Week of September 8, 2008

Wireless Bandwidth Slammed

Friday, September 12, 2008

With the advent of phones with wi-fi receivers and 3G access, we are looking at an exponential increase in 3G and wi-fi usage. Makes sense, right? Well, someone didn't tell AT&T, which blamed software inefficiencies for their slowness of the iPhone 3G network, but the underlying reality is that iPhone users were slamming the AT&T 3G network with usage. Fixable? Yes. Expected? Should have been.

Similarly, research company Meraki points out that wi-fi networks are seeing a surge in usage thanks to the iPhone. Free the Net, a free wireless network in San Francisco, has seen its usage increase dramatically, with nearly 20% of its access coming from iPhones.

Apple Releases Music Recommendation Engine

Thursday, September 11, 2008

By now we are all familiar with recommendation engines--those of the "if you like this, you'll like that" functionality. Netflix, Amazon, and other shopping sites are well-known for using them. A whole cottage industry in the music space have been built around them, including the kernel of both last.fm and Pandora. Notably absent from this was Apple's iTunes music store. Not anymore.

Apple announced that the latest version of iTunes includes an engine that "finds songs from your library that go great together" along with new songs from the iTunes Music Store. This integration with iTunes, the de facto music interface for millions of iPod and iPhone users, is a significant threat to other music recommendation engines. Although there is one element that they have that iTunes still doesn't...community.

The communities being built around last.fm, Pandora, Imeem, and others are just as important as the music itself in some cases. Perhaps in the next version of iTunes, Apple will release community features. In the meantime, however, its Genius Engine is worth paying attention to.

Google Continues Its Mission

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Google's primary mission is to index "the world's information," and it has begun its latest initiative to do just that. Called the Google News Archive, it's a collection of news stories collected from newspapers that go back dozens of years or more. Users can not only look up the text from past news, but they can also see an image of the newspaper where the news came from.

Microsoft, NBC, and Adobe

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

There have been a lot of headlines this past week about NBC "dropping" Microsoft's Silverlight technology, which NBC used for the Olympics, for Adobe's Flash technology, which NBC is using for the upcoming NFL season. The only trouble with these headlines are that they aren't true, and, interestingly, the underlying reality is that this transition may help Microsoft.

While it is true that Flash is the technology used for the NFL season, the choice was made by the NFL, not NBC. NBC has given no indication that they are not going to use Silverlight in the future. But an underyling storyline here is the consumer experience. By all accounts the Olympics viewing experience was rich and strong via Silverlight. Contrast that with the Flash experience of this past Sunday for the NFL, where video quality was horrible. When a change is made back to the old standard and yet it makes the old technology look very bad, isn't that good for the new technology?

Spore: Biggest Video Game Flop Of All Time?

Monday, September 8, 2008

Electronic Arts, maker of some of the most popular video games in history

led an almost unprecedented wave of pre-release hype for its game Spore. The

game, which takes single cell organisms and evolves them into societies, was

used for months before its release for numerous fun things via its creature

creator, Sporecreator. Expecting perhaps as many as 100,000 creatures to be

made, over 2 million were created. All things looked to a huge launch, with

However, a crippling amount of bad press among gamers over the DRM of the

game (only three installs allowed) and lackluster overall game play have led

to horrible reviews on Amazon and thoughts that this might be the biggest

flop in video game history. As one commentator mentioned, "Sporecreator is