Tony Gentile | buzzhit! blog: 10/01/2002

Gnoosic - find music you don't yet know you like
I'm sure this has been around forever and I'm just now discovering it.. still cool.

Interviewing at Pinnacle Systems , NASDAQ: PCLE tomorrow for a dir of global web services slot. All though this is a bit left of my normal role, having global P&L, marketing & technology responsibility for the online channel for a publicly traded international s/w company still sounds appealing. I also remain extremely interested in digital video/still imagery, sound, etc, all of which are serviced by Pinnacle's broadcast through consumer product line.

Wi-Fi getting new security standard
I'm stoked to see them moving so quickly to address the security issues. However, I still think that CDMA is ultimately a better long-term solution for both consumers and carriers.

From ICONOCAST:

E-Wear

The $208 billion U.S. apparel industry has changed markedly over the past 50 years. Now technology is adding a new wrinkle. Mobile executives may carry as much as 10 pounds (5kg) of tech tools. This trend has already rendered briefcases obsolete and is the driving force behind a new direction in fashion: e-wear.

The rapid spread of blue jeans as a fashion uniform clearly signals that consumers want easy-to-wear clothing. Garment manufacturers are responding with a raft of "smart fabrics." In 1999, Brooks Brothers introduced a no-iron cotton shirt, using technology provided by Hong Kong-based TAL Apparel Group.

These shirts, now also available from Nordstrom, J.C. Penney and others, are treated with a special seam adhesive to prevent puckering. And, in what may be a first for nanotechnology, Nano-Tex relies on a special polymer to allow stains on cotton or wool to be wiped off like lint.

As more people tote around notebook computers, PDAs, mobile phones and maybe a digicam or MP3 player, they have two choices: use a photographer-like "gadget bag" or stow them in available pockets. Expandable, soft bags have all but erased sales of attaché cases, which were once a mainstay of business professionals.

But traditional clothing is not designed for bulky gear, resulting in torn pockets and frayed jackets as belt-worn mobile phones brush against coat linings.

Levi's Dockers Mobile Pant addresses this problem with hidden gear pockets. In Europe, the company is set to launch anti-radiation Dockers -- trousers that include a mobile phone pocket lined with a radiation-reducing material called MDF.

Levi's has already teamed up with consumer electronics manufacturer Philips to create a jacket featuring a built-in mobile phone and MP3 player. And Palm and Japanese apparel manufacturer Sanyo Shokai have created a line of raincoats featuring a "Designed for Palm Handhelds" pocket.

Another anti-body clutter approach comes from ScotteVest, which hides headset cords using garment conduits, dubbed a "personal area network."

This activity is just a warm-up for a new generation of e-wear that will literally electrify you. So-called "textronics" will allow clothing to be made with enough conductivity to power mobile phones and MP3 players.

And if you're worried about getting lost in this future, DuPont is producing textiles that can be detected by global positioning satellites.

Panasonic is banking on the popularity of e-wear. The company has registered the e-wear trademark and promotes its views on this emerging fashion at each CES show. One researcher, Venture Development, says the market for wearable computing, including devices built into fabric itself, could hit $1.3 billion by 2006.

One day, that once odd act of people talking into mobile phone headsets might look positively normal next to the guy talking to his vest.

Have a good business idea related to e-wear?

Top Apparel Searches on Yahoo!
Rnk Term
1. Old Navy
2. GAP, The
3. Victoria's Secret
4. Nike
5. Lands' End
6. Banana Republic
7. Abercrombie and Fitch
8. Frederick's of Hollywood
9. Burberry
10. L.L. Bean
11. J. Crew
12. Prada
13. Adidas
14. Coach
15. Chadwick's of Boston
16. Nine West
17. Ralph Lauren
18. Calvin Klein
19. Lane Bryant
20. Levi's

Source: Oct. 2002 Yahoo! Buzz Index (week ending Oct. 26)

Bausch & Lomb CEO Denied Bonus Over Bio
Yet another sleazeball gets nailed.

"The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has."
- Michelangelo

Execution is nothing more than a series of conceived, selected and applied ideas, whose aim is to satisfy the originating (signified) idea within a set of given constraints. -- TJG 10/2002

Sorry Deeje, I don't see a world where web logs (in any form similiar to their current common implementation) replace email and message boards for online discussion and collaboration. Message boards wrapped in blogs? Perhaps. But the three forms of communication we're discussing each have a distinct application. As you've said before, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Blogging (easy personal publishing, which harkens back to our days at Aldus and the revolution they and Adobe started 20 odd years ago in pre/press) will certain evolve and make an impact on how people share and discuss ideas... but I don't see it as the proverbial second coming.

Apple to Sell iPod through Target
Sweet! Apple finally a) goes consumer electronics and b) extends the brand to new markets as a hook for future Mac sales. Jobs gets Marketing.

sf, i've grown to love much about you... but the homer hankies have GOT TO GO

Bruce cleaves 260 at Adobe
Fingers crossed for Rachel & Elena

American Heart Assoc funds low-carb diet study
Finally some $ goes into actual research, and surprise surprise, the results are positive...

