Headlines Powered by Business Wire: "The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) today announced the launch of its MovieBeam(SM) on-demand movie rental service. MovieBeam will give consumers instant access in their homes to recent DVD and video releases, as well as a wide variety of popular favorites, from almost all of the major studios.
This week, MovieBeam will launch in Jacksonville, Fla.; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Spokane, Wash. Consumers in those three markets will have the ability to rent films from their homes without the inconvenience of trips to and from the video store and without the possibility of incurring rental late fees.

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VOD - Video On Demand -- moves one step closer with this new service from Disney. We just converted over to digital cable at home, which gives us access to TimeWarner's iControl VOD service... will be testing it soon to see if it can dislodge my NFLX loyalty...
The MovieBeam receiver -- manufactured by Samsung Electronics -- is a first-of-its-kind device that automatically receives movies, stores them on its hard-drive, and gives consumers the opportunity to view them on their schedule. MovieBeam always offers 100 movies in full digital quality, and every week, about 10 new movies are transmitted via a digital wireless signal to the MovieBeam receiver's small indoor antenna, replacing 10 titles. The data transmissions take the form of secure data streams and are sent through the broadcast spectrum of television stations owned by ABC and National Datacast's network of PBS stations. MovieBeam will work whether or not a consumer has a cable or satellite television subscription. "

Meant to get to this, but life has been busy...

Street Scene 2003 rocked, as always. Diana, Kim, Randy and I saw:

The Doors (of the 21st Century)
REM
B-52s
311
Pennywise
Cypress Hill
Goo Goo Dolls
Bad Religion

And last year (2002) , since I don't think I made notes... I saw...

James Brown
Stone Temple Pilots
Violent Femmes
The Roots
Blackalicious
Black Eyed Peas
Live
Save Ferris
Bad Religion

and a few others I can't recall right now.

Can't wait for 2004!

Apple: Reselling iTunes songs 'impractical' | CNET News.com: "Apple's Lowe left unaddressed the question of whether a transfer would violate iTunes' terms-of-service contract, focusing instead on technical and other barriers to such a sale.
'They would have to somehow give their account info to the person they were selling to in order to get their Mac authorized to play the music being sold,' he said.
Lowe also said that with songs selling for 99 cents apiece, reselling music could be financially impractical.
'Economically, I don't believe there is going to be much of a market for resold music...We just don't see it as that much of an issue,' he said. "
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Alright Deeje... explain Apple's position on this one. They sound greedy, weak and unconcerned with their customer's needs.

iTunes auction treads murky legal ground | CNET News.com: "Consumers can resell CDs purchased in a record shop, but what about digital music files downloaded from an online store?
George Hotelling wants to know. In a move that could spark a novel legal test of Internet music resale rights, the Web developer in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Tuesday night put a digital song he purchased online at Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store up for auction on eBay.
Hotelling said he isn't all that concerned about getting his money back for the Devin Vasquez remake of Frankie Smith's song 'Double Dutch Bus,' which cost him 99 cents. Instead, he said he's using the attempted sale to probe some thorny consumer issues stemming from commercial online music services, in particular, technology known as digital rights management that's used to prevent unauthorized copying. In that spirit, he's promised to donate anything above his purchase price to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an activist Internet legal group. "
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I commented on a secondary market for digital assets/IP some time ago (but of course have no convenient way to find it...), and now someone is finally pushing hard on the issue. I assume (but don't know) that Apple's Terms of Service indicate that users are buying a perpetual, non-transferable license to the songs they purchase. But even if they do, that's in place to help Apple and the RIAA, not the consumer.

New Office locks down documents | CNET News.com: "Office 2003, the upcoming update of the company's market-dominating productivity package, for the first time will include tools for restricting access to documents created with the software. Office workers can specify who can read or alter a spreadsheet, block it from copying or printing, and set an expiration date. "
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This looks extremely handy for protecting internal documents... but it's a shame that it won't be offered as another Passport service. It'd be great to use this as a full-fledged publishing system.

Researcher sees cellophane window to 3D | CNET News.com: "Professor Keigo Iizuka discovered that ordinary cellophane wrap can be used to turn a laptop computer screen into a 3D display.
Iizuka was searching for so-called half-wave plates, which rotate the polarization of light, and ultimately found that a certain brand of cellophane gift wrap beat out high-tech alternatives. 'I tried every possible material that might have that half-wave plate function, and this was the best I could find,' he said. 'Ironically, it was the cheapest.' "
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A truly low-tech solution to a seemingly high-tech problem. How often do the simplest, most elegant solutions evade us do to our desire to solve problems using the latest technology? Can a reasonable process be used for evaluating the effects generated by applying existing, rudimentary solutions? If so, even if they aren't the solution, can they point us in the right direction? As information explodes, we may often find ourselves "rediscovering" new applications for existing tech.