’re calling implicit query. As CNET describes the Comdex demo:

In demonstrating Implicit Query, Dumais began to type an e-mail asking a colleague about a set of slides for an upcoming conference. Before the message was complete, the program — which appears in a window on the side of the screen — pulled up e-mails, slide decks and Word documents containing the name of the conference and the future recipient. Each hit came with a brief summary of the internal content, date, the type of software the file was written in, and its potential relevance, among other information.

This is the same functionality that in my PhD I call Just-In-Time Information Retrieval, and is the main focus of the Remembrance Agent software I developed. It can be incredibly powerful (I use it regularly to suggest email discussions related to my blog entries, for example) and I hope Dumais pursues it. It looks like she’s still in early stages with the concept though, and and more importantly the current interface is still designed for explicit query — far too intrusive for something that runs all the time in the background. By contrast, Autonomy has had an actual product in this area for over three years, though I’d say the interface is still the real trickiness for this kind of application. Still, as is often the case one of the more interesting aspects of Microsoft doing something is that it’s Microsoft doing it. If implicit query makes it into a future version of the OS (and if MS doesn’t screw it up they way they did with that annoying paperclip) that’ll be quite interesting.

References

• Remarks by Bill Gates, COMDEX Las Vegas 2003 (Bill Gates, Microsoft, 16 November 2003) [Video available in Windows Media Format, OSX users need to install WMP 9, Linux users are as usual shut out]
• Microsoft aims for search on its own terms (Michael Kanellos, CNET, 24 November 2003)
• Stuff I’ve Seen: A System for Personal Information Retrieval and Re-Use (Susan Dumais et. al., ACM SIGIR’03 Conference, 28 July 2003)
• Autonomy’s Active Knowledge Page
• The Remembrance Agent (code and papers from my thesis work — runs as a plug-in for Emacs)

Back in July there was a big scandal over DARPA’s funding of a futures market where people bet on things like whether Arafat will be assassinated or when the US will pull out of Iraq. The project was canceled, and also became the straw that forced John Poindexter’s resignation. Now the Guardian reports that San Diego-based Net Exchange, the company that was implementing the project, is going ahead and launching it without government support or involvement. Given the previous uproar, Net Exchange is being understandably quiet about the whole thing.

Personally I’d be happy to see them try this out. As I said before, the U.S. Government shouldn’t be involved in something as shady as gallows gambling, but as a private experiment the whole thing intrigues me and I don’t have a problem with seeing where it goes. My guess is it will wind up being an interesting past-time for armchair analysts, but like most markets will fluctuate far too much to provide any real security data. The only real danger I see is if the stakes get high (unlikely) and attract corruption — unlike sports gambling or its Wall-Street counterpart, Middle-East politics has neither conflict-of-interest nor insider-trading laws. The more likely danger is simple lack of interest, the risk all seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time Internet projects face.

References

• Future’s bright for terror betting (Gary Younge, The Guardian, 18 November 2003)

Just in case anyone was still in doubt that Apple’s iPod is going to slowly grow into a universal portable media server, Apple has just announced several new iPod accessories, including a voice recorder (microphone to turn the iPod into a dictaphone) and media reader (accepts various media cards and slurps the data onto the hard drive for later retrieval). The iPod isn’t the first hard-drive based MP3 player to offer these extras (Archos has had one for a while), but Apple goes one step further with automatic synchronization of recorded audio and stored pictures with iTunes and iPhoto respectively. Now if they can just add Bluetooth the iPod will be well on its way to becoming the personal server it’s destined to become.