MSFT scoops up Vicinity.NET+XDegrees+WinCE (PDAs)+Smartphones...

Galaxy becomes CPXe
Note to self -- add this to the 'ol resume

Microsoft Calling
I'm very excited to see MSFT finally rolling out their smartphones; as I've stated repeatedly, I see a future w/ a reduced number of mobile peripherals (the few that remain will become more potent) with an emphasis on:

- local environmental sampling (voice/sound, image/video, data, location)
- sampled content processing [tagging, identification, transfer] (see deeje's write-up of the ideas WE generated while I was at Ofoto)
- ubiquitous connectivity (cdma/wi-fi combo until the eventual cost effectiveness of cdma pushes wifi, gprs, etc into our hazy memories)
- data/information retrieval with local presentation (time/location/receipient/activity sensitive)
- local, p2p and remote synchronization

http://www.memorypharma.com/about.html
wish i could invest

Nintendo Offering Adult Games
VentureReporter.net Monday, October 14, 2002, 4:28 PM ET

Nintendo has started offering adult games for its GameCube system. The Japanese videogame company, which has traditionally eschewed adult-themed games in favor of games for children, said it will spend $140 million to market its new wares to American teenagers and people in their 20s. Marketing efforts may include rebates with purchases of GameCube systems and games. In preparation of the holiday season, the company said it will offer 80 new titles for the GameCube. Nintendo is in a fight with Microsoft for the second place spot behind leading game provider Sony. The videogame market has traditionally only supported two large providers.

Read the Wall Street Journal story (subscription required)

Is 'Stealware' Next?
VentureReporter.net Friday, September 27, 2002, 1:49 PM ET

Users of Morpheus, Kazaa, and LimeWire beware; these programs may be taking the commission from your online purchases for themselves, a New York Times article said today. Parasite-ware, or stealware, as it is called by its detractors, installs itself along with some of these popular music-swapping services, and cannot be uninstalled, even if the original application is.

Traditionally, when a consumer is directed to an online vendor from an affiliate site, the affiliate site receives a small commission on any purchases. However, when these 'stealware' programs are installed, that commission is redirected to the software's proprietor.

The practice is legal, according to the companies that use the software, since users are always asked upon install if they would like to support the software's designers by participating in the affiliate shopping program.

However, some larger online sellers have already started refusing payment, including Amazon, which recently cut off payments to Morpheus.

For more, see The New York Times (subscription required)

Liquid Audio Saga Plays On
VentureReporter.net Tuesday, October 01, 2002, 2:37 PM ET

Liquid Audio, which last Thursday met with a group of shareholders seeking to liquidate the company's cash assets, announced today that it has reached an agreement with Microsoft to sell the software giant the domestic and foreign rights to its patents. The company says the move is part of a shift in its "strategy in preparation for the merger with Alliance Entertainment." That merger was the main point of contention in last week's shareholder meeting. What's more, the San Jose Mercury News reported last week that the activist investors had, in fact, gained enough votes to remove Liquid's chairman and proceed with the liquidation of the company. The company won't announce the vote totals until October 4, but seems to be proceeding with merger preparations notwithstanding.

For more, see the press release

DeCSS Haiku
Almost scary

Intel continues to beat the Banias drum
Finally, a full mobile chip set solution hits the market. This will move me to a laptop & pda/smartphone.

US Bird of Prey - daylight stealth aircraft...

MSFT C R U S H E S ESTIMATES
winner and champion of the universe...

Got this note from the hiring manager at the main company I'm currently interviewing with:

"Thx for your note. We have several other candidates who we are getting into
the process. I want to get them through a few rounds of interview so we can
get down to a list of a couple finalists. I am hopeful that we will reach
this point in the next 2 - 3 weeks. I will let you know how this plays out."

How do you even respond to that?! Geez, guess I shoulda played a bit harder to get. Fucking insanity.

Uh, is it really MacWorld if Apple doesn't show?!?!

"Cascade/Waterfall" marketing
Nothing new, just well explained

Woried about using the Price to Earnings ratio ("PE") when the reliability of reported corporate earnings seems shaky?

Analyst Eric Bjorgen of The Leuthold Group argues for an alternative valuation measure--one that doesn't rely, as the PE ratio does, on earnings in the denominator. That measure is simply the total U.S. stock market (i.e., market cap) divided against the U.S. gross domestic product.

From 1926 to the second quarter of 2002, Bjorgen found that the long-term average for this ratio is 58%, and it has stayed in the 40-80% range for more than 38 of the past 50 years. Yet at the end of 1999, it peaked at 185%. As of the end of June 2002, it had eased somewhat to 104%.

DJIA +3.4%, NSDQ +4.4%...

can you say

short ->SQUEEZE<-

the path has been cleared for the next BIG fall... or rally... which way will the will of the investing public take us? does enough new wealth (or reserved wealth) exist to inflate the bubble? to what degree?

i must admit, in a beautiful mind kinda way, that the bizzare combination of appearant randomness, yet occasionally obvious correlated behavior makes the market a facinating thing to watch. is there a practical application for enhanced data visualization in this space, ala deeje's experiential enhancement for music via iMusic?

Ten Mobile Technologies To Watch
Some cool stuff here from DemoMobile... in particular, the Canesta infrared keyboard!!!

Aquila Employee Fired after Criticizing Company in E-mail
Shades of Ofoto. When all is said and done, you're probably better off keeping your mouth shut (in the present environment) than trying to help your employer do the right thing, especially when they don't want to...

Dave Winer did a piece on News Readers (currently an area of interest/research of my buddy Deeje), which I've shamelessly pasted below. In the past five or so years, I've worked on a number of offerings that have featured aggregation solutions in order to build convenience... PointCast chief amongst them. Dave is right in stating that this is a rehash of previous solutions; I have a very strong PointCast deja-vu in thinking about this space. As before, HTML limitations and monolithic (non-browser) clients remain barriers to the 'best' solution.
-
DaveNet essay, "What is a News Aggregator?", released on 10/8/2002; 12:37:14 PM Pacific.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***A new category

Every once in a while a new category of software catches on. It may borrow features from previous categories, but in some way, it represents a new activity with a computer. Often the category existed for a while, even years, before it caught on. That was true of weblogs, and now it's true of another category, news aggregators.

We did our first aggregator in 1999, a centralized application called My.UserLand. It was a contemporary of My.Netscape, which took the same information, in a format called RSS [1], and displayed it in a series of boxes, one for each source. Our software presented a stream of new items, the newest items at the top of the stream (most visible) and the older items towards the bottom. In Web terminology this form of presentation is called reverse-chronological.

Today, our aggregator is decentralized, it's a key part of our Radio UserLand [2] software. We have competition, our software is not the only desktop news aggregator on the market. There's a lot more to say about the category, but first a definition.

***What is a News Aggregator?

A news aggregator is "software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page."

***How does a news aggregator work?

Every hour the aggregator reads the "feeds" you're subscribed to, as few as a half-dozen, or as many as you like. When you see an item that you want to amplify with your own comments, or pass on to others in your organization or interest group, with a couple of clicks you can "route" it to the home page of your weblog. Aggregators and weblog software are flip-sides of the same idea. Weblogs are for writing, aggregators for reading, and at the intersection is routing.

***Amateurs and pros

I'm subscribed to quite a few sources, and the range of sources is significant. Consider that I get news from the New York Times, the BBC, and from weblogs like Sam Ruby (an expert programmer), Jon Udell (InfoWorld columnist), John Robb (he works with me at UserLand), Mike Chambers (works for Macromedia, writes about Flash), The Shifted Librarian, Ernie the Attorney, analyst Kevin Werbach, Ed Cone (North Carolina columnist), book author Christian Crumlish, my own weblog (Scripting News). I also subscribe to News.Com, The Motley Fool, The Register, Doc Searls, a local newspaper in South Carolina (Go Upstate), O'Reilly's Safari service and Patrick Logan (a developer). I am currently subscribed to 73 feeds, some people I know are subscribed to as many as 300!

The key point is that I don't have to visit each of these sites to find out what's new. My computer, running aggregator software, does it for me, every hour, automatically. The information is formatted in XML, but I am barely aware of that, as with all compelling apps, the technical details are tucked out of the way. Like all open formats, it's easy to figure out what's going on. Here's an example [3] of the XML behind news aggregators.

Not only am I getting news from professional news organizations, but I am also hearing from people and non-news organizations who make a difference to me. Rarely an hour goes by without something interesting happening, my mind is stimulated, I get new ideas, and of course I share them. It's all about choice, customization, and communication. No one has the same virtual newspaper as mine, and mine is changing all the time.

Over the last few months it's been interesting to watch many of the smart people in weblog-land discover the convenience and power of news aggregators. In many ways it feels like aggregators are where weblogs were a couple of years ago, just about to be discovered by a much larger group of people.

Dave Winer

***See also

Jon Udell's BYTE column [4] on personal RSS aggregators.

Screen shot [5] of the aggregator built into Radio UserLand.

[1] http://backend.userland.com/rss
[2] http://radio.userland.com/
[3] http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml
[4] http://www.byte.com/documents/s=7181/byt1022183228615/0527_udell.html
[5] http://radio.weblogs.com/0001015/images/2002/10/08/aggScreen.gif

From Objects of Desire Come Subjects of Attention
"Inbound" marketing redefined. As spam dominates inboxes and congressional debate, smart companies are focused on LISTENING instead of SHOUTING.

TinderBoxKickass IA tool

bad news: nflx continues to get crushed...

good news: djia finally closes below 7500... how low will it go before a short squeeze/mini rally?

well, i'm getting my ass handed to me by my netflix stock, which is a damn shame! :)

otoh, i'm happy to see the djia back down around 7500... should just be a matter of time before the plunge to 6k occurs.

read a great article on the impending localized collapse of the housing market in the WSJ yesterday. SF & San Diego are both amongst the most overinflated markets, with housing prices outpacing salary increases by 60%+!!

Temp Hides Fun, Fulfilling Life From Rest Of OfficeFrom KimU. Pretty classic & in some ways, very, very true. Hope he doesn't get himself fired though.